Margaret Durrell

Margaret Isabel Mabel "Margo" Durrell (4 May 1919 – 16 January 2007) was the younger sister of novelist Lawrence Durrell and elder sister of naturalist, author, and TV presenter Gerald Durrell, who lampoons her character in his Corfu trilogy of novels: My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts, and Relatives, and The Garden of the Gods.

She wrote a memoir, Whatever Happened to Margo?, giving a humorous account of her experiences as a Bournemouth landlady in the late 1940s. It includes details about the lives of her family, particularly Leslie, Gerald, and her mother Louisa Durrell following their time on Corfu. The manuscript was apparently written in the 1960s and was discovered in the attic by a granddaughter nearly 35 years later. It was published in 1995.

Early life Durrell was born in Kurseong, Bengal, in British India and brought up in India and England. In 1935, along with her brothers Gerald and Leslie, she accompanied her mother to a new home on Corfu, following her eldest brother, Lawrence, who had moved there a few months earlier with his first wife, Nancy Myers. Margo's mother, with Gerald and Leslie, returned to England by 1939 with the outbreak of World War II, but Margo decided that her real home was on Corfu and remained on the island, sharing a peasant cottage with some local friends.

Marriages and wartime Durrell met Jack Breeze, the chief flight engineer of an Imperial Airways flying boat, later the same year.

Death Margaret Durrell died at age 87 on 16 January 2007. Her ashes were scattered on Pontikonisi, an islet off Corfu, to which the Durrells used to swim as children; part of the ashes of her brother Gerald had also been scattered there following his death in 1995.