The Durrells in Bournemouth
The Durrells are always associated with Corfu, but Bournemouth was the place which featured more in their lives than anywhere else. Tony Burton-Page tells the story of a family… and other animals.
Published in June ’17
Gerald, Jacquie and secretary Sophie in the tiny attic flat at 51 St Albans Avenue
Literary families are comparatively rare. One thinks of the Brontë sisters and the Powys brothers, and from further afield the Brothers Grimm. But few others come to mind. Moreover, sometimes gifted members of the same family pursue different courses in life – the Attenborough brothers, for example, and the Crowe cousins (the actor Russell and the cricketing brothers Jeff and Martin). The Durrell brothers, Lawrence and Gerald, likewise seemed to be following different paths: the first a poet and novelist, the other a naturalist and animal-collector. It was only a need for money to finance his zoological expeditions which compelled Gerald to start writing, and both brothers were surprised by his success; Gerald’s books have outsold his brother’s many times over. Admittedly, he was a reluctant writer and he would have preferred to spend the time his writing took up on being a naturalist, but in the end, he is remembered as both.
The place with which the Durrell family will be forever associated is, inevitably, Corfu – there have been three television adaptions of Gerald’s classic book, My Family and Other Animals, which tells the story of the family’s idyllic stay on the island in pre-World War 2 days. Lawrence, too, enthused about the island in his 1945 travel memoir, Prospero’s Cell. But in reality they only spent five years there, and the place which featured most consistently in the lives of the Durrells was actually Bournemouth. Indeed, there are members of the family who live there to this day.
The Durrell parents, Louisa (née Dixie) and Lawrence Samuel, were Anglo-Indians, born and brought up in the India of the Raj. Lawrence Samuel was a successful engineer who founded his own company, Durrell & Co, in Jamshedpur in 1918. However, his premature death in 1928 at the age of 43 led to the enforced departure of his family, which consisted of his widow and their four children – Lawrence (16), Leslie (11), Margaret (8) and Gerald (3). They sailed to England the same year, intending to settle in London.
The Durrells moved to 18 Wimborne Road in 1932. Louisa named it ‘Dixie Lodge’ after her family surname. They only left it because of the move to Corfu.
At first they lived in the house their father had bought in Dulwich, but Louisa could not afford the running costs, so they rented rooms in the annex of the Queen’s Hotel in Upper Norwood, where they became friendly with the neighbouring Brown family. It turned out that they, like the Durrells, were looking for somewhere permanent to live, and when they chose Bournemouth, Louisa decided that her family should follow suit. In 1931 they moved into Berridge House in Spur Hill, Parkstone. It was a huge Victorian mansion standing in four acres of grounds, which included an orchard and a tennis court so large that two games could be played on it at once. In the basement was an enormous parquet-floored ballroom, where young Gerald could run amok
at will.
But the house was if anything too large, for by now Larry was living a bohemian existence in London, Leslie was at Dulwich College, and Margaret was at Malvern College, leaving only a widowed lady and a six-year-old boy. So Louisa decided to downsize. In 1932 they moved three miles east, to a smaller but still substantial property at 18 Wimborne Road. Louisa christened it ‘Dixie Lodge’ in honour of her own family.
The downside for Gerald was that he was no longer able to go to school at The Birches, a friendly kindergarten, and was enrolled at Wychwood School in nearby Braidley Road. This was a very traditional prep school – ‘a real school,’ as Gerald later wrote, ‘where they expected you to learn things like algebra and history and things which were even greater anathema to me, like sports.’ Gerald hated it, and had to be dragged there, screaming, by his mother. Gerald’s time at Wychwood came to an end when he was beaten by the headmaster for a crime he did not commit (the school sneak’s word was believed rather than Gerald’s) and his mother removed him from the school for good.
Meanwhile, Lawrence, who loathed living in what he called ‘Pudding Island’, endured life in London by reading voraciously in the Reading Room of the British Museum. However, his visits to Bournemouth became more frequent after his discovery of Commin’s Bookshop in Old Christchurch Road. He got to know the assistant manager, Alan Thomas, who lived in Boscombe, shared many of Lawrence’s intellectual and literary interests and became a frequent visitor to Dixie Lodge. Their friendship lasted until Lawrence’s death nearly sixty years later.
Gerald and Jacquie in the back garden of 51 St Albans Avenue with some of the lodgers
18 Wimborne Road remained the family home until 1935, at which point some underlying problems became too large for the family to ignore: Louisa’s pension was being sorely stretched, and her loneliness brought about excessive alcohol consumption. Lawrence’s friend, George Wilkinson, had moved to Corfu and wrote enthusiastically about the island’s beauty, climate and inexpensiveness. Lawrence joined the dots and persuaded his own family to move there. They left in March 1935. 18 Wimborne Road was put up for sale and its contents were packed up and sent ahead to Corfu.
The story of the idyllic years which the family spent on that island is well-known. They became so attached to Corfu that it took a world-changing event to dislodge them. The European situation in 1939 was grave enough to affect even this little island – Mussolini claimed territorial rights over Greece, Corfu included. When Louisa’s advisers in London warned her that when the inevitable war came her funds would be cut off, the family returned to Britain.
At first they lodged in London, but Bournemouth was in Louisa’s heart. After one of many investigative forays there, she found a family-sized house in St Albans Avenue, a quiet road in Charminster with Queens Park at its eastern end. She was to live in St Albans Avenue until she died in 1964. Gerald, now 14, stayed with her until after the war, but by now her other offspring were only intermittent visitors. Larry, who had married Nancy Myers in Bournemouth (with Alan Thomas as witness) just before the Corfu years, was wandering around Europe; Margaret also got married in Bournemouth but spent the war roaming around Africa with her husband, Jack Breeze; Leslie, unfit for war service, was working in a local aircraft factory and used the house as
a base.
52 St Albans Avenue, the house in Charminster which Louisa bought after the return from Corfu
Gerald turned 18 in January 1943 and received his call-up papers, but he too was deemed unfit for military service, so for his work for the war effort he went to Brown’s, a riding school at Longham. It was when he came into his inheritance three years later that he started his animal-collecting expeditions. By then Leslie was living in St Albans Avenue, having put all of his inheritance into a fishing boat, which sank before it had even got out of Poole Harbour. Margaret, now back from her wanderings and single again, used her inheritance more wisely and bought a house opposite her mother’s – no. 51 – and opened a boarding house there. Her lodgers were not only human, for when Gerald returned from his animal-collecting expeditions he would deposit crates of animals in the back garden: St Albans Avenue became a residence for pythons and chimpanzees, among many others.
Margaret (Margo in the books) bought 51 St Albans Avenue, opposite her mother’s house, in 1947 and ran it as a boarding house for many years
Louisa decided to sell her own house, no. 52, and move in with Margaret, who had converted her house into a number of small flats for rent. In the early 1950s Gerald lived in the attic in one of the smallest ones with his wife, Jacquie, whom he had married in Bournemouth in 1951. By then he had spent most of his inheritance on expeditions and was desperately short of money. At Jacquie’s suggestion, he began to write about his adventures, and to his surprise the books were popular. His first few books were hammered out on a typewriter in that tiny attic flat.
His familiarity with the town convinced him that Bournemouth would be an ideal place for the zoo which he had dreamt of starting since his Corfu days. He wrote to the MP for Bournemouth East, Nigel Nicolson, who agreed wholeheartedly. Bournemouth Council preferred the cheaper option of a ‘Pets’ Corner’, but Gerald pursued the idea with such vigour that he persuaded the town’s biggest department store, J J Allen, to mount a Christmas publicity show with animals (from Margaret’s back garden), which became ‘Durrell’s Menagerie’.
By now he had settled on Upton House as a venue for his zoo, but negotiations with Poole Council dragged on interminably. Eventually the project fell through because Upton House itself was in such a poor state of repair that its refurbishment would have consumed all the money earmarked for the construction of animal enclosures and other zoological necessities.
In the end the zoo did come to pass, but on the island of Jersey. Margaret, however, spent much of the rest of her life in Bournemouth and died in a nursing home there ten years ago, the last of the four Durrell siblings.
