Dal to Lek

In my Black Archive monograph about The Daleks (out in April), I examine the naming of the story’s various characters and species. This involved referencing Terry Nation’s well-known but bogus claim that he took the word ‘Dalek’ from the spine of an encyclopaedia covering ‘Dal to Lek’. Cut from the chapter, because it wasn’t directly relevant and space was tight, was a further point relating to Daleks and book spines, which I’ve slightly expanded into the silliness that follows.

In 1973 Nation admitted that he had made up his “romantic story” about the encyclopaedia spines to satisfy persistent journalists. There is obviously no such asymmetrical encyclopaedia. And in fact, we even know which encyclopaedia Nation actually used in the early 1960s. If you look over Nation’s shoulders in the image below from a 1964 Radio Times photoshoot, you can see several volumes of the 1958 edition of the Everyman’s Encyclopaedia published by JM Dent & Sons Ltd.

And if you want to know how that encyclopaedia divided its volumes, this photograph (which I have shamelessly stolen from an eBay listing) will show you:

Definitely no ‘Dal to Lek’!

Yet, whilst Nation could not have been inspired by the spine of an encyclopaedia, he could have been inspired by the spines of the London telephone directory, had its volumes been sat on the shelves of his study while he was stuck for a name for his new monster.

The telephone directory for the ‘London Postal Area’ was published in four volumes, the first three of which covered names beginning A-D, E-K and L-R. Displayed on the books’ spines, these letters form an anagram of Dalek, albeit with a redundant ‘R’ (although ‘Darlek’ would be a homophone of Dalek and could even have been a stage in the word’s development). In fact, noting that the letters are stacked vertically on the books’ spines, the word ‘Dalek’ can be read along the spines if one reads a little selectively with the fifth volume omitted and the L-R volume placed second rather than its proper third position.

Here are two of the relevant volumes for 1963, when Nation was writing The Daleks (the best the British Library could find me!):

I should acknowledge that I did not discover this by myself. Starburst magazine noted the coincidence back in 1995 based on a then-recent iteration of the London telephone directory. I merely sought out the 1963 equivalents to confirm that yes, the same alphabetical split had applied back then (and indeed for some years before, so the same effect would be created if Nation had had a mix of earlier volumes on his shelves).

In fact, this specific alphabetical split is not rare in the world of reference books. Amongst others, it’s been used by the multi-volume guide British Books in Print. Perhaps more appropriately, it was also used for David Saunders’ Encyclopedia of the Worlds of Doctor Who, published (sans a final volume) in the late 1980s:

I’m not seriously suggesting that Nation was inspired by the telephone directory in devising the Daleks’ name – if he had been, he wouldn’t have needed to invent the encyclopaedia story. I raise it merely as a curious coincidence given that he chose to suggest a book spine was his inspiration. I do, however, have more serious suggestions for the origins of the word.

Come April, I hope some of you will buy my Black Archive book in which, amongst a great many other areas of exploration, I consider how the word Dalek may really have been devised. At least one of my theories should be fairly novel and, I hope, may even be convincing.

Image credits: photographs of Terry Nation © Radio Times; jacket designs for the Encyclopedia of the Worlds of Doctor Who © Picadilly Press; photograph of the telephone directory volumes © Oliver Wake; I regret I do not know who photographed the Everyman’s Encyclopaedias and the eBay listing it came from has since vanished (if anyone can inform me, I’ll happily add the appropriate credit).

No AI tools were used in any way to create the above text

Sources

Terry Nation interviewed by Denis Frost for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, 8 January 1973

Sidebar to John Peel’s interview with Terry Nation in Starburst #200 (April 1995)