E. S. Turner

Ernest Sackville
Born	17 November 1909
Died	6 July 2006
Occupation	author, journalist

Ernest Sackville (E. S.) Turner (born 17 November 1909, died 6 July 2006) was an English freelance journalist and author who published 20 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).

E. S. Turner was born in the Wavertree Garden suburb of Liverpool in the North West of England on 17 November 1909. His father, Frederick William Turner, "a churchgoer and a teetotaller, [and] a desk-man in the Post Office Engineering Department in Liverpool," was a descendant of Sir Barnard Turner, an Alderman and sheriff in London who commanded troops attempting to curb looting in the 1780 Gordon Riots in 1780, but who later died penniless less than a month into Parliament's assembly, after his election in 1784. 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."

Turner's first school was in Shrewsbury, where he is said to have been "a good pupil," winning "a few prizes" and enjoying "memorising passages of Macaulay’s Lays." He went on to Orme Boys' School in Newcastle-under-Lyme, and "[a]lthough he had the reserved, courteous and erudite air of an Oxbridge don," Turner never went on to attend university. At the age of 17 his father presented him with "an ancient typewriter [purchased] for a fiver from a passing lorry," supporting his desire to write.

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