JOHN NEVILLE
TURNER (1936-2018)
Jazz pianist, linguist, sports historian, cricket and
football lover, Supreme Court barrister, professor of law, expert on family law
and advocate for the legal rights of children.
Sometimes –
though, sadly, all too infrequently - one meets someone who, regardless of the
brevity of that meeting, leaves an everlasting and very special impression. One
such person in my life was John Neville Turner, unquestionably one of the finest characters I am ever likely to encounter. J. Neville passed away on
Thursday morning, close to his 82nd birthday, having suffered from vascular
dementia for the past 3½ years. He was often referred to by friends as a “Modern Renaissance
Man”, a salute to his wide range of interests and expertise, from
jazz pianist to sports historian, prolific author, professor of law at Monash University for almost 30 years, expert on family
law and an advocate for the
legal rights of children. Neville was a solicitor in the Supreme Court of Judicature in England before coming to Australia in the late 1960s. Here he became a barrister in the Supreme Court of Victoria, a lecturer in law at the University of Adelaide for five years, and taught law at universities in Michigan and Nebraska. He spoke five languages, as well as being versed
in classical Latin and Greek.
Unsurprisingly, given he was born in Bury in Lancashire, and
gained his law degree with honours at Manchester University, his greatest sporting passions
were cricket and football. The former is a game of which he was a connoisseur
in the absolute literal sense of the word. Anyone who not just tolerates but
continues to embrace cricket for as long - and with such intense and unabiding
affection - as Neville did, surely needs to be a true connoisseur. Neville was moreover
a purist and a traditionalist who found “noise pollution” at cricket matches to
be “heinous”. Cricket, Neville felt, should be “a refuge from the vulgarity of
the traffic and commerce of early 21st Century freneticism.” Many
modern, revamped cricket stadiums were “anti-historical, superfluous,
grandiose, grandiloquent, [a] folly which only a modern-day Nero would build”
(how he would have hated the loss of the WACA Ground in Perth). In 1993, Neville
described one-day cricket, the version shaped to appeal largely to the hoi
polloi, the great unwashed, as “a facile perversion of a great
art-form” which attracted hooligans, drunks and misfits. “On the other hand,
the first-class, extended match offers an authority and beauty that no other
game in the world can match.” These were comments which would quickly separate
the men from the boys when it comes to genuine cricket love. Neville, indeed,
could view cricket as an extension of both art and war. He once presented a paper describing players from
the great rivalry between Lancashire and Yorkshire in terms of characters from
Shakespeare's War of the Roses plays. Neville attended cricket Tests at 44 grounds around the world and all football
World Cups from 1986 to 2010.
In July
1989, Neville presented a paper to an Australian Society of Sports Historians
conference asking “Is Sport an Art Form?”, a proposition which was dismissed by
one pretentious columnist as tantamount to suggesting “opera for the
proletariat”. But the thought was more warmly received by Tony Stephens in The Sydney Morning Herald, who quoted Neville as saying, “Sport is one of the graces
of life, a source of infinite joy and productive of the finest cultural
values”. Neville had accepted “Tolstoy’s concept of art as the sincere sharing
of an emotion that moves the person who expresses it”, and he believed the
Australia Council’s mandate should be extended to cover sport as well as music,
literature and ballet.
Thereafter Neville’s name was not seen so much on the news
pages; in hindsight it seems as if he’d felt stung by the chilly reception and
patently pseudo intellectualism of the conceited columnist (“Paspalum Place”).
On the other hand, Neville’s ongoing dislike of modern technology – no
computers, no email and no Word Doc for him – quite possibly curtailed his
wider influence as the study of sport and sports history tightened into an
exclusive academic enclave, a zealously protected school for like minds, their work reading increasingly like what "Paspalum Place" described as onanism. Neville
preferred books and primary sources to the insidious, unreliable Internet. He
wrote his notes and letters in longhand. As for revolutionary ideas, like sport
as art, they came to be frowned upon – after all, it attracted negative
publicity.
Ironically,
Neville’s passing was announced to a broader audience on the very stage Neville
shunned, social media. It came on Facebook, from his great friend and fellow
sports historian Bernard Whimpress. This elicited an outpouring of sorrow from
the select group of Bernard’s online friends, one of whom referred as Neville
as “Nevillepaedia”.
Others recalled a gentleman and a true character, a special and an exceptional
man, a great “encourager” and contributor, and an entertaining and extremely
knowledgeable companion. For all that, Neville was a man people felt they knew,
yet knew little about.
Neville’s true fame did not extend much beyond that small circle
of those close friends who, through getting to know Neville well, had gained
some inkling of his life of achievements. The Neville I knew was quiet,
unassuming, humble and modest, though also exceedingly erudite. He was a voice of reason and he was generous and kind, including with his praise (you knew
you’d earned it), a impish soul with an irresistible sense of fun. I’m reliably told he was
also a marvellous teacher.
It was only through a chance chat in a bar in 2007 that I learned Neville was such an adept at a keyboard. It was talking with a lifewire
Ukrainian, Dr Jorge Dorfman Knijnik, a lecturer in physical education and sport
at University of São Paulo in Brazil, when Jorge offered to sing one of my favourite tunes, The Girl from Ipanema, at a dinner I was
MC-ing in the Great Hall at the Australian National University, and Neville was
suggested as an accompanist. I was only too happy to agree to this arrangement, and
stopped the pre-recorded soundtrack between Frank Sinatra’s There Used To Be a Ballpark Right Around
Here and Roy Harper’s When An Old
Cricketer Leaves the Crease for the Jorge-Neville recital. To say Neville astonished the large gathering with his piano playing would be a gross
understatement. We were simply flabbergasted that, in the enforced absence of
Sinatra and Harper, such a rich talent was in our midst.
Neville went on to play Vangelis’s memorable instrumental Chariots of Fire, the theme music for
the movie of the same name, ending his performance with a lavish back-fingered
sweep of the wires and proceeding to explain to a room full of sports
historians and their partners that the title had nothing whatsoever to do with
sport, nor indeed the 1924 Paris Olympic Games. We philistines, we innocently
profane many, learned that the words “Chariots of Fire” came from the poem “And Did Those Feet in Ancient
Time" by William Blake, probably written in 1804, a preface to his epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books, one of a
collection of writings known as the Prophetic Books. And that Blake’s words
became the hymn Jerusalem, with music
written by Sir Hubert Parry in 1916. The poem was inspired by the apocryphal
story that a young Jesus, accompanied by Joseph of Arimathea, a tin merchant,
travelled to what is now England and visited Glastonbury. The theme is linked
to the Book of Revelation, describing a Second Coming, wherein Jesus
establishes a New Jerusalem. Blake implies that a visit by Jesus would briefly
create heaven in England, in contrast to the "Dark Satanic Mills" of
the Industrial Revolution.
In a way it sounds a bit like postmodernist theory, and I doubt that did much for
Neville. Either way, I gather that, because of our night on the town with Bernard
Whimpress, which included a bossa
nova
around a large pile of coats (the
first dance in 30 years of sports history conferences), the pair missed the
following morning’s presentation on postmodernist theory in the study of sport history. Bernard, by the way,
gained some notoriety by adding a typewriter museum to a nunnery as being among
places in which he’d slept.
Happily, the one session I’m forever grateful I attended during that 2007 sports history conference was the last one,
the one in which J. Neville Turner presented his talk titled “The Half Eaten
Pear”. My recollection is that this wasn’t even a scheduled presentation, and
that some unfortunate historians, eager to catch flights out of Canberra,
missed it. But “The Half Eaten Pear” has, in the past 11 years, developed such
a reputation it has almost attained legendary status, at least among sports
historians. There are those of us who were there and heard it and those who so
earnestly wished they had been there that they have come to believe they were.
The talk was a satirical look at the maze of rules of golf as laid down by the
Royal and Ancient of St Andrews, so comprehensive and involved that they leave
one wondering, “What possible eventuality could they have overlooked?” Well, Neville
provided the answers to that question with a paper that readily recalled Evelyn
Waugh in his Scoop mood, such was its
plausible ridiculousness. In my humble opinion, “The Half Eaten Pear” ranks,
among sports talks, right up there with Humphrey Tilling’s famous “Six Ages of
Cricket”, given to the Forty Club in London in 1963 (indeed, Neville was probably
suitably inspired by the Tilling talk). Neville’s costume manager on the day
was Bernard Whimpress, who, since Neville was not golfer himself (though an
able tennis player), supplied a broken half-wedge and plus fours.
Back then, Jorge Dorfman Knijnik reminded me of a quote from the
Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamuurti,
“So when you are listening to somebody completely, attentively, then you
are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being
conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.” Bernard Whimpress has come to
describe Neville’s talk as a “riot”. Yet, as much as everyone there was reduced
to tears of laughter, nobody dared miss a single word. And during Neville’s
talk, one grasped fully the feeling, and came to gain a precious insight into
the character that was John Neville Turner.
Amy Bonner (left as a young woman, and right) was born to a Romanian father and Austrian mother in New York City on February 7, 1891, and grew up in Brooklyn and later lived in Manhattan. A journalist, she reviewed books of verse for the World-Telegram and The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and also worked on the staff of The New York Evening Post. She wrote poetry which appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, starting in 1921. From 1937-47 she served as Poetry’s eastern business representative. She died on December 26, 1955, aged 64
I guess Kelley felt he couldn't just take a whole series of shots of authors at their typewriters, so with the novelist Nancy Wilson Ross (1901-86, right) he caught the Olympia, Washington native feeding a chipmunk a peanut butter sandwich from her studio porch. Ross was working on I, My Ancestor at the time. Ross was also an authority on Eastern religions. Other writers at The MacDowell Colony at the time Kelley visited were Willa Cather, Thornton Wilder, Elinor Wylie, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Stephen Vincent Benét (below).
