Authors

Roald Dahl

British 1916 - 1990

Roald Dahl, the enormously popular writer of fiction for children and adults, was born on 13 September 1916 in Llandaff, Glamorgan, the son of prosperous Norwegian shipbroker Harald Dahl and his wife Sofie Hesselberg.

Harald's first wife had died suddenly leaving him with their two young children. Sofie would become a mother to them and go on to have four children of her own, Roald being her third child and only son. A favorite in the predominantly female household, he was known affectionately as the apple.

From infancy Dahl's life would be marked by tragedy and misfortune, a background that later he would say gave his work a 'black savagery'. At just three years old he lost his father and older sister within two months of one another. But there was also security and happiness in these early years. His strong and capable mother had a huge influence on Roald Dahl's life and work, fostering his love of reading by introducing him to novelists such as John Galsworthy and Rudyard Kipling, and taking him to Norway in summer where her scholarly family encouraged his early interest in ornithology and entomology.

Norway's richly imaginative folklore opened up a strange and magical world to young Roald. Full of witches and trolls, it remained with him and found its way into the dark imagery of much of his writing. He dearly loved the books of Beatrix Potter and at six years old had the wonderful and formative experience of meeting her at Hill Top, her house in the Lake District.

Roald was educated at Llandaff Cathedral school before, at the age of nine, boarding at St Peter's in Weston-super-Mare, and then the prestigious Repton School where he didn't distinguish himself academically but was remembered for his competitive nature, irreverent humor and hatred of authority. His most enduring memory of this time was the sadistic cruelty of the two headmasters he encountered at Repton, one a future Archbishop of Canterbury, whose brutal floggings, believed by Dahl to be done for perverse pleasure, were followed by pious sermons in the school chapel. Dahl said that this experience put him off Christianity for life, and that he could never get over Repton. He later would recount this time in his story Lucky Break (1977) and his memoir Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984). Going Solo (1986) would cover the following period of his life.

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On leaving school at eighteen, Dahl's adventurous streak led him to join the Public Schools Exploring society's expedition to Newfoundland. In 1934 he took up employment with the Shell Petroleum Company and was sent to Mombasa, Kenya and then Dar es Salaam, Tanganyika, where he lived in luxurious surroundings and enjoyed the beauty and variety of the wildlife. In 1939, with war imminent and feeling a strong urge to contribute, he joined the King's African Rifles. On the outbreak of the Second World War he drove to Nairobi to volunteer for the Royal Airforce and learned to fly over the Kenyan Highlands, an exhilarating but difficult and dangerous experience that he found both enchanting and nightmarish. It would haunt him until it found an outlet in atmospheric aspects of his writing.

In 1940, when serving with the RAF No.80 Squadron, Dahl's Gloster Gladiator biplane ran out of fuel and crash landed in the Libyan desert. Suffering a fractured skull and badly smashed face, the severity of his injuries, from which he would never fully recover, required a seven month stay in hospital. It was during this time that he began to write Biggles style adventure stories to distract himself from his boredom and pain. Having sufficiently recovered, Dahl showed tremendous courage by going straight on to fight in the doomed air defences over Athens and the Peloponnese, but his active service was soon over. After being invalided home to England he was offered the opportunity to go to Washington as assistant air attaché which led to work for the security services. In 1943 he was appointed flight lieutenant.

It was when Dahl was living in Washington that his prodigious career as a writer took off somewhat accidentally. In 1942 the popular novelist C.S. Forester, creator of the Hornblower series, asked him to provide RAF stories and anecdotes for propaganda material. One of these stories, misleadingly titled 'Shot down over Libya: an RAF pilot's factual account, was published in the Saturday Evening Post. Others followed, The Gremlins catching the eye of Walt Disney who, after failing to turn it into a film, published it in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. Such was its success that it found an unlikely fan in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt who loved to read it to her grandchildren. This opened the doors of the White House to Dahl and he became a frequent guest of the president and his wife. He would later claim that taking advantage of this, the British Intelligence service enrolled him as a spy.

Encouraged by this success, Dahl expanded his imaginative range to write blackly comic stories on macabre subjects which appeared in distinguished magazines such as Harper's and The New Yorker before being collected and published as Someone Like You (1953) and Kiss Kiss (1960). These best-sellers would bring Dahl mainstream celebrity when they were adapted for television in Alfred Hitchcock Presents and later as Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected, made by Anglia Television for ITV and running on TV channels throughout the world from 1979. Characterised by a twist in the tale, a typical and memorable example is Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), where a jilted wife bludgeons her husband with a frozen leg of lamb before cooking and feeding it to the officers who have come to look for the murder weapon. Although somewhat in the spirit of Hector Hugh Munro (Saki), these stories would find disfavor with some critics for whom their cruelty was a dangerous and subversive force. Prolific and flexible as a writer, Dahl also would be responsible for the screenplays of successful films including Ian Fleming's You only Live Twice (1967) and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

- Roald Dahl

While living amongst America's glamorous high society, Dahl had married the American actress Patricia Neal in 1953. Together they had a son and four daughters, one of whom died of encephalitis aged seven. Their son Theo suffered a serious brain injury when he fell from his pram into the path of a New York taxi cab. Dahl was able to turn this great family trauma to good, helping to pioneer a life saving valve to drain fluid from the brain. The Wade-Dahl-Till Valve aided Theo's recovery and has been used to treat thousands of injured children since. Roald Dahl loved his children deeply and found great joy in creating stories for their entertainment, often frightening but always exciting and, most importantly, funny. Unsurprisingly, he would now turn the force of his great talent to writing children's fiction.

The stream of darkly imaginative and irreverent children's classics started with James and the Giant Peach, first published in the US by Alfred Knopf in 1961. Based on a bedtime story Dahl had invented for his own children, the tale of an orphaned boy who sets off on an adventure inside a giant peach, avenging himself on his sadistic aunts by rolling over and flattening them on the way, proved controversial to those who thought writing for children should be educational and improving and it wasn't published in Britain until 1967.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory followed in 1964. One of the most enduringly popular children's books ever written, it would find an even wider audience with adults and children when the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory staring Gene Wilder came out in 1971. Charlie's journey from poverty and hunger into a world of unlimited plenty presided over by the inscrutable Willie Wonka was a warped morality tale where all the undesirable traits shown by the other children would be punished by their meeting of terrible fates. Dahl believed that children were born with a natural savagery that was drawn to cruel humour, and it was true that children loved his books. Some thought that at times he went too far and when The Witches came out in America in 1983, it was placed on the restricted list in schools.

Roald Dahl would have a succession of massively successful children's books including Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1973), Danny the Champion of the World (1975), The Enormous Crocodile (1978), The Twits (1980), George's Marvellous Medicine (1981), The BFG (1982), and Matilda (1988), with The Vicar of Nibbleswicke and The Minpins both published posthumously in 1991. Quentin Blake captured the strange, colourful and at times grotesque world of Roald Dahl memorably and his illustrated editions of eighteen of the books are among Blake's most popular works. Dahl's creative energy and tremendous productivity is all the more impressive given the troubles that continued to beset his family's life.

One of Dahl's greatest challenges came when Patricia Neal suffered a series of massive strokes while pregnant with her last child. He looked after their children and household while at the same time devoting himself to his wife's recovery, often displaying aggressive and bullying tactics to force her out of her dependant state. However harsh this appeared to concerned onlookers, Patrica did make a remarkable recovery and eventually was able to resume her acting career. But this close knit and apparently happy family life was shattered when Dahl divorced Neal in 1983. Later that same year, he married Felicity Crosland, his wife's close friend with whom he had been conducting a long term affair.

Roald and Felicity established themselves and their eight children from their previous marriages at the romantically named Gipsy House in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Adapting a garden hut into a studio, he wrote, chain-smoked and surrounded himself with curiosities such as a giant silver ball made up of the wrappers of all the chocolate bars he had consumed and his arthritic hip bone that had been replaced. In later life Roald Dahl was a controversial figure, outspoken and fearless. Feeling that he had not received sufficient recognition for his work, he felt increasingly bitter at not being offered a knighthood. His powers of invention were not confined to the pages of his books and he had a tendency to exaggerate and embellish his account of his life. But for all this apparent grandiosity, he was a home lover, at peace cultivating his garden and feeding the one hundred budgerigars that flew wild in it.

The unexpected twist in Dahl's own tale is that for all his worldly experience and the grief and trauma that characterised so much of his life, to the very end he retained a childlike capacity that allowed him to identify with children and share their fresh sense of wonder as well as their irreverence and unaffected sense of humour. In his own words, a children's author 'must like simple tricks and jokes and riddles and other childish things.' And he was careful not to take himself too seriously, writing that 'pomposity is the enemy of children's writing'. But he didn't shy away from the deeper and darker side of a child's imagination and could speak to that too. His voice is both unique and universal as testified to by his enormous and continued popularity: collectively his books have sold well over 300 million copies world wide as well as being the subject of countless adaptations for stage and screen.

Roald Dahl died of leukaemia on the 23 November 1990 at the John Radcliff Hospital in Oxford. The key to his success, as he put it himself, had been 'to conspire with children against adults'.

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