Saxon Sydney-Turner

alt=Snapshot by Ray Strachey of Saxon Sydney-Turner, reclining at the beachSaxon Arnoll Sydney-Turner (28 October 1880 – 4 November 1962) was a member of the Bloomsbury Group who worked as a British civil servant throughout his life.

Early life

Sydney-Turner was the son of a Gloucester surgeon who moved to Brighton in 1893. He attended Westminster School and then read classics at Trinity College, Cambridge where he was a contemporary of Leonard Woolf, Thoby Stephen and Clive Bell. He was very well-read and fiercely intellectual. Lytton Strachey wrote of him: When I first knew him he was a wild and unrestrained freshman who wrote poems, never went to bed, and declaimed Swinburne and Sir Thomas Browne till four o’clock in the morning in the Great Court at Trinity. He is now... quite pale and inanimate, hardly more than an incompletely galvanized dead body. Leonard Woolf wrote of the older Sydney-Turner, "He looks sometimes like a little schoolboy whom life has bullied into unconsciousness."

Although he did not socialise easily, he was elected a member of the Cambridge Apostles where he spoke very little at meetings. He had wide intellectual and aesthetic interests: poetry, painting, puzzles and music (particularly Wagnerian opera).

Work Having obtained a double first, he did well enough in the Civil Service examinations to become a civil servant in the Inland Revenue from which he was later promoted to Treasury following this career throughout his life.

Bloomsbury Group Through his university friendships, Sydney-Turner became a member of the Bloomsbury Group where his intellectual erudition could be intimidating. However, he sometimes would spend many hours at their discussion meetings without saying anything at all.

Personal life Sydney-Turner never married and, unlike many associated with Bloomsbury, it does not seem he was sexually active. He fell in love with the artist Barbara Hiles, a friend of Dora Carrington, but, when she decided to marry Nick Bagenal, Sydney-Turner refused her offer to stay as her lover.

Later years Sydney-Turner gambled away nearly all his money on horse racing. By the end of his life, he had become reduced to living in a meagre flat.

His only published writings are his contributions to Euphrosyne: a collection of verse (1905).

Notes and references