Christian Dewar Durie

Christian Dewar Durie, sister of the Chief, Andrew Durie of Durie, is the secretary of the DFA and was named after Christian Maule of Bolshau and Panmure, one of her mother’s ancestors, who married Simeon Durie in 1630. She lives in London and Wiltshire having been brought up in England, Scotland, Germany and China following her father’s military wanderings. She is a fashion graduate of London’s St Martin’s School of Art and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts having won two of its design awards. Her career has been in fashion and latterly textiles, culminating in being a journalist and a fund-raiser for the charity that helps launch graduate textile designers internationally, Texprint. She was very fortunate in 1969 to win a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship and spent three exceptional months travelling - exploring the United States and Canada. Later her fashion consultancy work took her round the world to Japan, Hong Kong, America and Canada twice a year. More recently her work has been in Europe. She enjoys art, history, architecture, ballet, opera and reading and, for sport, skiing.

Her interest in the Durie family was first aroused when searching for a project to do at school when she was about 12 years old. Having always been told she was ‘Scottish’ and to eat her porridge with salt (and not sugar), with her father belonging to a Highland regiment - but having lived, up to that time, everywhere except in Scotland it was a good opportunity to research her family roots. The pamphlet she produced would be considered by the Durie family Genealogist, Dr Bruce Durie, as a mass of errors, but the exercise was absorbing, the research exciting and led her to appreciate how single aspects and events, in one time and place, can lead to wide spread links with a great variety of subjects and historical incidents throughout time.