The museum
The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre is a museum in the village of Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, the South of England. Children’s novelist and adult short story writer Roald Dahl lived in the village for 36 years until his death in 1990. During that time he became famous around the world, mostly for his best-selling children’s books although he did write quite a few short stories for adults on very adult themes (witness the two hefty Penguin paperback volumes of the Complete Short Stories).
But it was for children’s books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda, Danny the Champion of the World and that he became famous. At the peak of his success the local post office delivered 4,000 letters a week from young fans around the world.
After Dahl’s death, his widow, his wider family, his publishers and better-off fans all agreed it would be good to create some kind of memorial to the great man. However, the house he actually lived in and the garden where he built the famous writing shed which he worked in every day, had passed into private hands.
Then in the 2000s a derelict coaching inn and stable complex in Great Missenden High Street came on the market. The Roald Dahl trustees had the very imaginative idea of buying it and converting it into a child-focused museum, gallery, cafe and interactive space to celebrate Dahl’s life and work and to inspire new generations of storytellers.
The comprehensively refurbished space opened as the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre in 2005.
Front of the Roald Dahl Museum (Photo courtesy The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre)
The Museum is aimed at 6 to 12 year-olds and their families. It has three galleries along the side of the attractive cobbled yard, as well as a café and a lunch room for school trips.
Children getting creative in the Roald Dahl Museum
Of the three galleries, ‘Boy’ focuses on the book of the same name which describes Dahl’s boyhood adventures and experiences. ‘Solo’ features his RAF flying days and moves onto his life in Great Missenden, including an evocative recreation of the writing hut Dahl built in the garden of his house, stuffed with the cosy bric-a-brac which made him feel at home.
Inside Roald Dahl’s original Writing Hut (Photo courtesy The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre)
And there’s a story centre room with crayons and paper etc where children are encouraged to create their own stories, or can gather round on the floor to discuss and share ideas.
From the museum’s bright and colourful displays I learned that:
- Roald is pronounced Rooo-arl.
- He was Norwegian, at least his parents were. Roald was born in Wales, in Llandaff outside Cardiff, and sent to a prep school across the Bristol Channel in England, before going on to Repton, a public school in the Midlands.
- He was unusually tall at 6 foot six. He joined the RAF at the outbreak of the war and his fighter plane cockpit had to be adjusted for him.
The RAF section of the museum with a model of the kind of fighter plane he flew
He crash landed his plane in the Libyan desert and was lucky to survive; as a result, his back gave him trouble for the rest of his life. But he continued as an air ace, shooting down enemy planes for another year until finally being invalided out of the RAF in 1941. After more medical check-ups, he was sent to the USA to promote the war effort and persuade America to join the Allies.
There’s a striking photo here of tall, handsome, uniformed Roald striding next to an overweight, jowly grey-haired Ernest Hemingway.
It was a chance meeting with the adventure novelist C. S. Forester, who suggested Dahl write about his wartime experiences. The result was his first story, retelling the story of his desert crash and introducing the idea that he was shot down, which was published in the Saturday Evening Post.
The rest is the usual story of a writer’s long warfare with publishers and critics, editors of magazines and journals, until he had established himself as a writer of cruel and sardonic short stories.
Very roughly speaking Dahl wrote short stories for adults for 15 years after the war, brought together in collections like Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch. It was only in 1961 that Dahl published his first ‘novel’ for children, and what a succession of brilliant children’s fictions then poured from his pen!
- James and the Giant Peach 1961
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 1964
- Fantastic Mr Fox 1970
- Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator 1972
- Danny, the Champion of the World 1975
- The Enormous Crocodile 1978
- My Uncle Oswald 1979
- The Twits 1980
- George’s Marvellous Medicine 1981
- The BFG 1982
- The Witches 1983
I really liked the presentation of all this in the museum. There are blown-up photos, a timeline, models, books and illustrations and notes, it’s all big and bright and attractive and interesting, and all the time there is the voice of Dahl himself reading extracts from relevant books. Thus the first room, Boy, features Dahl reading out descriptions of key incidents and adventures from the book of the same name describing his childhood.
Billy and the Minpins
There’s a small space devoted to changing exhibitions. Currently they’re displaying 14 illustrations by Quentin Blake for Dahl’s last children’s book, Billy and the Minpins. These are, as all of Blake’s illustrations, magical, and beneath each one is displayed the relevant snippet of the original hand-written manuscript of the story in Dahl’s spidery handwriting.
Cover of Billy and the Minpins by Quentin Blake
The shop
There’s a massive shop, featuring a wide range of merchandise as well as DVDs of all the movies made from his books, a wall of wonderful prints of some Quentin Blake illustrations and, for me, most impressive of all, a wall of his books, not only the children’s books but a range of short story collections, including the famous Tales of the Unexpected, televised in the 1980s, as well as the surprising amount of non-fiction which he wrote.
Walks
The shop is a mine of information and the staff are very knowledgeable and happy to answer questions. They also give out free leaflets describing two walks you can do: one is a tour of the village of Great Missenden, taking in places and buildings which feature in the stories; the other is a longer walk across the railway line and up to the nearby woods where Dahl took his own children to play and ramble when they were small.
I went on both walks and describe them in my walking blog. The most striking feature of Great Missenden High Street is probably the beautifully preserved vintage petrol pumps which feature in Danny The Champion of the World.
The petrol pumps in Great Missenden High Street
Set half a mile away from the village, on the side of a hill overlooking the valley of the little River Misbourne is the church of St Peter & St Paul, where Dahl is buried.
Church of St Peter & St Paul, Great Missenden
It’s worth mentioning that there’s currently a Chilterns Walking Festival which runs till 1 October, with lots of group walks and other activities taking place all across the region.
Great Missenden is only a 45-minute train journey from Marylebone station and the museum is a simple five-minute walk down the old High Street. What with the village walk and the opportunity for a picnic up in the woods, this makes a wonderful day out for families with small children who love any of Dahl’s books.
Books & Boots 