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Gerald Durrell honoured with blue plaque at childhood home in London

Gerald Durrell is being memorialised with a blue plaque – but not amid the olive groves and sandy beaches of Corfu. Instead, a marker from English Heritage is being installed at the My Family and Other Animals author’s former family home in south London.

The plaque will mark Durrell’s first permanent home in England: 43 Alleyn Park in Dulwich. Durrell, who was born in India in 1925, moved to England in 1928 with his mother after his father’s death. The family lived in Dulwich for two years, “sheltering behind a grim, dropping, choking laurel hedge”, as Durrell put it, according to Michael Haag’s book The Durrells of Corfu.

Speaking from Corfu, Durrell’s widow Lee Durrell, a naturalist, said her husband would have been “very flattered, but quite taken aback” to learn that he was to be commemorated in this way. “He was actually a very humble and modest man,” she said.

Durrell was only three when he lived in the house, she added, but he recalled a dog his family had at the time. With his siblings away at school, Durrell’s mother Louisa decided to acquire a watchdog for the large house, Haag recounts in his biography, ending up with “one of the biggest bull mastiffs ever bred”, Prince. Durrell would describe the dog as “about the size of a Trafalgar Square lion” and told of how it killed various small dogs on its daily walks.

“Probably he did not consider them dogs, because they were so small,” Durrell said. “He may have thought they were rats or small rabbits. Be that as it may, yells and screams from Mother and [his aunt] Prue, accompanied by belabouring with umbrellas and handbags, Prince merely took as encouragement.” The dog was eventually sent to a farm in the country, according to Haag, where Durrell said “he could pick on something more his size, like a bullock”.

Research from English Heritage found that the Dulwich house “proved too large and expensive to run”, and so in either late 1928 or 1929, the Durrells left for Upper Norwood. English Heritage historian Rebecca Preston said the organisation was delighted to be able to honour Durrell with a blue plaque. “Durrell was instrumental in highlighting the importance of breeding endangered animals in captivity to help ensure their conservation in the wild,” she said. “As a writer and broadcaster, he also helped transform the way that the public thought about nature.”

In 1934, Durrell’s brother Lawrence persuaded his mother to bring the family out to Corfu, and they left in the spring of 1935 for what Durrell would later describe as a “magic land, a forest of flowers through which roamed creatures I had never seen before”. They returned to England in 1939, and Durrell would go on to write about their time on the island in his most famous works My Family and Other Animals (1956), Birds, Beasts and Relatives (1969), and The Garden of the Gods (1978). The books were recently adapted by ITV as The Durrells.

Lee Durrell said the municipal garden in the island’s main city was named Bosketto Durrell after her husband and his brother in 2006. “Two years later, bronze busts of the brothers were also installed and they’re greatly visited and greatly admired,” she said. “I’m always trying to figure out whose nose is shinier from people rubbing it, Larry’s or Gerry’s.”