Ernest Sackville Turner OBE (17 November 1909 – 6 July 2006) was an English freelance journalist and writer who wrote 20 published books, including Boys Will Be Boys (Michael Joseph, 1948), The Phoney War on the Home Front (St. Martin's Press, 1961), and What The Butler Saw (Penguin, 1962), and contributing to the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and regularly to the English satirical weekly magazine Punch (the latter for more than 50 years).
[5] Turner's mother, Bertha Pixton Norbury, was an amateur portrait and landscape painter, and oversaw a home "built for a class… [her son E.S.
thought] extinct, that of ‘meritorious artisans’", with a "family bookcase... weighted with the massed works of Swedenborg… and a ‘splendid’ volume called The Bible in Pitman's Shorthand.
"[4] He went on to Orme Boys' School in Newcastle-under-Lyme,[1] and "[a]lthough he had the reserved, courteous and erudite air of an Oxbridge don", Turner never went on to attend university.
"[3] Stating this another way, Jonathan Sale of The Guardian described it as his"work[ing] his way up from copy boy to subeditor, reporter and gossip column editor.
[4] Such travels contributed to two later pseudonymous Rupert Lang novels, and to a final London Review of Books (LRB) piece written with his first hand information on ocean liners.
[3][1] At the Daily Express, a fellow sub was prominent British journalist James Cameron, who he described as "a good friend, a brilliant reporter.
The politician Tony Benn often quoted passages from the book in the House of Commons to illustrate points he was trying to make, and especially in 1992, during one particular debate on foxhunting.
Turner's literary flexibility was illustrated when he wrote a Betjeman-style pastiche for the Royal wedding of The Princess Anne and Mark Phillips on 14 November 1973, subsequently quoted in an obituary by Miles Kington in 2006.
[3] At the age of 89, he published "Unholy Pursuits", which took as its subject the incidence of Anglican clergymen working anonymously as journalists (a profession considered well beneath them at the time).
[1][3][4][12] Andrew O'Hagan, in his 1998 LRB retrospective, noted that while Turner's fingers had always been light on the keyboard, his writing was "with a strongly human pulse just under the skin, a richness of personal feeling in the blood.
He takes hold of a subject, advertising or boys’ magazines, and he causes you to feel you’ve learned everything there is to know about the subject... And that's not all… his parodies of Betjeman are better than Betjeman.’[4]Some mention is made of political leanings—O'Hagan refers to Turner as "never a left-wing diehard" and as having a "rightwing persona (which was only partly a pose)"[4]—but these are not thoroughly explored, and during a House of Commons debate on the foxhunting issue, Labour MP Tony Benn quoted from Roads to Ruin: A Shocking History of Social Progress (1950), the book where Turner exposed the upper class's "disgraceful rearguard action…" against reforms such as "abolition of child chimney sweeps and the repeal of laws under which convicted criminals could be hung, drawn and quartered.
A formal man and an Edwardian, Ernest Sackville Turner is said to have "clung to the dignity of his formal style and title":"[W]hen his local paper, the Richmond and Twickenham Times, modestly expanded ES to Ernest in a puff for... his final book, the solecism prompted a modest rebuke… in a letter to the editor… [where Turner declared] 'The first-naming of all and sundry is the curse of the age' [and where he] went on to wonder if the paper's then proprietor, David Dimbleby, would care to be known as 'Dave.