Gerald Durrell
Gerald Malcolm Durrell was a British naturalist, writer, zookeeper, conservationist, and television presenter. He was born in Jamshedpur in British India, and moved to England when his father died in 1928. In 1935 the family moved to Corfu, and stayed there for four years, before the outbreak of World War II forced them to return to the UK. In 1946 he received an inheritance from his father's will that he used to fund animal-collecting trips to the British Cameroons and British Guiana. He married Jacquie Rasen in 1951; they had very little money, and she persuaded him to write an account of his first trip to the Cameroons. The result, titled The Overloaded Ark, sold well, and he began writing accounts of his other trips. An expedition to Argentina and Paraguay followed in 1953, and three years later he published My Family and Other Animals, which became a bestseller.
In the late 1950s Durrell decided to found his own zoo. He finally found a suitable site on the island of Jersey, and leased the property in late 1959. He envisaged the Jersey Zoo as an institution for the study of animals and for captive breeding, rather than a showcase for the public. In 1963 control of the zoo was turned over to the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. The zoo repeatedly came close to bankruptcy over the next few years, and Durrell raised money for it by his writing and by fundraising appeals. To guarantee the zoo's future, Durrell launched a successful appeal in 1970 for funds to purchase the property.
Durrell was an alcoholic. In 1976 he separated from his wife; they were divorced in 1979, and Durrell remarried, to Lee McGeorge, an American zoologist. He and Lee made several television documentaries in the 1980s, including Durrell in Russia and Ark on the Move. They co-authored The Amateur Naturalist, which was intended for amateurs who wanted to know more about the natural history of the world around them, though it also had sections about each of the world's major ecosystems. This book became his most successful, selling well over a million copies; a television series was made from it.
Durrell became an OBE in 1982. In 1984 he founded the Durrell Conservation Academy, to train conservationists in the practice of captive breeding. The institution has been very influential: its thousands of graduates included a director of London Zoo, an organisation which was once opposed to Durrell's work. He was diagnosed with liver cancer and cirrhosis in 1994, and received a liver transplant, but died the following January. He was cremated, and his ashes divided between Corfu and Jersey Zoo.
Early life and education
Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, British India, on 7 January 1925. His father, Lawrence Samuel Durrell, was a civil engineer; his mother was Louisa Florence Durrell. He had two older brothers, Lawrence and Leslie, and an older sister, Margaret. Another sister, Margery, had died in infancy. His parents were both born in India: his mother's family were Irish Protestants from Cork, and his father's father, who was from Suffolk, had come to India and married an Anglo-Irish woman. Durrell's father insisted that Louisa leave household chores and parenting duties to the Indian servants, as was expected of Anglo-Indian women of the day, but she was more independent than he wished. She spent much time with her cook, learning to make curries, and had trained as a nurse. It was usual for Anglo-Indian parents to see little of their children, and the household included an ayah who helped raise the children, and a Catholic governess.When Durrell was fourteen months old, the family left Jamshedpur and sailed to Britain, where his father bought a house in Dulwich, in south London, near where both the older boys were at school. They returned to India in late 1926 or early 1927, settling in Lahore, where Lawrence had contract work. It was in Lahore that Gerald's fascination with animals began, first when he saw two large slugs entwined in a ditch, and later when he visited the zoo in Lahore. He was entranced by the zoo, later recalling "The zoo was in fact very tiny and the cages minuscule and probably never cleaned out, and certainly if I saw the zoo today I would be the first to have it closed down, but as a child it was a magic place. Having been there once, nothing could keep me away." The Durrells also briefly owned a pair of Himalayan bear cubs, given to them by Louisa's brother John, a hunter. Louisa soon decided they were too dangerous, and gave them to the zoo.
Durrell's father fell ill in early 1928, and died of a cerebral haemorrhage on 16 April. Louisa was devastated by his death, but Gerald was scarcely affected, having been much closer to his mother and his ayah than his father, who had often been absent as his work had taken him all over British India. Louisa considered keeping the family in India, but finally decided to move back to the UK, and they sailed back from Bombay. The house in Dulwich that Lawrence had bought in 1926 was large and expensive to run, and in 1930 Louisa moved the family to a flat attached to the Queen's Hotel in Upper Norwood, also in south London. Early the following year they moved to Parkstone, near Bournemouth. Louisa was lonely with just Gerald for company; the other three children were at school or studying elsewhere. Durrell later recalled that she began "resorting to the bottle more and more frequently" and eventually had "what in those days was called a 'nervous breakdown. He was left alone in the house except for a governess, brought in until Louisa returned, at which point he was sent to a kindergarten nearby instead. He enjoyed his time there, particularly because one of the teachers encouraged his interest in natural history, bringing in an aquarium with goldfish and pond snails.
In 1932 Louisa moved them again, to a smaller house in Bournemouth, and the following year she enrolled him at Wychwood School. Gerald loathed the school; the only lessons he enjoyed were in natural history. He would scream and struggle to avoid going. When he was nine he was spanked by his headmaster, and his mother took him away from the school. She bought him a dog, which he named Roger, as compensation for his traumatic time there. He never received any further formal education, though he intermittently had tutors.
Corfu
Gerald's brother Lawrence and his partner, Nancy, were living with friends of theirs, George and Pam Wilkinson, in 1934. At the end of the year, the Wilkinsons emigrated to the Greek island of Corfu, and Lawrence and Nancy moved in with Louisa and Gerald. George wrote to Lawrence about Corfu in glowing terms, and first Lawrence and then the rest of the family took up the idea of moving there. Gerald and Lawrence later gave varying accounts of how the decision was reached: the poor English climate, Louisa's growing dependence on alcohol, and financial problems may all have played a part. Michael Haag, in his account of the Durrells' time in Corfu, suggests that Louisa's drinking was the reason Lawrence felt he could not move to Corfu unless Louisa did also. Lawrence and Nancy left England on 2 March 1935, and the rest of the family followed five days later, reaching Corfu later that month.Lawrence and Nancy moved into a house in , near the Wilkinsons, and the rest of the family stayed in the Pension Suisse in Corfu town for a few days, house-hunting. They met Spiro Chalikiopoulos, who found them a villa near Lawrence and Nancy, and became a close family friend. Gerald fell in love with Corfu as soon as they moved out of the town, and spent his days exploring, with a butterfly net and empty matchboxes in which to bring home his finds. Louisa soon decided he needed to continue his education, and hired George to tutor him in the mornings, but Gerald was a poor student.
George was friends with Theodore Stephanides, a polymathic Greek–British doctor and scientist, whom he introduced to Gerald. Stephanides spent a half-day every week with Gerald, walking in the countryside and talking to him about natural history, among many other topics. He was enormously influential on Gerald, and helped to encourage and systematise Gerald's love of the natural world. Gerald collected animals of all kinds, keeping them in the villa in whatever containers he could find, sometimes causing an uproar in the family when they discovered water snakes in the bath or scorpions in matchboxes. Stephanides's daughter, Alexia, who was a little younger than Gerald, became his closest friend, and the families of each hoped that the two would one day marry.
In late 1935 the family moved to a villa near Kontokali, not far north of Corfu town. Gerald's education continued to be haphazard, with tutors who were unable to interest him. Lawrence encouraged Gerald to read widely, giving him an eclectic selection of books, from the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover to Darwin. Among the books were Jean-Henri Fabre's Insect Life and The Life and Love of the Insects, which Gerald found entrancing; naturalists such as Fabre, Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Gilbert White became his heroes. Equally influential was a copy of Wide World, an adventure magazine, which Leslie lent him: it contained an account of an animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons, in west Africa, led by Percy Sladen, and gave Gerald the ambition of someday doing the same. Leslie and Lawrence each owned boats, and Gerald was given a small rowing boat as a birthday present. It was christened the Bootle-Bumtrinket, and Gerald added trips along the coast to his excursions through the countryside.
Late in 1937 the family moved again, this time to a villa overlooking Halikiopoulou Lagoon that had been built as a residence for the British governor of the Ionian Islands. Stephanides left the island for a job in Cyprus in early 1938, though his wife and daughter stayed in Corfu, and Margaret returned to England the following year. In mid-1939, with war looking increasingly likely, Louisa was warned by her London bank that if she did not return to England she would have no access to her funds if hostilities broke out. Louisa, Leslie, Gerald, and Maria Condos, the family's maid, left Corfu for England in June. Margaret briefly returned; Lawrence and Nancy waited to leave until after war was declared, and Margaret finally left after Christmas.