Olivia Dahl

Dahl was born on 20 April 1955 at Doctors Hospital in New York City [1] and grew up in the Buckinghamshire village of Great Missenden.

Her middle name, Twenty, originated from the date of her birth, and the fact that her father had $20 in his pocket when he saw her in the hospital for the first time.

[2] Neal "struggled" with Olivia shortly after her birth but found her behaviour transformed after spending a few weeks with her paternal aunt, Elsie Logsdail.

Neal contacted her brother-in-law, Ashley Miles, who sent them gamma globulin, then common in the United States, to boost children's immunity against measles.

[3] Olivia subsequently contracted measles, and had a mild fever for a few days before suffering convulsions after growing increasingly lethargic.

[7] Roald Dahl became increasingly depressed and withdrawn after Olivia's death, spending hours at her grave in silence.

He later became a vaccination advocate, writing an account of Olivia's death in a 1986 pamphlet titled "Measles: a dangerous illness" for the Sandwell Health Authority.

Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn't do anything.

[13] Olivia's sister, Lucy, interviewed in 2015 by CBS, stated that her father did not understand why people chose not to vaccinate their children against measles.

Roald Dahl in 1954, the year before Olivia's birth