Hello and thank you for downloading our history program witness from the BBC World Service with me Louise Adagow.

Today we go back to January 1964 and the first publication of a book that would become one of the best loved children stories of all time.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roldahl.

I've been talking to the author's nephew, Nicholas Logsdale, who was one of the only people

to read the first draft.

Actually, within sight of the house in which Charlie lived, there was an enormous chocolate factory.

Just imagine that, and it wasn't simply an ordinary enormous chocolate factory

either it was the largest and most famous in the whole world it was was wonkers fact. That's why he was so appealing to children

because he would think up the most fantastical stories that were very much based on

his sense of curiosity and his sense that children love this kind of stimulus

and sense of danger and scary people and very new different understanding of what children found exciting.

Art dealer Nicholas Logsdale was Rold Dahl's oldest nephew.

I was very lucky as a small boy because I was the right age and I was a test child in a sense he tried things out on me.

Several times a week the young Nicholas would cycle through the woods to his uncle's house and off they'd go on adventures flying giant model airplanes or building

camps in the garden going on trips.

Royal when he was at home had a very strict routine of writing in the morning and after lunch he was free. He believed

that you could only do four hours useful and intensive work in the day and the rest of the day was

to enjoy yourself, have fun, do research, go on adventures, and I was often included in these

wonderful excursions to London to art galleries, to visit friends of his, sometimes

rather glamorous girlfriends.

This was before the birth of Rold Dahl's own children,

and at least once a month,

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