Background and career
Roald Dahl (13 September 1916 – 23 November 1990) was a British author of popular children's literature and short stories, a poet, screenwriter, and wartime fighter ace. His books have sold more than 300 million copies worldwide. He has been called "one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century". Dahl was born in Wales to affluent Norwegian immigrant parents, and lived for 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. 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". In 2021, Forbes ranked him the top-earning dead celebrity. 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. The latter also champion the kindhearted and feature an underlying warm sentiment. 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.
Roald Dahl was born in 1916 at Villa Marie, Fairwater Road, in Llandaff, Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian parents Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Dahl née Hesselberg. Dahl's father, a wealthy shipbroker and self-made man, had emigrated to Britain from Sarpsborg, Norway, and settled in Cardiff in the 1880s with his first wife, Frenchwoman Marie Beaurin-Gresser. They had two children together (Ellen Marguerite and Louis) before her death in 1907. Roald's mother, originally from Christiania (now Oslo), belonged to a well-established Norwegian family of lawyers, wealthy merchants, estate owners and priests in the Church of Norway, and emigrated to Britain when she married his father in 1911. Dahl was named after Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen. His first language was Norwegian, which he spoke at home with his parents and his sisters Astri, Alfhild, and Else. The children were raised in the Church of Norway (Lutheran), and were baptised at the Norwegian Church, Cardiff. His maternal grandmother Ellen Wallace was a granddaughter of the member of parliament Georg Wallace and a descendant of an early 18th-century Scottish immigrant to Norway. Dahl's sister Astri died from appendicitis, age seven, in 1920 when Dahl was three years old; his father died of pneumonia at age 57, several weeks later. Later that year, his youngest sister, Asta, was born. Upon his death, Harald Dahl left a fortune assessed for probate at £158,917 10s 0d (equivalent to £6,141,145 in 2025). Dahl's mother decided to remain in Wales instead of returning to Norway to live with relatives, as her husband had wanted their children to be educated in English schools, which he considered the world's best. When he was six years old, Dahl met his idol Beatrix Potter, author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit featuring the mischievous Peter Rabbit, the first licensed fictional character. The meeting, which took place at Potter's home, Hill Top, Lake District, north west England, was dramatised in the 2020 TV film, Roald & Beatrix: The Tail of the Curious Mouse.
Dahl first attended The Cathedral School, Llandaff. At age eight, he and four of his friends were caned by the headmaster after putting a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers at the local sweet shop, 11 High Street, Llandaff, owned by a "mean and loathsome" old woman, Mrs Pratchett. The five boys named their prank the "Great Mouse Plot of 1924". Mrs Pratchett inspired the cruel headmistress Miss Trunchbull in Dahl's Matilda; a prank, this time in Trunchbull's water jug, would also appear in the book. Gobstoppers were a favourite sweet among British schoolboys between the two World Wars, and Dahl referred to them in his fictional Everlasting Gobstopper which was featured in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Dahl transferred to St Peter's boarding school in Weston-super-Mare. His parents had wanted him to be educated at an English public school, and this proved to be the nearest because of the regular ferry link across the Bristol Channel. Dahl's time at St Peter's was unpleasant; he was very homesick and wrote to his mother every week but never revealed his unhappiness to her. After her death in 1967, he learned that she had saved every one of his letters; they were broadcast in abridged form as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in 2016 to mark the centenary of his birth. Dahl wrote about his time at St Peter's in his autobiography Boy: Tales of Childhood. Excelling at conkers — a traditional autumnal children's game in Britain and Ireland played using the seeds of horse chestnut trees — Dahl recalled, "at the ages of eight, nine and ten, conkers brought sunshine to our lives during the dreary autumn term".
From 1929, when he was 13, Dahl attended Repton School in Derbyshire. Dahl disliked the hazing and described an environment of ritual cruelty and status domination, with younger boys having to act as personal servants for older boys, frequently subject to terrible beatings. His biographer Donald Sturrock described these violent experiences in Dahl's early life. Dahl expresses some of these darker experiences in his writings, which is also marked by his hatred of cruelty and corporal punishment. Dahl's autobiography, Boy: Tales of Childhood, says a friend named Michael was viciously caned by headmaster Geoffrey Fisher. In that same book, Dahl reflected: "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." Fisher was later appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, and he crowned Elizabeth II in 1953. However, Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown says the caning took place in May 1933, a year after Fisher left Repton; the headmaster was in fact J. T. Christie, Fisher's successor as headmaster. Dahl said the incident caused him to "have doubts about religion and even about God". He viewed the caning as being the result of the headmaster's enmity towards children, an attitude Dahl would later attribute to the Grand High Witch in his dark fantasy The Witches, with the novel's main antagonist exclaiming that "children are rrreee-volting!". Dahl was never seen as a particularly talented writer in his school years; one of his English teachers wrote in his school report, "I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended." He was exceptionally tall, reaching 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m) in adult life. Dahl played sports including cricket, football and golf, and was made captain of the squash team. As well as having a passion for literature, he developed an interest in photography and often carried a camera with him. During his years at Repton, the Cadbury chocolate company occasionally sent boxes of new chocolates to the school to be tested by pupils. Dahl dreamed of inventing a new chocolate bar that would win the praise of Mr Cadbury himself; this inspired him in writing his third children's book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and to refer to chocolate in other children's books. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Dahl spent most summer holidays with his mother's family in Norway. He wrote about many happy memories from those visits in Boy: Tales of Childhood, such as when he replaced the tobacco in his half-sister's fiancé's pipe with goat droppings. He noted only one unhappy memory of his holidays in Norway: about age eight, he had to have his adenoids removed by a doctor, a procedure which at the time was done without anaesthesia. His childhood and first job selling kerosene in Midsomer Norton and surrounding villages in Somerset are subjects in Boy: Tales of Childhood.
After finishing his schooling, in August 1934 Dahl crossed the Atlantic on the RMS Nova Scotia and hiked through Newfoundland with the British Public Schools Exploring Society. In July 1934, Dahl joined the Shell Petroleum Company. Following four years of training in the United Kingdom, he was assigned first to Mombasa, Kenya, then to Dar es Salaam in the British colony of Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania). Dahl explains in his autobiography Going Solo that only three young Englishmen ran the Shell company in the territory, of which he was the youngest and junior. Along with the only two other Shell employees in the entire territory, he lived in luxury in the Shell House outside Dar es Salaam, with a cook and personal servants. While out on assignments supplying oil to customers across Tanganyika, he encountered black mamba snakes and lions, among other wildlife.
In August 1939, as the Second World War loomed, the British made plans to round up the hundreds of Germans living in Dar-es-Salaam. Dahl was commissioned as a lieutenant into the King's African Rifles, commanding a platoon of Askari men, indigenous troops who were serving in the colonial army. In November 1939, Dahl joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as an aircraftman with service number 774022. After a 600-mile (970 km) car journey from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi, he was accepted for flight training with sixteen other men, of whom only three survived the war. With seven hours and 40 minutes experience in a De Havilland Tiger Moth, he flew solo; Dahl enjoyed watching the wildlife of Kenya during his flights. He continued to advanced flying training in Iraq, at RAF Habbaniya, 50 miles (80 km) west of Baghdad. Following six months' training on Hawker Harts, Dahl was commissioned as a pilot officer on 24 August 1940, and was judged ready to join a squadron and face the enemy.
