A MEMOIR that lay unfinished when conservationist Gerald Durrell died almost 30 years ago is being published by Penguin Random House to mark the centenary of his birth on 7 January.
Myself and Other Animals is described as a “new book mosaicked from unpublished autobiographies, uncollected pieces and previously published extracts from Durrell’s work and archives”.
The posthumous autobiography carries a foreword from one of the conservationist’s greatest supporters, Princess Anne, and an introduction by his widow, Dr Lee Durrell, who also edited the volume.
Described by the publishers as “the unvarnished story of Durrell’s life, from touching family tributes to golden bats and pink pigeons”, the new book draws on a memoir that Gerald Durrell was working on before ill-health forced him to set it aside, and an unfinished work derived from a trip that he undertook to Australia in 1969 to the Great Barrier Reef, Northern Territory and Queensland.
Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur, India, in 1925 before his family returned to England three years later. They later settled in the island of Corfu, where they lived until 1939. The story of those years is told in the so-called Corfu trilogy – Birds, Beasts and Relatives, The Garden of the Gods and the book alluded to in the title of this centenary publication, My Family and Other Animals.
In 1945 Gerald Durrell joined the staff of Whipsnade Park as a student keeper, and in 1947 he led his first animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons. He later undertook numerous further expeditions, visiting Paraguay, Argentina, Sierra Leone, Mexico, Mauritius, Assam and Madagascar.
His first television programme, Two in the Bush – which documented his travels to New Zealand, Australia and Malaya _ was made in 1962.
It was in 1959 that he founded the Jersey Zoological Park, and the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust five years later.
