Roald Dahl sisters. Dahl always maintained that his mother and her stories had a strong influence on his writing. In one interview, he mentioned: "She was a great teller of tales. Her memory was prodigious and nothing that ever happened to her in her life was forgotten." When Dahl started writing and publishing his famous books for children, he created a grandmother character in "The Witches" and later stated that she was based directly on his own mother as a tribute. In 1961, Dahl hosted and wrote for a science fiction and horror television anthology series called "Way Out", which preceded the
Roald Dahl which is also marked by his hatred of cruelty and corporal punishment. According to "Boy: Tales of Childhood", a friend named Michael was viciously caned by headmaster Geoffrey Fisher. Writing in that same book, Dahl reflected: “All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely... I couldn’t get over it. I never have got over it.” The master was later selected as the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. (According to Dahl's biographer Jeremy Treglown, the caning took