Saturday, January 7, 2012

Gerald Durrell


Gerald Durrell O.B.E.

7 January 1925 - 30 January 1995


Gerald Malcolm Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, Bihar Province, India, on 7 January 1925, the fourth surviving child of Louisa Florence Durrell (née Dixie), aged thirty-eight, and Lawrence Samuel Durrell, forty, a civil engine. Following the death of his father in 1928 the family moved back to the UK, but spurred on by Gerald’s oldest brother, Lawrence, they soon returned to a warmer climate, this time the island of Corfu er.

By 1918 Lawrence Samuel was Chief Engineer with the Darjeeling and Himalaya Railway on the India-Tibet border, leaving two years later to found his own company — Durrell & Co., Engineers and Contractors — in the new industrial boom town of Jamshedpur, planned and built as a `garden city' by the giant Tata Iron and Steel Company, but in those days a raw-edged place in the middle of a hot, dusty plain. In the four years preceding Gerald's birth he became one of the fat cats of British India, successful, rich — and desperately overworked.

Most of the major construction projects that Durrell & Co. helped to build in Jamshedpur still stand today, among them extensions to the Tata works, the Tinplate Company of India, the Indian Cable Company, the Enamelled Ironware Company and much else beside, including `Beldi', the home in which Gerald was born and in which he spent the first years of his life. `Beldi' was a regulation D/6 type bungalow in European Town, Jamshedpur, a residence appropriate to Lawrence Samuel Durrell's status as a top engineer — a rung or two below the Army and the Indian Civil Service, a rung or two above the box-wallahs and commercials. It was not grand, but it was comfortable, with cool, shuttered rooms, a large veranda with bamboo screens against the heat of the sun, and a sizeable garden of lawn, shrubs and trees, where Gerry the toddler took his first steps.

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