Above: Roald Dahl at work in his writing hut at Gipsy House, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
- In celebration of Roald Dahl, St. Paul's Primary School children have come to school dressed as a character from their favourite Roald Dahl book.
- Roald Dahl was buried (at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire) along with a number of his favourite things, such as his HB pencils, some chocolate, burgundy wine, a power saw and some snooker cues.
6 feet, 5 & 3/4 inches – Roald Dahl’s adult height (1.96 metres).
3 – the number of languages that Roald Dahl could speak (English, Norwegian and Swahili).
4 – the number of hours spent writing each day (from 10am until 12pm, and then from 4pm until 6pm).
Did you know?
Roald Dahl died on 23 November 1990 at the age of 74, and was buried in the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Missenden. Several of his books were published for the first time the following year: The Vicar of Nibbleswicke; The Minpins; Roald Dahl’s Guide to Railway Safety and Memories with Food at Gipsy House.
Roald Dahl wrote his stories from a brick-built shed in the garden at ‘Gipsy House’, his home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Whilst sitting in a wingback chair, curtains drawn, he would use HB pencils and write onto yellow legal notepads that he rested on a special board (his back injury made sitting at a normal desk difficult). Dahl built the shed sometime in the late 1950s, having been inspired by the writing shed that Dylan Thomas used.
1 – the number of times that Quentin Blake, his illustrator and personal friend, was allowed into the writing shed (Roald wanted the shed to be a private space and rarely let anyone enter, not even his family).
6 – the number of sharpened HB pencils that Dahl typically kept to hand, propped in an antique Toby mug (visible to Dahl’s right in the picture above).
I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again. – Roald Dahl describing the influence of the writing hut on his fiction for children.
Roald Dahl Written Works
283 – the number of words that Roald Dahl invented in his writing, collectively referred to as ‘Gobblefunk’, including frobscottle, scrumdiddlyumptious, Chiddler, and Oompa Loompa.
1939 – the year Dahl enlisted in the RAF, whereupon he was awarded the rank of Leading Aircraftman (LAC).
8 weeks – the length of Dahl’s RAF basic training.
6 months – the length of Dahl’s advanced flying instruction, after which he was ready to go into battle.
80 – the number of Dahl’s RAF squadron.
1940 – the year in which Dahl was forced to crash land his Gladiator aircraft in the Libyan desert. He suffered a fractured skull and temporary blindness.
1941 – the year in which Roald Dahl experienced his first aerial combat of World War II, shooting down a German plane whilst flying his Hawker Hurricane.
1942 – the year in which The Saturday Evening Post published Roald’s first paid piece of writing (an account of his time flying Gladiator warplanes in Libya, the piece was initially titled ‘Shot Down Over Libya’, and later republished as ‘A Piece of Cake’).
2 – the number of hip replacement operations that Dahl experienced.
Did you know?
Amongst the interesting collection of oddities displayed on the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ in Roald Dahl’s writing hut, the item that caused most surprise was a paperweight made from a piece of Dahl’s femur bone, removed during one of his hip replacement operations.
1943 – the year in which Dahl’s first book was published. ‘The Gremlins’, published in the US by Random House, was written for Walt Disney and intended to be a promotional device for an animated movie that was never made. Dahl was credited as ‘Flight Lieutenant Roald Dahl’.
17 Nov 1967 – the date on which Roald’s mother Sofie died, exactly 5 years after the death of Roald’s eldest daughter Olivia.
47 – the number of years by which Sofie outlived Roald’s father. Following her funeral (which Roald was too ill to attend) her ashes were scattered alongside Harald’s grave in Radyr churchyard.
Above: Roald Dahl interviewed on British TV by Terry Wogan in 1984.
6 – the number of back operations that Dahl had throughout his adult life, a result of the back injury sustained in the war.
1953 – the year in which Dahl married his first wife, the film actress Patricia Neal.
1954 – the year in which Roald and Patricia moved into ‘Gipsy House’ in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, the house that Roald would call home for 36 years.
36 – the number of years that Dahl lived in Great Missenden.
Did you know?
In later life Roald Dahl used to enjoy making imaginative food, such as pink milk for breakfast, or jelly containing ‘hundreds and thousands’.
5 – the number of children that Dahl and Neal had together (see facts about his family).
Did you know?
Interviewed in 2016, Sophie Dahl recalled how, following lunch or dinner, her grandfather Roald would collect a medium-sized, red Tupperware box from the kitchen, containing a selection of small chocolate bars, which could include Flake, Curly Wurly, Fruit and Nut, Aero, Kit Kat, Dime, Crunchie, or packets of Rolo or Maltesers. But never Creme Eggs; both Roald and his granddaughter loathed them.
1983 – the year in which Dahl and Neal divorced, and he remarried to Felicity Ann Crosland.
Roald Dahl College St Paul Athletics
Above: A TV recording from 1961, in which Roald Dahl is introduced using the correct pronunciation of his name, “Roo-al”.
11 – the number of days that Dahl spent in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford before his death (he was admitted on November 12, 1990).
23 November 1990 – the date Roald Dahl passed away.
74 – Dahl’s age at his death.
Above: Roald Dahl gravestone at the Church of St Peter and Paul, Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England (Credit: MilborneOne, via Wikimedia Commons).
Did you know?
Roald Dahl was buried (at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire) along with a number of his favourite things, such as his HB pencils, some chocolate, burgundy wine, a power saw and some snooker cues.
2012 – the year in which Dahl’s perfectly-preserved writing hut was carefully deconstructed and moved to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, also in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, where it can be visited today.
This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Even the Mississippi River seems to know when it has crossed the Mason-Dixon line. The Upper Mississippi is a Yankee protestant-work-ethic river, always busy. The lower Mississippi below Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio comes in, is a grander, more leisurely affair—a world of colonels and judges and mint juleps. No wonder that Currier and Ives chose to immortalize the steamboat race between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee rather than between the small, plain packet boats north of St. Louis.
In that 1870 race, the Robert E. Lee won, and was awarded a pair of deer antlers to display atop the pilot house as the sign of victory, long a custom on the Lower Mississippi, where steamboat racing was an affair of gentlemen with time on their hands, a sport the same as deer hunting or horse racing. Races were announced several weeks in advance, and the boats gotten ready, the engines tuned, cargo cleared, and the crew trained. The race was a betting affair, a spectator sport, covered by the press.
On the Upper Mississippi, steamboat races were even more frequent, but they were all impromptu affairs engaged in by boats at work hauling cargo or passengers, who happened to meet on their way. Much as boys who are rivals for the same girl will do when they want to show off. 'Beat you to the corner,' the rival says. 'Beat you to Dubuque,' or 'See you in St. Paul,' the Captain of the challenging boat would cry—and the race would be on, putting in peril crew, passenger, and cargo. Boys, after all, will be boys.
And what did the winner get to wear on the roof of the pilot house or suspended between the smokestacks? No rack of antlers fresh from some gentleman's hunt graced the working packet boat. That was the South. Rather, it was a fit symbol for all those stereotypes we have of the North.
You may already have seen that victory symbol if you have looked closely at photographs of packet boats and remarked to yourself that the top of a pilot house was a very odd place to hang a push broom.
That broom tells you the winner has made a clean sweep.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.