Lawrence Samuel Durrell

Lawrence Samuel Durrell (23 September 1884 – 16 April 1928) was a British Indian subject and engineer, and is best remembered as the father of novelist Lawrence Durrell and naturalist Gerald Durrell. He was an Anglo-Indian in the sense that he was of English descent and brought up in India.

Durrell was born in Dum Dum (present day Kolkata) on 23 September 1884, the son of Samuel Amos Durrell and his wife, Dora Maria Johnstone, and christened in Fatehgarh, Bengal, on 7 October 1884.

An engineer by profession, he studied in the prestigious Thomason College of Civil Engineering (now the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee). In Roorkee, he met Louisa Florence Dixie and married her in 1910. The couple had three sons and a daughter—Lawrence, Leslie, Margaret, and Gerald. While he worked for the North-West Railway in Jalandhar, his son Lawrence was born in 1912. Durrell went on to work for the Mymensingh–Bhairab Bazar Railway Company in Bengal.

In 1918, he became the chief engineer of the famous Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, and in 1920 left the company to found his own company Durrell & Co., Engineers and Contractors at Sakci, which became the industrial boomtown of Jamshedpur. Gerald Durrell was born in Jamshedpur in 1925. Many of the important industrial constructions in Jamshedpur were undertaken by his company, including the Tinplate Company of India, the Indian Cable Company, and the Enamelled Ironware Company, and contractual work for the Tata Iron and Steel Works.

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