Monday 21 July 2025
To help us celebrate Gerald Durrell's centenary year, we've been collecting stories about Gerry from our supporters. Thank you to Dr Garrett Eriksen, Lucia Dunlop, and Charmaine Noel for their stories.
You can submit your own memories of Gerry here.
Dr Garrett Eriksen
My name is Garrett Eriksen, son of Glenn Eriksen and the late Andrew Eriksen, who both founded the Cango Wildlife Ranch, a WAZA-accredited conservation facility in South Africa, in 1986. The facility is still going strong almost 40 years later and I am reaching to share that the entire reason our facility exists is because of Gerald Durrell!
My father grew up in a small flat in the middle of the city of Johannesburg. When he was a youngster, he fell gravely ill and was bedridden for a whole year. During that time, he started reading Gerald Durrell's books, and it was those books and the life that Gerry led that inspired my father to go into conservation and kept him going during his illness. It was after this that his room started "mysteriously" filling with animals, much to the consternation of his parents!
Many years later, he met my mother some 1,200km south of Johannesburg and the two of them purchased a local crocodile farm and then spent some 39 years turning it into a world-class conservation facility.
My siblings and I all grew up hearing about Durrell from our father and what an inspiration he was to him and even had the opportunity to visit Durrell's home-cum-museum in 2010. My father, for his part, spent the day walking the halls and staring at each photo and nook and cranny for ages, a dream come true for him. I have attached a photo of him overcome with emotion after seeing some of Durrell's photos in the house. My father, unfortunately, passed away in 2022 and we are coming to the Durrell's house again in June this year as part of a memorial trip for my father.
Lucia Dunlop
I was very interested to read Joan's reminiscences of her years as Secretary to Gerald Durrell as my mother Anne Murfitt was also interviewed by him for the job of taking shorthand and typing up his book in the 1970s. My mother worked at Bletchley Park during the war and her shorthand and touch typing were excellent. My mother was offered the job and was excited about it as all her children were away at boarding school and she wanted something interesting to do. We lived just down the road from the zoo at Anchor Lodge in Trinity. However, when my father heard about it, he was furious and said people would think he could not afford to look after his wife! How times have changed! My father was a very proud man; a doctor on the Island. Mum was furious that she had to turn down the job but went on to be a volunteer guide at the zoo. My mother and Gerald were the same age. As a child I owned a fairly large tortoise that liked to go walk-abouts and was forever escaping our garden. One day he was found walking down the main Trinity road towards the zoo and was picked up by a zoo worker who put him in with the giant tortoises for the day! On her way home she stopped at all the houses along the road until she got to ours and he was return to us!
Charmaine Noel
Gerry was often around, but as he was a very shy man, he was quite hard to spot. I used to look out for him at the zoo. A few times I saw Gerry near the Les Augres Manor, and near the bat house, which I think he liked to keep an eye on. I was a shy child, but I was inspired by his passion, his journey studying and conserving animals. I loved all the animals, but especially the amphibian and reptile house section. With my pocket money I bought the paperback of ‘My Family and Other Animals’, and his other early books ‘Catch me a Colobus’, which always drew me in, but also made me laugh and chuckle. I remember him watching us, watching the monkeys one day. There were three of us siblings, and he had three siblings. Maybe he was wondering about our family dynamics whilst we watched us, as we watched the monkeys? He was a great observer. He watched people too, and they became part of his stories.