Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl[a] (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British author of popular children's literature and short stories, a poet, screenwriter and a wartime fighter ace.[1][2] His books have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide.[3][4] Dahl has been called "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century".[5]
Roald Dahl
13 September 1916
Cardiff, Wales
23 November 1990 (aged 74)
Oxford, England
- Novelist
- poet
- screenwriter
1942–1990
- Sophie Dahl (granddaughter)
- Phoebe Dahl (granddaughter)
- Nicholas Logsdail (nephew)
United Kingdom
1939–1946
Dahl was born in Wales to affluent Norwegian immigrant parents, and spent most of his life in England. He served in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. He became a fighter pilot and, subsequently, an intelligence officer, rising to the rank of acting wing commander. He rose to prominence as a writer in the 1940s with works for children and for adults, and he became one of the world's best-selling authors.[6][7] His awards for contribution to literature include the 1983 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the British Book Awards' Children's Author of the Year in 1990. In 2008, The Times placed Dahl 16th on its list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945".[8] In 2021, Forbes ranked him the top-earning dead celebrity.[9]
Dahl's short stories are known for their unexpected endings, and his children's books for their unsentimental, macabre, often darkly comic mood, featuring villainous adult enemies of the child characters.[10][11] His children's books champion the kindhearted and feature an underlying warm sentiment.[12][13] His works for children include James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, The BFG, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine and Danny, the Champion of the World. His works for older audiences include the short story collections Tales of the Unexpected and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.
Diplomat, writer and intelligence officer
After being invalided home, Dahl was posted to an RAF training camp in Uxbridge. He attempted to recover his health enough to become an instructor.[71] In late March 1942, while in London, he met the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Major Harold Balfour, at his club. Impressed by Dahl's war record and conversational abilities, Balfour appointed the young man as assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Initially resistant, Dahl was finally persuaded by Balfour to accept, and took passage on the MS Batory from Glasgow a few days later. He arrived in Halifax, Canada, on 14 April, after which he took a sleeper train to Montreal.[72]
Coming from war-starved Britain (in what was a wartime period of rationing in the United Kingdom), Dahl was amazed by the wealth of food and amenities to be had in North America.[73] Arriving in Washington a week later, Dahl found he liked the atmosphere of the US capital. He shared a house with another attaché at 1610 34th Street, NW, in Georgetown. But after ten days in his new posting, Dahl strongly disliked it, feeling he had taken on "a most ungodly unimportant job."[74] He later explained, "I'd just come from the war. People were getting killed. I had been flying around, seeing horrible things. Now, almost instantly, I found myself in the middle of a pre-war cocktail party in America."[75]
Dahl was unimpressed by his office in the British Air Mission, attached to the embassy. He was also unimpressed by the ambassador, Lord Halifax, with whom he sometimes played tennis and whom he described as "a courtly English gentleman." Dahl socialised with Charles E. Marsh, a Texas publisher and oilman, at his house at 2136 R Street, NW, and the Marsh country estate in Virginia.[76][77] As part of his duties as assistant air attaché, Dahl was to help neutralise the isolationist views still held by many Americans by giving pro-British speeches and discussing his war service; the United States had entered the war only the previous December, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.[58]
At this time Dahl met the noted British novelist C. S. Forester, who was also working to aid the British war effort. Forester worked for the British Ministry of Information and was writing propaganda for the Allied cause, mainly for American consumption.[78] The Saturday Evening Post had asked Forester to write a story based on Dahl's flying experiences; Forester asked Dahl to write down some RAF anecdotes so that he could shape them into a story. After Forester read what Dahl had given him, he decided to publish the story exactly as Dahl had written it.[79] He originally titled the article as "A Piece of Cake" but the magazine changed it to "Shot Down Over Libya" to make it sound more dramatic, although Dahl had not been shot down; it was published on 1 August 1942 issue of the Post. Dahl was promoted to flight lieutenant (war-substantive) in August 1942.[80] Later he worked with such other well-known British officers as Ian Fleming (who later published the popular James Bond series) and David Ogilvy, promoting Britain's interests and message in the US and combating the "America First" movement.[58]
This work introduced Dahl to espionage and the activities of the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, known by the codename "Intrepid."[81] During the war, Dahl supplied intelligence from Washington to Prime Minister Winston Churchill. As Dahl later said: "My job was to try to help Winston to get on with FDR, and tell Winston what was in the old boy's mind."[79] Dahl also supplied intelligence to Stephenson and his organisation, known as British Security Coordination, which was part of MI6.[77] Dahl was once sent back to Britain by British Embassy officials, supposedly for misconduct—"I got booted out by the big boys," he said. Stephenson promptly sent him back to Washington—with a promotion to wing commander rank.[82] Toward the end of the war, Dahl wrote some of the history of the secret organisation; he and Stephenson remained friends for decades after the war.[83]
Upon the war's conclusion, Dahl held the rank of a temporary wing commander (substantive flight lieutenant). Owing to the severity of his injuries from the 1940 accident, he was pronounced unfit for further service and was invalided out of the RAF in August 1946. He left the service with the substantive rank of squadron leader.[84] His record of five aerial victories, qualifying him as a flying ace, has been confirmed by post-war research and cross-referenced in Axis records. It is most likely that he scored more than those victories during 20 April 1941, when 22 German aircraft were shot down.[85]
Dahl married American actress Patricia Neal on 2 July 1953 at Trinity Church in New York City. Their marriage lasted for 30 years and they had five children:
On 5 December 1960, four-month-old Theo was severely injured when his baby carriage was struck by a taxicab in New York City. For a time, he suffered from hydrocephalus. As a result, Dahl became involved in the development of what became known as the "Wade-Dahl-Till" (or WDT) valve, a device to improve the shunt used to alleviate the condition.[88][89] The valve was a collaboration between Dahl, hydraulic engineer Stanley Wade, and London's Great Ormond Street Hospital neurosurgeon Kenneth Till, and was used successfully on almost 3,000 children around the world.[90]
In November 1962, Dahl's daughter Olivia died of measles encephalitis, age seven. Her death left Dahl "limp with despair", and feeling guilty about not having been able to do anything for her.[90] Dahl subsequently became a proponent of immunisation—writing "Measles: A Dangerous Illness" in 1988 in response to measles cases in the UK—and dedicated his 1982 book The BFG to his daughter.[91][92] After Olivia's death and a meeting with a Church official, Dahl came to view Christianity as a sham.[93] In mourning he had sought spiritual guidance from Geoffrey Fisher, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and was dismayed being told that, although Olivia was in Paradise, her beloved dog Rowley would never join her there.[93] Dahl recalled years later:
In 1965, Dahl's wife Patricia Neal suffered three burst cerebral aneurysms while pregnant with their fifth child, Lucy. Dahl took control of her rehabilitation over the next months; Neal had to re-learn to talk and walk, but she managed to return to her acting career.[94] This period of their lives was dramatised in the film The Patricia Neal Story (1981), in which the couple were played by Glenda Jackson and Dirk Bogarde.[95]
In 1972, Roald Dahl met Felicity d'Abreu Crosland, niece of Lt.-Col. Francis D'Abreu who was married to Margaret Bowes Lyon, the first cousin of the Queen Mother, while Felicity was working as a set designer on an advert for Maxim coffee with the author's then wife, Patricia Neal.[96] Soon after the pair were introduced, they began an 11-year affair.[96] In 1983 Neal and Dahl divorced and Dahl married Felicity,[97][98] at Brixton Town Hall, South London. Felicity (known as Liccy) gave up her job and moved into Gipsy House, Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, which had been Dahl's home since 1954.[99]
In the 1986 New Years Honours List, Dahl was offered an appointment to Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), but turned it down. He reportedly wanted a knighthood so that his wife would be Lady Dahl.[100][101] Dahl's last significant involvement in medical charities during his lifetime was with dyslexia. In 1990, the year which saw the UN launch International Literacy Year, Dahl assisted with the British Dyslexia Association's Awareness Campaign.[102] That year saw Dahl write one of his last children's books, The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, which features a vicar who has a fictitious form of dyslexia that causes him to pronounce words backwards. Called "a comic tale in the best Dahl tradition of craziness" by Waterstones, Dahl donated the rights of the book to the Dyslexia Institute in London.[102][103]
In 2012, Dahl was featured in the list of The New Elizabethans to mark the diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. A panel of seven academics, journalists and historians named Dahl among the group of people in Britain "whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and given the age its character".[104] In September 2016, Dahl's daughter Lucy received the BBC's Blue Peter Gold badge in his honour, the first time it had ever been awarded posthumously.[105]
Criticism and controversies
Opposition to Israel and comments on Jews
Dahl reviewed Australian author Tony Clifton's God Cried, a picture book about the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army during the 1982 Lebanon War.[196] The article appeared in the August 1983 issue of the Literary Review and was the subject of much media comment and criticism at the time.[197][198][199] According to Dahl, until this point in time "a race of people", meaning Jews, had never "switched so rapidly from victims to barbarous murderers." The empathy of all after the Holocaust had turned "into hatred and revulsion."[198] Dahl wrote that Clifton's book would make readers "violently anti-Israeli", with Dahl stating: "I am not anti-Semitic. I am anti-Israel."[200] He asked: "must Israel, like Germany, be brought to her knees before she learns how to behave in this world?"[201] The United States, he said, was "so utterly dominated by the great Jewish financial institutions" that "they dare not defy" Israelis.[198]
Following the Literary Review article, Dahl told a journalist from the New Statesman: "There's a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason."[202][203] In 1990, during an interview with The Independent, Dahl explained that his issue with Israel began when they invaded Lebanon in 1982:
