[1] Percy Purvis Turnbull trained as a chorister at the Cathedral Church of St Nicholas in Newcastle and took piano lessons from Sigmund Oppenheimer.
After leaving school in 1916 he began working for the Tyne Improvement Commission, but kept up his musical interests in his spare time, encouraged by one of the leading musicians of the area, William Gillies Whittaker, founder and conductor of the Newcastle Bach Choir.
This was tempered by an enthusiasm for the Russian pianist composers Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Medtner, as well as the Francophile influence of Faure and Ravel, and also something of his friend and teacher John Ireland.
His most extended instrumental work, the Violin Sonata, also dates from 1925 when it was played by Marie Wilson with Turnbull as pianist at the Royal College of Music.
[2] Few were published in his lifetime, but there are eleven volumes of piano music posthumously published by the Turnbull Memorial Trust, including Seven Character Sketches (1923–1927), a five movement Piano Suite (1925), Six Preludes (1934–41), the Sonatina (1948), Three Winter Pieces (1951) and the Pasticcio on a theme of Mozart (1957) – the latter applying the styles of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Fauré, Ravel, Delius and Bartok to the original Mozart theme.