Tag: Durrells

Whatever happened to Margo?

A young Margo Durrell pictured in Bournemouth in 1940s. All pictures: Courtesy of the Durrell family

Words: Jeremy Miles

The famously free-spirited Durrell family probably didn’t realise it at the time but when they ditched their digs in dank 1930s Bournemouth and headed for the sunshine of Corfu they were writing a little piece of history.

Widow Louisa and her children Larry, Margo, Leslie and Gerry spent only a  few idyllic years on the Greek Island but it was long enough to sow the seeds of a legacy that lives large to this day.

Eighty years later millions tuned in each week to watch The Durrells, the good-hearted ITV drama series based on their exploits. What many don’t know is that by the 1950s and 60s the family was firmly back in Bournemouth.

Gerald was finding fame as a pioneering naturalist, conservationist and best-selling author and would go on to establish the famous Jersey Zoo and Durrell Wildlife Trust.

Eldest brother Larry meanwhile had become literary superstar, Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet. Fans of the TV show will not be surprised that Leslie made a rather less spectacular impact.  Always the most vulnerable of the siblings, he was living over a Bournemouth off-licence with his gun collection and lurching from one failed business venture to the next.

A young Gerry on Corfu in the 1930s

But what of sister Margo? In TV version of The Durrells she is a force of nature, a scatty, fun-loving teenager determined to make her presence felt amidst the creative chaos of her brothers. By all accounts it was a fairly accurate reading of her character. For the real Margo was loved by everyone and remained at the hub of the Durrell family for the rest of her life. She died aged 87 in 2007.

Despite being charismatic, joyful to know and leading an extraordinary life, she never sought the limelight and as a result was rather eclipsed in the public-eye by her famous brothers.

In the 1960s she quietly set about redressing the balance by penning her own fascinating memoir.  It was called, of course, Whatever Happened to Margo? It remained unpublished for nearly 30 years until her granddaughter Tracy Breeze found the dusty manuscript covered in handwritten corrections hidden away in a drawer in Margo’s Bournemouth home.

Tracy laboriously retyped it and, in 1995, Whatever Happened to Margo? finally arrived on the nation’s bookshelves. It was a fascinating, rather madcap tale. It was well received but by the time The Durrells hit the small screen it had been out of print for years. Two years ago Penguin republished Margo’s book to coincide with the final season of the Tv series and no one was more delighted than Tracy, the daughter of Gerry Breeze the elder of Margo’s two sons.

At the time she told me. “I loved my nan. She was such an amazing person and we were incredibly close because she actually brought me up from the age of 11 when my mother died.” She remembers Margo being open-minded, adventurous and above all lots of fun. “She was the heart and soul of the family.”

Margo in the 1990s

In the opening episode of that last season of The Durrells, mother Louisa describes Margo as having “a mind like a roomful of starlings.” Was she really that scatterbrained? Tracy didn’t hesitate. “No, free-spirited would be a more accurate term.”  The Tv show, she admitted, was a little exaggerated but she loved it, telling me: “The impact it’s having on the Durrell family is fantastic. It’s helping to sell Uncle Gerry’s books and promoting the Jersey zoo which is continuing his work with endangered species. For me that ticks all the boxes. As for seeing my grandmother portrayed as a teenager, that’s absolutely fine. It just makes me smile.”

Whatever Happened to Margo? lifts the lid on what happened after the family left Corfu. It finds Margo, now in her late 20s, returning to post-war Bournemouth in 1947. Her marriage to a dashing RAF pilot, Jack Breeze, is sadly over and she has two small children to bring up. She spends an inheritance on buying a substantial property in the Bournemouth suburb of Charminster with the intention of running a boarding house.

It doesn’t quite turn out the way she’s planned. She will soon have brother Gerald keeping a small menagerie of exotic animals in her back garden and several chimpanzees and a six foot python as house pets.

As for the paying tenants? Her boundless good nature finds her acting as landlady to a stream of characters who are guaranteed get the net curtains of Charminster twitching like mad. There’s a painter of nudes and a pair of  glamorous nurses whose revolving gentleman callers lead to suspicions that she is running a brothel.

Tracy remembered the house, at 51 St Albans Avenue, well recalling that Margo’s open-mindedness and live and let live philosophy meant everyone was welcome. “She would probably have taken in the tenants that other people were turning away. She just accepted everyone for who they were. The Durrells were all very down earth despite coming from a privileged background. One minute Uncle Gerry would be talking to Princess Diana and the next he’d be asking the dustman in for a cup of tea. There were no barriers.”

Gerald and his first wife in Margo’s back garden in the 1950s

Tracy insists that growing up as a member of the Durrell family just seemed normal to her. “As a child I don’t think I realised how special it was. You just accept things, but I was very lucky indeed to be brought up by my nan. She was my best friend and we had great adventures. We even went back to Corfu which she had always felt such strong connection to.”

Margo was described at her funeral by Gerry’s widow, Lee Durrell director of the Durrell Wildlife Trust, as “One of a kind who sparkled with her own special joie de vivre and enriched the lives of everyone around her with an aura of happy serenity and a marvellous sense of fun.”

Her friends and family in Bournemouth knew Margo as a woman who loved reading, art exhibitions, walking by the sea and visiting churches. Needless to say this latter interest crossed all faiths.  Even though she was a chanting Buddhist she worked for a time as an enthusiastic guide to Christchurch Priory.

She also somehow found time to write another book. The manuscript tells of a time when her children had grown up and she was looking for another adventure. She answered a small ad in the local newspaper took a job with the crew of a Greek cruise line sailing the Caribbean. Her second memoir is called Growing Old Disgracefully and now Tracy is hoping to find a publisher for that too. Watch this space.

Margo out on the town with friends and lodgers in Bournemouth in the 1950s

Remembering conservation pioneer Gerald Durrell monkeying around in the Suburbs

The young Gerald Durrell and friends in Corfu

Author and naturalist Gerald Durrell found fame in the 1950s and 60s as the outspoken, larger-than-life best-selling writer who went on to establish the pioneering Jersey Zoo. Known these days as the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, it is revered by conservationists across the world. It is also one of the biggest tourist attractions in the Channel Island’s.

However had a few local government big-wigs taken a more enlightened view 50 odd years ago, the zoo may well have found a home right here in Dorset. For Durrell, author of nearly 40 books including worldwide best sellers like My Family and Other Animals, originally wanted to establish his groundbreaking captive breeding programme at Upton House near Poole.

Sadly the local authority felt it was an unsuitable use for the  grand Georgian property and the project was strangled by red tape. An environmental campaigner years ahead of his time, Durrell had been determined to start work on a project that would save threatened species from extinction.

By the late 1950s he had amassed a bewildering collection of animals in the back garden of his sister Margo’s home in the Bournemouth suburb of Charminster. He was already a well-known author and well on the way to establishing the project he named The Stationary Ark. He would have loved it to have been at Upton which has beautiful parkland and even its own island in Poole Harbour, but stymied by council bureaucracy, he lost patience and took his life’s work to the Channel Islands instead. Margo’s son, Gerry Breeze, describes the loss of the zoo to the local area as “a tragedy.” 

Now 68 and still living just a half-a-mile from his childhood home, young Gerry used to feed and clean the animals in the back garden while his uncle was off on his globe-trotting expeditions He would later help build the cages for the Jersey Zoo and lived and worked there for a while, looking after the reptile house. Gerry – a seventh dan karate expert – invited me into his happily chaotic home, where Japanese and African masks adorn the garden walls, kiwi fruit grow in abundance and he still studies is beloved reptiles. It is a typically Durrell-like environment. Although as Gerry himself unwittingly pointed out this isn’t always obvious when viewed from the inside.

“When you’re growing up you just accept your family and the people around you as being normal,” he told me.  “It was only years later that I realised what an extraordinary and interesting family I had.” Interesting indeed. Apart from Uncle Gerald there was also Uncle Larry (the writer Lawrence Durrell)  and the gun-mad Uncle Leslie who used to keep a small armoury of weapons “including elephant guns, revolvers..everything” in the flat over the Bournemouth off-licence he ran with his wife Doris,

Then of course there was young Gerry’s mother, Margo – another charismatic character who would go on to write her own highly praised autobiography. The Durrell siblings are of course familiar from Gerald’s best-seller My Family and Other Animals. Although set on the Greek island of  Corfu, the book  actually opens on the precise cold, miserable, rainy day in Bournemouth that originally inspired the family to head for the sun.

His years in Corfu consolidated  an interest in animals that had been growing since he was a toddler and collected wood-lice, earwigs… anything that crawled. He had already decided that school was an irksome business and had been removed from formal education after a single unhappy year. With private lessons and a freedom that few are privileged to enjoy, Gerald Durrell would go on to become a world-renowned expert in his field.

The man David Attenborough described as “magic” and whose Jersey project has saved entire species from extinction was not the easiest of people. He drank heavily, had a fearsome temper and didn’t suffer fools gladly.“He certainly had his moments.” Gerry Breeze told me.  “He drank far too much and could swear like no one else I’ve ever heard. He was a remarkable man though. He used to go off on expeditions and bring all sorts back – we had monkeys, mongooses, snakes, birds, just about everything in that garden.  I remember one day all the monkeys escaped. We found them as far away as Boscombe Gardens.”

“What on earth did the neighbours say?” I ask.  “Not a lot.” replied Gerry. “The ones on the left used to grumble a bit but I don’t think they actually did anything.”  The Durrell’s urban menagerie including a chimpanzee called Chumley who used to enjoy an occasional cigarette and drink. Thumbing through a dog-eared family album, Gerry finds a fading black and white picture.  “Look there he is swinging on the curtains,” he chuckled. I can’t help noticing that Chumley is wearing clothes. “Gran used to make those,” explained Gerry. Looking at this handful of images that have now become history, he says he wishes he had taken more photographs. “I just didn’t realise how important it was at the time.”

Since Gerald Durrell’s death in 1995  at the age of 70, The Wildlife Conservation Trust has been run by his widow, Dr Lee Durrell. The couple met in the mid 1970s when the then recently divorced 53-year-old Gerald was on a lecture tour of America and Lee was a 27-year-old graduate student completing a PhD in animal communication. “I remember the moment he came into the room. It instantly seemed to light up. He was very high wattage person,” she tells me. Durrell was clearly taken by the young Memphis belle and the pair fell into deep conversation about Madagascan Lemurs. Two years later they were married.” 

Lee believes that the loss and degradation of habitat is the biggest threat facing many of the world’s endangered species. Gerald, she says, may have been hard-drinking, volatile and in many ways a rather old fashioned character, but he was also a man of vision. He understood the threats facing the natural world long before most people had even given it a second thought. She gives an example “Gerry loved Corfu but when he went back in the 1950s and tourism was beginning to take off, he was appalled. He felt the Island was being ruined. He ranted and raved about it.Yet when he took me there in the 80s and tourism had more or less done its wicked thing. I thought it was magical. It’s a matter of perception.”

She now works tirelessly to promote the work of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. Encouraged by Gerry Breeze, she recently returned to Bournemouth, where she so often spent happy times with the extended Durrell family, to give a lecture at Talbot Heath School. It was the first of a series of illustrated talks which she hopes to give at locations around the UK and she was impressed by what she found.

“I spoke to the sixth form and it was so encouraging that the subjects they are studying in their science and geography classes are exactly the kind of things that we are working on. They knew all about biodiversity. They knew about the various world treaties and conventions that have been set up to regulate trade and protect different species, habitats and eco-systems. Twenty years ago you’d go into a school and the curriculum would be completely conventional. Now kids like these are really beginning to look at how the world actually works.”

*You can visit The Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust at Les Augrès Manor, La Profonde Rue, Trinity, Jersey, Channel Islands JE3 5BP. For more information about how you can help their work protecting endangered species by becoming a Trust  member go to www.durrell.org or telephone +44 (0) 1534 860000