Who was Herbert Turner?

Herbert Frank Charles ‘Bert’ Turner was born in West Melbourne on 3 April 1894. He was the oldest child of Frank William George Turner and Harriet Eliza Roskilly who married in Victoria in 1893. Bert’s three younger siblings Florence, Alfred, and Alexander were born in 1896, 1897 and 1898. Sadly Alfred died in 1898, followed by Harriet (30), who died in April 1899, leaving Frank bereft, with three very young children in his care.

In 1901 Frank (26) remarried to Ethel Alice Cook nee Lettey (27), a widow with two young children of her own. Their son Alfred was born in 1903, after which the Turners came to Western Australia where their daughter Ethel was born in Day Dawn, a bustling goldmining town in the upper Murchison, in 1905.

But this Victorian heritage gives no hint of this particular Turner family’s strong ties to early Western Australia…

In fact Bert’s great grandfather, James Woodward Turner, had arrived in Western Australia in March 1830 with his second wife Maria Rockley aboard the ship ‘Warrior’, and was one of the settlers of the south west town of Augusta. Eventually, after a promised government settlement failed to eventuate and fellow settlers the Bussells and Molloys moved to the Vasse region, James and his family moved to Perth in 1848.

James’ youngest son (Frank’s father, and Bert’s grandfather) was James Augustus Turner, who married Annie Amelia Armstrong, daughter of colonial interpreter Francis Fraser Armstrong. Frank was one of their seven children, born in Perth in 1874.

So by the time Bert was born in Melbourne in 1894, three generations of his family had already lived in Western Australia. Which means when Frank came to Western Australia in the early 1900s, he was really just coming home.

Though he grew up in Maylands, when the First World War began, Bert was a postal assistant in Leonora. His medical exam was performed on 15 January 1915; a date which would later prove significant. He entered Blackboy Hill Camp for training on 30 January and, on 24 April 1915, was assigned to the 5th Reinforcements to the 11th Battalion.

Two days later he embarked at Fremantle for Egypt.

By Shannon Lovelady
Story from A Signaller’s Story Exhibit