Author: Durell, Edward
Biography:
DURELL, Edward (1781-1848: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 26 Dec. 1781 at St. Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands, the son of Edouard Le Vavasseur dit Durell and Elizabeth Le Breton, who had married in Jersey in 1780. He was educated at Exeter and proceeded to Pembroke College Oxford (matric. 1799, BA 1803, MA 1809). He was ordained deacon and priest in 1805 and was variously curate at Coln Rogers, Gloucestershire, from 1810 curate at Withiel, Cornwall, from 1817; and rector of St. Saviour, Jersey, from 1819 until his enforced retirement in 1840. He was also briefly a schoolmaster at Norwich grammar school and at Bodmin grammar school in Cornwall. In 1823 he became editor of the Jersey Gazette and his radical political opinions caused some controversy on the island and in church circles. He married Marie Anthoine on 30 Dec. 1822, at St. Saviour. They had five sons and a daughter. In 1836 two parishioners accused him of sodomy and the island was split along party political lines as the matter rumbled on for about five years. (Durell was a radical rector in a predominantly conservative parish.) He refused to attend an ecclesiastical court and was ably defended by a young attorney, Pierre Le Sueur, but by 1840 he was forced to accept handing over to a curate, and retired. He died on 23 Feb. 1848 from paralysis, at his house in Windsor Road, Jersey. In addition to the work listed here, he contributed poems to newspapers, including an elegy on the death of his eldest son, Charles Rouse Durell, in 1847. He added over two hundred pages of notes and illustrations to a new edition of Rev. Philip Falle’s An Account of the Island of Jersey (1837), originally published in 1694. His guidebook, The Picturesque and Historical Guide to the Island of Jersey (1847), was highly regarded and frequently reprinted. (ancestry.co.uk 20 Mar. 2023; findmypast.co.uk 20 Mar. 2023; CCEd 20 Mar. 2023; Bibliotheca Cornubiensis [1874], 1: 128; Jerripedia) AA