Ralph was born on 7 September 1876 in Earley, Berkshire, the son of the Rev Havilland Durand and his wife Mary née Hawtrey, where his father was the rector.
[2] Durand left school at the age of sixteen, and travelled to Australia, where an aunt had offered to find him work on a cattle station.
[3] When Durand arrived in Sydney in late 1892, his aunt concluded that the bespectacled 'shy clumsy dreamer' was totally unsuited to life on a cattle station and found him a job in a bank instead.
He spent five years in Australia during which he bought shares in a tin-mining venture, worked as sheep shearer, a sugar plantation coolie, cook to a party of cattle drovers and labourer to a feckless Irish farmer.
He left this venture after a severe illness, and after a period of recovery travelled to South Africa, where he joined Thornycroft's Mounted Infantry, with which he served in the Boer War.
Violet was his eldest daughter in a large family which included Edith Picton-Turbervill, one of the first female members of parliament.
In 1916 he was sent to France, where he first saw active service at the Battle of the Somme, but after an attack of gall stones, he was invalided back to England by the end of that year.
He continued to write and publish books, and was elected to the Council of La Société Guernesiaise, contributing articles on Guernsey history to their journal, Transactions.
[12] In 1940, when German forces occupied the island, Durand was asked by the Bailiff, Victor Carey, to keep an official account of the period.
[14] Durand's account Guernsey Under German Rule was originally scheduled for publication in late 1945, but was delayed, firstly due to post-war shortages of printing materials and staff, and then by the death of the author in December 1945.