Talent spotted by an assistant to Arturo Toscanini, musical director of La Scala, Milan, Turner was engaged to sing there in 1924, and then had an international career in Continental Europe, North and South America and at Covent Garden.

She decided that she wished to make opera her career, and was supported by her parents, who paid for her to take lessons with the bass Daniel Rootham, who had been teacher to Clara Butt.

[2] At the age of nineteen Turner started a four-year course at the Royal Academy of Music, where she sang in Sir Alexander Mackenzie's opera The Cricket on the Hearth.

[4] Towards the end of her time at the academy Turner auditioned for Walter van Noorden, proprietor and conductor of the opera company that had fired her imagination in Bristol.

[1] The Times described her Leonora as promising although needing to be sung more freely, The Stage praised her vivacity as Musetta, and The Era found her Santuzza "remarkable" and "brilliant".

[6] The following year the company returned to Covent Garden for a seven-week season, during which Turner sang all her 1920 roles and added Fricka in Das Rheingold, Brünnhilde in Die Walküre and Siegfried, Elsa in Lohengrin, the title-role in Aida and Jeanette in a short-lived one-act piece called Le chant fatal.

[10] As English opera singers were not at that time highly regarded internationally it was suggested to Turner that she might change her name, but as her biographer Sir John Tooley comments, "Proud of her Lancastrian roots, she refused".

[14] In 1938 Turner was among the sixteen leading singers of the day for whom Ralph Vaughan Williams composed his Serenade to Music, honouring the conductor Sir Henry Wood.

When peace came, it was decided to abandon the pre-war practice of starry internationally cast seasons in favour of a resident company performing year-round and singing in English.

[9] Among those who studied with her in the US and England were Roberta Knie, Amy Shuard, Rita Hunter, Linda Esther Gray, Pauline Tinsley and Eric Garrett.

Tooley writes that Turner passed on "her wealth of experience with her inimitable generosity but also with a ferocious expectation of hard work and high standards in return".

[19] Turner's ninetieth birthday was celebrated with a gala at Covent Garden, which included contributions, some spoken, some sung, by Geraint Evans, Tito Gobbi, Ljuba Welitsch, Victoria de los Angeles, Isobel Baillie, John Gielgud and several star singers of the younger generation, including Valerie Masterson, John Tomlinson and Hinge and Bracket.