Herbert Westren Turnbull, 1885-1961

Abstract

Herbert Westren Turnbull, second son and second of the seven children of William Peveril Turnbull, H.M. Inspector of Schools at Wolverhampton and later at Sheffield, was born at Tettenhall, Wolverhampton, on 31 August 1885. His death at Grasmere on 4 May 1961 was felt as a personal loss not merely by mathematicians in Scotland, with which country he had had associations for forty years, but by a multitude of friends, mathematicians and others, in America and in many other foreign countries. Educated at Sheffield Grammar School, he went up in 1903 to Trinity College, Cambridge, with an Entrance Scholarship. In the Tripos of 1907 he was Second Wrangler, in 1908 he was in Division 1 of the First Class in Part 2, in 1909 he was a Smith’s Prizeman. These distinctions followed in the line of a remarkable family tradition; for his father, four of whose sons went to Cambridge, had likewise before him been Second Wrangler and a Smith’s Prizeman, being also later a Fellow of Trinity; an uncle had been Third Wrangler; a cousin, R. W. H. T. Hudson, was Senior Wrangler, while three lady cousins, one of whom was Dr Hilda P. Hudson, author of Cremona transformations in plane and space , gained First Class in Mathematics at Cambridge and Oxford, and yet another cousin was Tutor in Mechanical Science at Trinity Hall. It would indeed have been remarkable if Herbert Turnbull had not become a mathematician. He was a lecturer at St Catherine’s College in 1909 and at the University of Liverpool in 1910. In July 1911 he married Ella Drummond, daughter of Canon H. D. Williamson, and went with her to Hongkong, to become a lecturer at Hongkong University in 1912, Master at St Stephen’s College from 1911 to 1915, and Warden of the University Hostel from 1913 to 1915.