Sir Henry Turner was a photographer, journalist, and general secretary of the Empire Press Union (later Commonwealth Press Union).
Henry Ernest Turner was born in Downshire Hill, Hampstead, youngest of the four children of Jack and Matilda Turner. In 1912 he joined the Newspaper Society as an assistant to its secretary.
In 1914 he enlisted in the 6th London Regiment and spent the much of the First World War on the western front, in the trenches, as a Lewis gunner. He attended an officers’ school in Dover before being posted to the Balkans, and finished the war working in intelligence in what was then Constantinople (now Istanbul).
Following demobilisation in 1919 Henry Turner joined the Empire Press Union as its General Secretary. The Empire Press Union was an association of 750 news groups or agencies, from 49 countries across the British Empire. It changed its name to the Commonwealth Press Union in 1950. It represented the interests of its member news organisations and campaigned for freedom of the press across the Commonwealth. Turner was appointed a Commander of the British Empire in 1935 and knighted in 1951, both for services to the press.
On 26 February 1927, Henry married Eileen Arbuthnot Robertson, better known as the novelist, critic and broadcaster E Arnot Robertson, in Kensington registry office. They had one adopted son, Gordon, born 13 February 1939.
In 1935/6 Henry and Eileen travelled from Lechdale in the upper reaches of the Thames to Southend in their motor launch, Tritoma. Every Friday they would journey to where they had moored the boat the previous Sunday evening and travel the next stretch, chronicling scenes on the river with his camera and her pen. The resulting images, published in Thames Portrait (1937), give a charming snapshot of life along the Thames in the late 1930s. The originals, including many not included in the published book, are held in the Museum of London collection.
The Turners collaborated on several short films and another book, The Spanish Town Papers, published 1959. Henry Turner’s life was tragically ended in 1961 when he drowned at Wapping Pier while trying to free a rope entangled in the propeller of his boat Fleurie. His body was washed up on the foreshore below the Prospect of Whitby pub.