Obituary notice

Herbert Hall Turner was the son of an artist, John Turner, and was born at Leeds on August 13, 1861. His education began at Leeds, but he passed as a scholar to Clifton College, whence he went as a Major Scholar to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was Second Wrangler in 1882, and gained the second Smith’s Prize in 1883. In the following year he was elected a Fellow of Trinity. He had a strong physique that allowed him in those days, as often as he liked, to sit up all night playing whist, evidently without detriment to his studies. He carried this strong physique as well as his devotion to whist all through his life. Another scrap of evidence from this time shows how tenacious were his dominant habits. In the second part of the Tripos, he took “Heat and Electricity.” Finding that there was a want of examples for a student to try his teeth on, he searched for and copied out all that had been set in earlier examinations, and so that others should not be put to the same trouble later, he had them published in a little book. His friends will recognise in this the industry, the practical solution of a practical difficulty, and the quite unassuming service for others that gave him a direction all through his life. W. H. M. Christie became Astronomer Royal in 1881, following Airy’s long reign, during which immense expansion of the only national observatory had passed beyond useful consolidation into the stage of crystallisation. Christie determined to infuse some new blood, and selected Turner as his chief assistant. He could hardly have done better. There have been greater astronomers than Turner, and astronomers whom he has not surpassed in industry and scope; there have been men who have originated more, in bringing remote and subtle ideas into use, or in devising new methods of observation; but I have never heard of one who meant more in personal touch. Practically everyone is interested in astronomy, though even at the present day the number of professional astronomers is not large. Whether one belonged to the one class or the other, or to the fluctuating margin between, one was immediately made aware of Turner’s unforced, unfeigned sympathy, and to an extraordinary degree of his practical willingness to help at the cost of his own time. He constituted himself that indispensable requisite of modern life—a medium of exchange. It was his practice always and immediately to introduce people to one another if they were working on the same idea. He brought a man at once into the ambit of any appropriate organisation. There is almost no living astronomer in this country who is not indebted to him for some service of this kind; nor in this country alone. Late in his life, arriving in Madrid, tired and late, he yet did not fail to pay a visit at once to the astronomers at the observatory, so that they might feel the encouragement of a brother astronomer’s interest. I stress this personal element in Turner’s character, because I regard it as the dominant one, a voice he never thought of disregarding, and which he could not have disregarded without doing violence to his nature.