CARDIFF’S ROALD DAHL – BEYOND THE GIANT PEACH (Part 1)
CARDIFF’S ROALD DAHL – BEYOND THE GIANT PEACH (Part 1)
Cardiff City fan, supporter of the Norwegian Church and Fighter Pilot!
When Roald Dahl was born, on 13th September 1916, he was named after the first man to reach the South Pole. His Norwegian father, Harald, came to Cardiff to seek his fortune in the late 19th-century coal-mining boom. He made money in shipping and built his own substantial home, Villa Marie on Fairwater Road, where Roald was born. Now renamed Ty Gwyn, there is a blue plaque on the garden wall.
Harald died in 1920 and was buried in St John’s Church in Danescourt. His widow and six children lived in what is now the nursery of Howell’s School Llandaff for most of the 20s, a fact marked by another blue plaque. The family worshipped at the Norwegian Church, then in Cardiff Docks. When the church fell into disrepair in the 1970s, Roald was at the forefront of a campaign to raise money to save it.
As a youngster Roald was a keen Cardiff City fan. The 1920s was a golden era, with the team riding high in the First Division. He recorded fond memories of attending matches with the family gardener Joss Spivis. ‘Every Saturday afternoon, rain or hail or snow or sleet, Joss and I would go to a packed Ninian Park (pictured) to see City play.’ He remembered being passed to the front over the heads of the crowd so that he could see the action.
‘As we rode the 20-minute journey from Llandaff in the big red bus, our excitement began to mount. Joss would tell me about the opposing team and the star players who were going to threaten our heroes. Outside the ground we would stop at a whelk stall that stood near the turnstiles. Joss would have a dish of jellied eels and I would have baked beans and two sausages on a cardboard plate.’ Dahl recorded the names of his favourite players, the legendary Billy Hardy and the giant goalkeeper Tom Farquharson. He may have attended the FA Cup Final in 1927 or listened to the first ever cup final radio commentary, when City became the only team to take the cup out of England, beating the mighty Arsenal 1 – 0.
At the outbreak of World War II, Dahl at 23, was commissioned as a lieutenant into the King’s African Rifles in Tanzania. His heart, however, was 600 miles away in an RAF base in Nairobi where he soon enlisted and trained as a fighter pilot. At 6 feet 6 inches he could barely fit into a cockpit. His air combat career got off to a bad start when he was involved in a near-fatal crash landing after being given the wrong airstrip coordinates. The crash fractured his skull, broke his nose and temporarily blinded him. He only just dragged himself free from the blazing wreckage just before the plane’s fuel tank exploded. Dahl returned to the fray after spending 6 months in the Royal Navy Hospital in Alexandria. He flew a Hawker Hurricane as part of a fighter squadron battling the Nazis near Athens, shooting down a pair of Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88s. On 20 April 1941 he took part in the Battle of Athens, which he described as “an endless blur of enemy fighters whizzing towards me from every side”. Around a third of the British pilots were killed. However severe migraines, caused by his earlier crash, resulted in him being sent home.
When the war ended Dahl was still 16 years away from writing ‘James and the Giant Peach.’ His life after 1945 was no less interesting than before…..but that’s for Part 2