Saxon Arnoll Sydney-TurnerMiddle name sometimes mistakenly spelled Arnold, but see A Cambridge Alumni Database: https://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/search-2018.pl?sur=sydney-turner&suro=w&fir=saxon&firo=c&cit=&cito=c&c=all&z=all&tex=&sye=1898&eye=1903&col=all&maxcount=50 (28 October 1880 – 4 November 1962) was a member of the

Bloomsbury Group The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, a ...

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 Brighton ( ) is a seaside resort in the city status in the United Kingdom, city of Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, England, south of London. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze Age Britain, Bronze Age, R ...

in 1893. He attended

Westminster School Westminster School is a Public school (United Kingdom), public school in Westminster, London, England, in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. It descends from a charity school founded by Westminster Benedictines before the Norman Conquest, as do ...

and then read

classics Classics, also classical studies or Ancient Greek and Roman studies, is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, ''classics'' traditionally refers to the study of Ancient Greek literature, Ancient Greek and Roman literature and ...

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

where he was a contemporary of

Leonard Woolf Leonard Sidney Woolf (; – ) was a British List of political theorists, political theorist, author, publisher, and civil servant. He was married to author Virginia Woolf. As a member of the Labour Party (UK), Labour Party and the Fabian Socie ...

, Thoby Stephen and

Clive Bell Arthur Clive Heward Bell (16 September 1881 – 17 September 1964) was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. He developed the art theory known as significant form. Biography Early life and education Bell ...

. He was very well-read and fiercely intellectual.

Lytton Strachey Giles Lytton Strachey (; 1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of ''Eminent Victorians'', he established a new form of biography in which psychology, psychologic ...

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 Algernon Charles Swinburne (5 April 1837 – 10 April 1909) was an English poet, playwright, novelist and critic. He wrote many plays – all tragedies – and collections of poetry such as '' Poems and Ballads'', and contributed to the Eleve ...
and Sir
Thomas Browne Sir Thomas Browne ( "brown"; 19 October 160519 October 1682) was an English polymath and author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including science and medicine, religion and the esoteric. His writings display a d ...
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 The Cambridge Apostles (also known as the Conversazione Society) is an intellectual society at the University of Cambridge founded in 1820 by George Tomlinson, a Cambridge student who became the first Bishop of Gibraltar. History Student ...

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 The British undergraduate degree classification system is a Grading in education, grading structure used for undergraduate degrees or bachelor's degrees and Master's degree#Integrated Masters Degree, integrated master's degrees in the United Kingd ...

, 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 A treasury is either *A government department related to finance and taxation, a finance ministry; in a business context, corporate treasury. *A place or location where treasure, such as currency or precious items are kept. These can be ...

following this career throughout his life. He was a clerk in the Estate Duty Office from 1904-1912 and was in the Treasury from 1913.

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. In 1917 he joined in a scheme to purchase The Mill House, Tidmarsh, the place lived in by

Dora Carrington Dora de Houghton Carrington (29 March 1893 – 11 March 1932), known generally as Carrington, was an English painter and decorative artist, remembered in part for her association with members of the Bloomsbury Group, especially the writer Lytt ...

and

Ralph Partridge Reginald Sherring Partridge, (1894 – 30 November 1960), generally known as Ralph Partridge, was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He worked for Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, married Dora Carrington and then Frances Marshall, and was the ...

and which he occasionally visited.

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

, but, when she decided to marry Nick Bagenal,Barbara Hiles, 1891–1984; Nicholas Bagenal, 1891–1974. Sydney-Turner refused her offer to stay as her lover. He remained a close friend of Hiles and her children. He was a kind and unambitious person whose friend Leonard Woolf described him as "an eccentric in the best English tradition who wrote elegant verse and music and possessed an extraordinary supple, and enigmatic mind". However,

Gerald Brenan Edward FitzGerald "Gerald" Brenan, CBE, Military Cross, MC (7 April 1894 – 19 January 1987) was a British writer and hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain. Brenan is probably best known for ''The Spanish Labyrinth'', a historical wo ...

called him "one of the greatest bores I have ever known" and Lytton Strachey, although a friend at Cambridge, later said of him "there was probably no one less entertaining in the world".

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 ''Times'' obituary by L. W. (Leonard Woolf) said he was a "remarkable man and strange character" and an English eccentric. He lived for over thirty years in a furnished apartment in Great Ormond Street with a large sitting room and a very small bedroom where he kept a stack of "good pictures" by Duncan Grant and other artists. The sitting room fireplace had the same picture on each side, an immense picture of a farmyard scene. At Trinity, he got a university scholarship as he was the only candidate who translated correctly a Greek passage with a riddle in it. In later life, he was a champion solver of crossword puzzles and wrote elegant verse and music but published nothing. His only published writings are his contributions to ''Euphrosyne: a collection of verse'' (1905).page 417 of Rosenbaum, Stanford Patrick.
The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs and Commentary
'. University of Toronto Press; 1995. . Also published by Croom Helm, London; 1995

Notes and references

;Notes ;References ;Bibliography *

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sydney-Turner, Saxon Bloomsbury Group English civil servants Civil servants in HM Treasury 1880 births 1962 deaths Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge 20th-century British civil servants