UNITED KINGDOM: The family of Roald Dahl is seeking to raise 500,000 British pounds to preserve the 50-year-old hut in which the late author wrote all of his books - but the appeal has prompted an unexpected backlash from some

Record ID: 644096

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: The family of Roald Dahl is seeking to raise 500,000 British pounds to preserve the 50-year-old hut in which the late author wrote all of his books - but the appeal has prompted an unexpected backlash from some
  • Date: 12th September 2011
  • Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (SEPTEMBER 13, 2011) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF WEB PAGE WITH HEADLINE READING "ROALD DAHL HUT CAMPAIGN UNDER FIRE" WITH PHOTO OF DAHL VARIOUS OF TWITTER PAGE FEATURING TWEETS CRITICISING CAMPAIGN
  • Embargoed: 27th September 2011 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: United Kingdom, United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: Entertainment
  • Reuters ID: LVADM5NGYJBMB9MSUZLAUDH78XS6
  • Story Text: Roald Dahl's family has launched an 800,000 U.S. dollar campaign to relocate the garden hut where the British children's author created classics including "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and "James and the Giant Peach".
    Dahl, who died in 1990 aged 74, would go from his home in Great Missenden, northwest of London, to the hut in his garden every day for 30 years.
    No one else was allowed into the small outbuilding, built in the 1950s from a single layer of bricks.
    "When you walk in here you feel very strongly Roald Dahl's presence, it's a very personal kind of space and he called it his womb his little nest, his womb. And what he did in a childlike way was keep things around him that he loved. So, for example, you have the wrapper ball, as we call it. Basically he had a chocolate bar after lunch everyday and he made them into a ball of wrappers and it's very heavy - I'm not going to pick it up - but it is very heavy. This here is his hip bone. When he had his hip - he had a hip replacement - the doctor gave it to him because it was incredibly big and he said he'd never seen such a big one and we actually have a little vial of his spine shavings as well," Amelia Foster Museum Director of The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre pointed out.
    "And, if you look at the walls, you can see he had a very Heath Robinson approach to attaching things to the wall so he would just just open up paper clips and jam them into the polystyrene. But it's full of personal mementoes. Pictures of his children, birthday cards, letters that they'd written to him. Things that are some way inspirational for him, so, a quote by Degas, pictures of Beethoven, things that helped him to be inspired and he really shuts himself away in here. He spent two hours every morning and two hours every afternoon writing, he was a very disciplined writer," she added.
    Dahl's grandson Luke Kelly came up with the idea to relocate the interior of the hut and its contents, including the author's own hip bone, to the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre close to the family home.
    The relocation is estimated to cost around 500,000 pounds (790,101 U.S. dollars) organisers said on Tuesday (September 13). They hope to install the hut's interior and open it to the public by March 2012.
    "We own the at the museum Roald Dahl's archive which is an incredibly important resource. Roald Dahl is translated into 49 languages, sold in 46 countries, he is an international as well as a national treasure and what we're about at the museum is encouraging a love of creativity, of reading and of writing, something that Roald Dahl was passionate about. And so for us to be able to preserve the hut and make it accessible - not to the chosen few like us, today - but actually to all Roald Dahl fans, is part of that mission. It's about inspiring children to write, it's about inspiring adults to write, it's about spreading that love of literacy," Amelia Foster said.
    There has been some sceptical reaction to the Dahl family's fund-raising campaign on micro-blogging site Twitter.
    "Stella McCartney to appeal to taxpayers for money to restring her father's Hohner Bass guitar," wrote journalist Misha Glenny, in a gentle dig at the campaign.
    Another Twitter message dubbed Sophie Dahl the "Big Stingy Giant", a play on the title of one of her grandfather's classics "The BFG" (The Big Friendly Giant).
    The press release on Roald Dahl's website said that the family "had done its utmost to safeguard the hut", which is now in a state of disrepair.
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