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Roald Dahl is born in Llandaff, near the Welsh capital of Cardiff, on 13th September 1916. Roald's parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, were both Norwegian and he was named after Norway's famous polar explorer, Roald Amundsen.
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In Autumn 1938 Roald is sent to Shell's branch office in Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanganyika, East Africa (now Tanzania), on a three-year contract. He was a year into his contract with Shell when the Second World War broke out.
He writes in detail about his experiences in Africa in his later memoir, Going Solo. -
Following the outbreak of World War Two, Roald Dahl leaves Shell and heads to Nairobi to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF). He is 23 years old.
In Nairobi he learns to fly a Tiger Moth plane, training alongside 15 other men of a similar age. In Going Solo he writes: "It is a fact, and I verified it carefully later, that out of those sixteen, no fewer than thirteen were killed in the air within the next two years." -
In 1951 Roald Dahl meets his future wife, the American actress Patricia Neal, known afterwards to Roald and the family as Pat, at a dinner party given by playwright Lillian Hellman.
When they met Pat was already well-known, having starred in films including The Day the Earth Stood Still. She would go on to appear as the wealthy matron Emily Eustace Failenson in Breakfast at Tiffany's in 1961, and to win an Oscar for her role in the 1963 film Hud. -
Roald Dahl dies, aged 74. He is buried in the parish church of St Peter and St Paul in Great Missenden.
