Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl crashed a fighter plane in the Libyan desert, helped design a medical valve and was buried with a power saw and a bottle of burgundy.
Published
Quick Facts
- Born
- 13 September 1916, Llandaff, Cardiff
- Died
- 23 November 1990, Oxford
- Named after
- Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, a hero to his Norwegian parents
- Famous books
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits
- Wartime role
- RAF fighter pilot, badly injured in a 1940 crash in the Libyan desert
- Writing hut
- A garden shed at Gipsy House, Great Missenden, now rebuilt inside the Roald Dahl Museum
- Regular illustrator
- Quentin Blake, from The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
- Celebrated on
- Roald Dahl Day, every 13 September
The Norwegian boy from Llandaff
Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Cardiff, to Norwegian parents, Harald and Sofie. His first name came from Roald Amundsen, the polar explorer, who was a national hero in Norway at the time. He was baptised at the Norwegian Church in Cardiff Bay, which is now an arts centre. He grew up speaking Norwegian at home and spent summer holidays in Norway, which left a lasting mark on his stories. Cardiff gave him something else: a sweet shop in Llandaff. In his memoir Boy he describes the Great Mouse Plot of 1924, when he and his friends slipped a dead mouse into a jar of gobstoppers to get back at the shopkeeper. Any grumpy adult in a Dahl book has her roots in that shop. At boarding school he wrote home to his mother every week. Later, at Repton, he and his schoolmates tested new chocolates sent by Cadbury. It is easy to see where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came from.
The pilot who fell out of the sky
Before he wrote for children, Dahl worked for Shell in East Africa. When war came he joined the RAF. In September 1940 his Gloster Gladiator crash-landed in the Libyan desert. He fractured his skull, was temporarily blinded and was lucky to survive. After recovering he flew Hurricanes over Greece, then was posted to Washington. There he met the novelist C. S. Forester, who wanted to write up his adventures. Dahl wrote the account himself, and it was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1942. His career as a writer began there. His first children's book, The Gremlins (1943), was about the mischievous creatures RAF pilots blamed for mechanical faults. Disney took an interest, though the planned film never appeared.
The man who wrote nasty grown-up stories first
Dahl made his name with short stories for adults, which were sharp, dark and full of twists. Collections such as Someone Like You and Kiss Kiss led to the TV series Tales of the Unexpected, which ran from 1979 to 1988 and which he introduced in its early years. He also worked on films, writing the screenplays for You Only Live Twice (1967) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). The children's books came after he had told his own children bedtime stories. James and the Giant Peach appeared in 1961, then Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in 1964. Later came Fantastic Mr Fox, The Twits, The BFG, The Witches and Matilda. He invented hundreds of words, such as snozzcumber and whizzpopping, and called the language gobblefunk.
A father who changed medicine
Dahl's family life was marked by tragedy. In 1960 his baby son Theo was badly injured when a taxi hit his pram in New York, and he developed hydrocephalus, a build-up of fluid on the brain. Dahl worked with the hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade and the neurosurgeon Kenneth Till to develop an improved valve to drain the fluid. The Wade-Dahl-Till valve was used on thousands of children. In 1962 his seven-year-old daughter Olivia died of measles. He wrote a public letter urging parents to have their children vaccinated, and the letter is still quoted today. His marriage to the actress Patricia Neal, whom he married in 1953, was also marked by hardship when she suffered strokes in 1965. He helped with her rehabilitation. They divorced in 1983, and he married Felicity Crosland the same year.
The hut, the hip bone and the pencils
Dahl wrote in a small hut in the garden at Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. He sat in a battered armchair with his legs wrapped in a sleeping bag and a board across the arms for a desk. He wrote on yellow pads with carefully sharpened pencils. His desk held a few odd keepsakes, including a ball of silver foil made from chocolate wrappers and the hip bone removed in one of his operations. He was buried at the village church of St Peter and St Paul, reportedly with snooker cues, burgundy, chocolates, pencils and a power saw. Children still leave toys and flowers by his grave.
Where to find him now
The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in Great Missenden opened in 2005. Inside, the writing hut has been reconstructed with its contents, and visitors can see the chair and the pencils. In Cardiff Bay, Roald Dahl Plass is a large open space named in his honour, close to the Norwegian Church where he was baptised. Llandaff, where his stories began, keeps its connection to him too. His books have been translated into more than 60 languages and have sold in the hundreds of millions. His reputation has not been without controversy. In 2020 his family apologised for his antisemitic remarks, and recent debates about rewriting his words have kept him in the news. Yet children still love his stories, and the shed where he wrote them still draws visitors.
Notable people
- Roald Dahl
- Quentin Blake
- Patricia Neal
- Felicity Dahl
- Roald Amundsen
- Stanley Wade
- Kenneth Till
- C. S. Forester
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