Roald Dahl

• 1. Introduction

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  Roald Dahl was born on the 13th of September 1916 at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road, in Llandaff, Cardiff, the son of Norwegian immigrant parents who gave him Norwegian as his first language. By the time he died in 1990, his books had sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. A war ace, an intelligence officer, a short story writer for adults and a storyteller for children, Dahl is difficult to fit inside any single description. How did a boy raised speaking Norwegian in a Welsh city become one of the world's best-selling authors? What did fighter combat in World War Two, a catastrophic desert crash, and years of Washington espionage have to do with his children's books? And why, in a 2017 poll of the greatest storytellers of all time, did a writer of children's fiction beat Dickens, Shakespeare, and J.K. Rowling? The answers lie in a life that was as turbulent and surprising as any of his plots.

• 2. A Norwegian Boy in Wales

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  Harald Dahl, Roald's father, had emigrated to Britain from Sarpsborg, Norway, in the 1880s and made himself a wealthy shipbroker before settling in Cardiff. He named his son after the Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. Norwegian was spoken at home, and the children were baptised at the Norwegian Church in Cardiff. Roald's mother, Sofie Magdalene, originally from Christiania (modern-day Oslo), came from a family of lawyers, merchants and priests, and she would become one of the most formative presences in his creative life.

  Trauma arrived early. Roald's sister Astri died from appendicitis, aged seven, in 1920, when Roald was only three years old. His father, Harald, died of pneumonia just weeks later at the age of 57. The loss left Sofie a widow in a foreign country with young children. She chose to stay in Wales, honouring her late husband's wish that their children be educated in English schools, which he had considered the world's best.

  At six years old, Roald met Beatrix Potter at her home, Hill Top, in the Lake District. Potter was the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and she was already Roald's idol. That meeting, brief and unlikely, would later be dramatised in the 2020 television film Roald and Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse. His mother was a prodigious storyteller who related Norwegian myths and legends to Roald and his sisters; Dahl maintained throughout his life that she and her stories had a strong influence on all his writing.

• 3. School, Pranks, and Chocolate

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  At the age of eight, Dahl and four friends were caned by the headmaster of The Cathedral School, Llandaff, after placing a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers at the local sweet shop at 11 High Street. The sweet shop was owned by a woman the boys considered "mean and loathsome", a Mrs Pratchett. They named the operation the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924". Mrs Pratchett became the direct inspiration for the cruel headmistress Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, and the prank itself reappears in the book, this time involving a water jug belonging to Trunchbull.

  From 1929, when he was 13, Dahl attended Repton School in Derbyshire. He described an environment of ritual cruelty in which younger boys served as personal servants for older ones and faced savage beatings. His autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, records how a friend named Michael was viciously caned by a headmaster. Dahl wrote, "All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I couldn't get over it. I never have got over it." That hatred of cruelty and corporal punishment runs through almost all his fiction.

  Repton also gave him an unexpected gift. The Cadbury chocolate company periodically sent boxes of new chocolates to the school for the pupils to test. Dahl dreamed of one day inventing a chocolate bar so good it would earn the praise of Mr Cadbury himself. That dream, implanted in a Derbyshire boarding school, would eventually become Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, his third children's book.

• 4. Desert Crash and Aerial Combat

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  In November 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force as an aircraftman with service number 774022. After a 600-mile car journey from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for flight training alongside sixteen other men, of whom only three survived the war. He was commissioned as a pilot officer on the 24th of August 1940, and assigned to No. 80 Squadron RAF, flying Gloster Gladiators, the last biplane fighter aircraft the RAF would ever use.

  On the 19th of September 1940, Dahl was ordered to fly his Gladiator by stages from Abu Sueir, near Ismailia in Egypt, to the squadron's forward airstrip 30 miles south of Mersa Matruh. On the final leg, he could not find the strip. Running low on fuel, he attempted a desert landing and the undercarriage struck a boulder. His skull was fractured, his nose smashed, and he was temporarily blinded. His colleague Douglas McDonald had landed safely and stayed with him until help arrived.

  Blind for six weeks, Dahl recovered in the Royal Navy hospital in Alexandria. An RAF inquiry later concluded that he had been directed to entirely the wrong location and had flown into no-man's land between Allied and Italian forces. He was discharged fit for duty in February 1941. Over Greece, he flew his first aerial combat on the 15th of April 1941, attacking six Junkers Ju 88s that were bombing ships and shooting one down. He shot down a second Ju 88 the following day. On the 20th of April, in an engagement he called the Battle of Athens, he flew alongside Pat Pattle, the highest-scoring British Commonwealth ace of the entire war. Of 12 Hurricanes involved, five were shot down and four pilots killed, including Pattle. Dahl described the combat as "an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards me from every side".

  Post-war research confirmed Dahl's record of five aerial victories, qualifying him as a flying ace. He was invalided out of the RAF in August 1946, holding the substantive rank of squadron leader.

• 5. Spy, Writer, Accidental Author

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  In late March 1942, Dahl met Major Harold Balfour, the Under-Secretary of State for Air, at his club in London. Impressed by Dahl's war record and conversation, Balfour appointed him assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Dahl arrived in Halifax, Canada, on the 14th of April, then took a sleeper train to Montreal before reaching Washington a week later.

  His assignment was partly to counter isolationist sentiment still strong among Americans and to promote Britain's cause, work that introduced him to espionage. He supplied intelligence directly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As he later put it, "My job was to try to help Winston to get on with FDR, and tell Winston what was in the old boy's mind." He also supplied intelligence to William Stephenson, the Canadian spymaster known by the codename "Intrepid", whose organisation, British Security Coordination, was part of MI6. When British Embassy officials briefly sent Dahl home for misconduct, Stephenson promptly returned him to Washington with a promotion to wing commander rank.

  His literary career began almost by accident. The noted novelist C. S. Forester, also working for the British war effort, had been asked by The Saturday Evening Post to write a story based on Dahl's flying experiences. Forester asked Dahl to jot down some RAF anecdotes as raw material. When Forester read what Dahl had written, he decided to publish it exactly as it stood. The Post bought the piece for US$1,000 and published it on the 1st of August 1942, under the title "Shot Down Over Libya", having changed Dahl's original title "A Piece of Cake" to something they considered more dramatic. Dahl had not, in fact, been shot down. Dahl later worked alongside Ian Fleming, who would go on to publish the James Bond series, and David Ogilvy, both promoting Britain's interests in the United States.

• 6. Family, Grief, and Medical Invention

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  Dahl married American actress Patricia Neal on the 2nd of July 1953 at Trinity Church in New York City. Their marriage lasted 30 years and produced five children. On the 5th of December 1960, four-month-old Theo was severely injured when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City. Theo suffered from hydrocephalus as a result. Dahl channelled his response into action, helping to develop what became known as the Wade-Dahl-Till valve, a device to improve the shunt used to treat the condition. The valve was created in collaboration with hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade and neurosurgeon Kenneth Till of Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, and was used successfully in almost 3,000 children around the world.

  In November 1962, Olivia, the Dahls' eldest daughter, died of measles encephalitis at the age of seven. Her death left Dahl, in his own words, "limp with despair". He became a proponent of immunisation, writing a pamphlet titled "Measles: A Dangerous Illness" in 1988 in response to cases in the UK, and he dedicated his 1982 book The BFG to Olivia.

  In 1965, Patricia Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child. Dahl personally oversaw her rehabilitation, and she managed to return to her acting career. Their story was dramatised in the 1981 film The Patricia Neal Story, with Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde playing the couple. In 1972, Dahl met Felicity d'Abreu Crosland while she was working as a set designer on an advertisement. After an 11-year affair, Neal and Dahl divorced in 1983, and Dahl married Felicity at Brixton Town Hall in South London. Felicity moved into Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, which had been Dahl's home since 1954.

• 7. The Craft and the Children's Books

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  Dahl invented over 500 new words by writing them down, swapping letters around, and playing with spoonerisms and malapropisms. Lexicographer Susan Rennie, who compiled The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary in 2016 to mark the centenary of his birth, noted that he built new words on familiar sounds and relied on onomatopoeia, so that children could work out what a word like "lickswishy" or "rotsome" meant even without a definition. Some of his invented words, she observed, had already escaped his fictional world entirely.

  His children's fiction follows a recognisable logic. Stories are usually told from a child's point of view, feature villainous adults who hate children, and guarantee the triumph of the good, the young and the kind. Children's book critic Amanda Craig observed that Dahl was "unequivocal that it is the good, young and kind who triumph over the old, greedy and the wicked." His daughter Lucy recalled that Dahl used his own children as a testing audience at bedtime: if they asked him to continue the story, he knew it was working; if they simply said goodnight, he took it as a sign he had a bad idea.

  As marketing director of Penguin Books in the 1980s, Barry Cunningham travelled the UK with Dahl on a promotional book tour and asked him the secret of his success. Dahl's answer was direct: "the thing you've got to remember, is that humour is delayed fear, laughter is delayed fear." Cunningham later connected this idea to the way children's humour functions as a weapon against terrifying circumstances. Cunningham would later go on to sign J.K. Rowling at Bloomsbury, citing his experiences with Dahl as having sharpened his eye for what children respond to in books.

  Dahl acquired a traditional Romanichal vardo in the 1960s. The family used it as a playhouse before Dahl converted it into a writing room, where he wrote Danny, the Champion of the World in 1975. He incorporated a similar caravan into that book's central plot.

• 8. Legacy and Controversy

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  Dahl made antisemitic comments throughout his life and stated late in life that he was antisemitic. In August 1983, a review he wrote for the Literary Review stated that Jewish people had never "switched so rapidly from much-pitied victims to barbarous murderers", in reference to the 1982 Lebanon War. In 1990, he made further comments claiming newspapers were "primarily Jewish-owned" and that he had become antisemitic in response to Jewish people abroad supporting Zionism. In 2014, the Royal Mint decided not to produce a coin to commemorate what would have been his 100th birthday because of these comments. In 2020, Dahl's family published an apology for his antisemitism on the official Roald Dahl website.

  In 2023, Puffin Books, which holds the rights to his children's books, published editions incorporating hundreds of revisions made at the advice of sensitivity readers, replacing words like "fat" with "enormous" or "large" and removing terms such as "crazy" and "mad". The changes drew criticism from then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and author Salman Rushdie, among others. On the 23rd of February 2023, Puffin announced it would also release an unedited selection as "The Roald Dahl Classic Collection".

  Dahl died on the 23rd of November 1990, at the age of 74, from a rare blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndrome, in Oxford. He was buried at the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Missenden. His family gave him what his granddaughter described as a Viking funeral; he was buried with his snooker cues, some burgundy, chocolates, HB pencils and a power saw. Children still leave toys and flowers by his grave.

  In September 2021, Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Story Company in a deal worth more than £500 million. In 2021, Forbes ranked Dahl the top-earning dead celebrity. The asteroid 6223 Dahl, discovered by Czech astronomer Antonin Mrkos, was named in his memory in 1996. His books have now been published in 63 languages, and his charitable work in neurology, haematology and literacy has been continued through Roald Dahl's Marvellous Children's Charity, which provides care and support to seriously ill children and young people throughout Britain.