THERE can be no doubt that Clarence and Doris Corbin of Pembroke have led a long and charmed life that seemingly becomes more fascinating as time goes by.

Distinguished in their own individual spheres, both in their nineties, they are a well-known, absolutely unpretentious couple who just naturally exude all the grace and charm one would expect from scions of Corbins, Darrells and Heyligers, who for generations were tops among the first families of Bermuda.

Mrs. Corbin was 93 on October 22. She has been twice honoured by the Queen for outstanding and meritorious service to her community. Mr. Corbin entered his 90th year on September 7. Tall and lanky, he was born in New York to Bermudian parents, educated in London and, in his heyday, he was Bermuda's top tennis player.

During the next few days the Corbins will be busy preparing to spend Christmas in Las Vegas. They received a call from their son George saying he had booked them into the Monte Carlo Hotel, where he would be joining them.

George is a retired educator who makes his home in Thousand Oaks, California. The trip has profound sentimental import for Mr. and Mrs. Corbin. It is more or less a pilgrimage. The grave of their youngest son Michael is in Vegas; and their niece, the late Ouida Somersall, is also buried there. She passed away five years ago.

Other family members gathering in Vegas will be Mrs. Corbin's other niece, Helen Foster, and her husband, the Rev. Thomas Wendell Foster, a former pastor of Vernon Temple and St. Paul AME Churches in Bermuda.

The Fosters make their home in the Bronx, New York. Mr. Foster is a pastor there, and until three years ago, he had been a long-serving elected member of the New York City Council. His daughter, a lawyer, succeeded him when he retired. Mrs. Corbin's activities for the most part have been engrossed in music and centred around her church. For 53 years she was Minister of Music at the Cathedral of African Methodism in Bermuda, St. Paul AME Church in Hamilton.

She was a Girl Guide and a Ranger. As far back as 1937 she was sent to London as the Official Delegate of Bermuda Guides for the Coronation of King George VI. She was accompanied by Wenona Robinson and Gaynell Paynter, both deceased. Hundreds of Guides from all over the then- British Empire attended the Coronation.

The three were away from Bermuda from April to September, spending some time at Chigwell, the Girl Guide Headquarters in Adelboden, Switzerland.

Doris was born in 1911, the youngest and only survivor of the three children of William and Dorcus Franklin Heyliger. Her father migrated to Bermuda at age 19, from his native St. Eustacius in the Dutch West Indies to work on the modernisation of the Royal Naval Dockyard. His Bermudian wife died when Doris was only two years old. He remained a widower, dying in 1981 at age 102.

When Mr. Heyliger went to work aboard the passenger ships plying between Bermuda and the United States, he left his children in care of the Rev. and Mrs. John Johnson. He was pastor of Mount Zion AME Church in Southampton, and his wife was the church organist.

Doris had been studying music since age nine under Mrs. Marie Carmichael, who trained many outstanding local musicians. It was also at age nine that she dedicated her life to God for church work.

Doris assisted Mrs. Johnson on the organ, and became so useful to the church that one of its trustees, John N. Bascome, out of appreciation for her musicianship, gave her a gold sovereign on her 13th birthday. Eighty years later she still wears that token on a gold chain around her neck.

Doris later moved to St. Paul AME Church in Hamilton, where in 1933 she was introduced to the pipe organ by the wife of the church's pastor, the Rev. Leo Pottinger. She was a qualified organist from Connecticut. At first young Doris assisted Mrs. Amy Dill, who for decades was the church organist. Upon her death, Doris became organist.

Doris attended Excelsior Secondary School operated on North Shore, Pembroke by St. Lucia-born Mrs. Millie Neverson. There she was introduced to the classics well as to Girl Guiding. She still can sing the French National Anthem in French. She also got the foundation that enabled her to pass the qualifying examinations set by the Department of Education for her career as a schoolteacher that began in 1932.

Mrs. Corbin added a new dimension to her musicianship when in the early 1950s she mastered a technique perfected by Dr. Furman Fordham of the United States for the production of mass choirs and training of individuals in voice, diction and stage presence.

During a six-week visit to Bermuda he formed the 300-strong Fordham Chorus that gave performances singing from Handel's Messiah, without the score, as well other works such as Lewis Lewandowski's Psalm 150 (Praise Ye the Lord).

After Dr. Fordham returned to the US, Mrs. Corbin took over direction of the Fordham Chorus and in several public performances, demonstrated to good advantage her own talents as an arranger and her vigour as a conductor of spirituals, chorales and classics. Unforgettable were renditions by her Chorus of such selections as God of Our Fathers, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, Is there Anybody Here, I Can't Turn Around, Jubilee and I'm Tramping.

Other mass choirs Mrs. Corbin will be remembered for include the 200-voice Billy Graham Crusade Choir; the combined choirs of local AME Churches in their "Night Under the Stars" at the Tennis Stadium in 1962; the Queen's Jubilee Choir, and of course her own Senior Choir at St. Paul's Church, as well as the combined Conference Choirs from 1949 to1984. In 1980 Mrs. Corbin received the Queen's Medal of Honour for her service to the Girl Guide Movement and as a schoolteacher. In 1982 she and her husband went to Buckingham Palace to receive from the Queen the MBE she was awarded for broad community service.

Doris and Clarence were married on September 11, 1941. Three sons were born of the marriage, George, Canterbury and Michael Corbin.

THE Corbins and the Darrells who were the maternal and paternal grandparents of Clarence Constantine Corbin were among the most influential and affluent black men in Bermuda during the late 1900s and the early 20th century.

He was named after his grandfather Clarence Darrell, a Front Street businessman, whose homestead was Clarendon, a well-known landmark on Flatts Hill, Smith's Parish, where he also carried on business.

Mr. Darrell's seven children were all outstanding achievers. His daughters were distinguished, becoming in turn Bermuda's first registered female pharmacist, a nurse, a dentist and a musician. Helen was the registered nurse. Her father sent her to Lincoln Hospital and Nursing School for her degree when racial discrimination and segregation prevented her from training in Bermuda.

Meanwhile, there were in St. George's the Corbin brothers, George, who became a councillor on the Corporation of St. George's; Louis, who was a dentist; Canterbury, who trained for the ministry and headed St. Phillip's Anglican Church in Atlantic City, New Jersey; and there was John, who was once manager of the old Quality Bakery.

John, obviously in love with Helen Darrell, joined her in New York, they got married and their only son, Clarence was born in the Bronx on September 7, 1915; later their daughter, Helen Wilhelmina, arrived. The young family returned to Bermuda, where Nurse Helen was much in demand as a midwife, delivering more that half of the Portuguese babies born in Smith's. Young Clarence attended the one-room private school of Mrs. Alice Spencer Paynter that accommodated 20 to 25 students. He chuckled remembering there were three outdoor toilets, one for girls, one for boys and the other for Mrs. Spencer.

"There was no toilet paper as we know it today. We made use of sheets torn from old National Bella Hess and Eaton's catalogues; everyone washed their hands with Sunlight soap in the same bucket and dried them with the same towel," he said.

Clarence Darrell did not engage his young grandson after school hours in his grocery and feed shop on the corner of Front and King Streets. Instead he set him to learn printing arts in R.C. Crawford's Hamilton Press that was located in the same block as the grocery.

Obviously an outstanding student at the Berkeley Institute, Clarence, upon graduation, was awarded a Technical Scholarship, which the power structure reserved in those days for the top black students, while Rhodes Scholarships went to the white boys.

His ambition was to study medicine at the University of London. Science was not part of the curriculum at the Berkeley in those days, so Clarence had to first enter a polytechnic school for his introduction to the sciences.

Meanwhile the Second World War broke out, forcing him to return to Bermuda. Soon afterwards his father died, and Clarence found his niche in printing. Eventually he became a manager at the Bermuda Press.