Studying Singapore's Past: C.M. Turnbull and the History of Modern Singapore

Chapter 1: Constance Mary Turnbull 1927-2008: An Appreciation

Constance Mary Turnbull 1927–2008 1 1 ~ Constance Mary Turnbull 1927–2008: An Appreciation1 P.J. Thum Early Life CONSTANCE MARY TURNBULL WAS BORN IN WEST LYHAM, Wooler in Northumberland on 9 February 1927, where her family had farmed the land for several generations. It was a difficult time for her family and for the country as a whole. Britain was still struggling to recover from the effects of the First World War. Having sold many foreign assets to pay for the war effort, and lost many others through enemy action, Britain had suffered a severe loss of foreign exchange earnings. This left the British economy more dependent upon exports, and more vulnerable to any downturn in world markets. But the war had permanently eroded Britain’s trading position in world markets though disruptions to trade and losses of shipping. Overseas customers for British produce had been lost, especially for traditional exports such as textiles, steel, and coal. Churchill’s restoration of the gold standard in 1926 had also made British exports more expensive. For a farming family, dependent on the vagaries of the market and the land, it was a struggle to survive. With the development of exciting new opportunities in the motor and the electrical goods industries, many people left the land and headed to the cities to seek their fortune. Among them was Turnbull’s father, 1 2 P.J. Thum David Turnbull, who sold his farm and moved the family to Coventry, then the centre of the motor industry, in 1929. An early memory of Turnbull’s demonstrated how common this occurrence was. The teacher in her Church of England primary school asked the class how many of them had been born in Coventry. Out of the 50 students in the class, only five raised their hands. The family struggled on, living a simple existence amidst the Great Depression. When she was four, her mother, Edna Turnbull Williamson, got a job as a supply teacher. With Turnbull not yet due to start school, she was shipped off to the Isle of Man, where her mother’s family were from, to live with her grandparents. She would later remember those “six idyllic months in the Isle of Man” with great pleasure.2 At the outbreak of war in September 1939, all the schoolchildren were evacuated eight miles to the south, to the Warwickshire town of Leamington Spa. While it later would be home to the Free Czechoslovak Army, at the time it was considered sufficiently far from the major industrial and military centres to be safe. However, nothing happened over the next eight months. It was the time of the Phoney War, as British and French troops sat entrenched on the Maginot Line, and the Germans on the Siegfried Line. They sat and stared at each other all winter. As time dragged on, people started drifting back home, and it was finally decided to send all the children back to school. In the summer of 1940, however, bombing raids on Coventry began. The city not only contained major metal working industries, including cars, bicycles, and aeroplane engines, but since 1900 had developed a large munitions industry. Coventry was, therefore, in terms of what little international legal precedent that existed governing the subject, a legitimate target for aerial bombardment.3 Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands which had been industrialised during the Industrial Revolution, industrial development had occurred before zoning regulations had come into existence. Many of the small and medium-sized factories were woven into the same streets as the workers’ houses and the shops of the city centre. However, there also existed large interwar suburbs of private and council housing, which were relatively isolated from industrial buildings as a result of being built after the zoning regulations had been made law. It was in one of these that the Turnbull family resided — on Harefield Road — and as a result, they managed to escape unscathed from the massive “Coventry Blitz” of 14 November 1940. It destroyed over 4,000 homes and over three-quarters of the City’s factories. Turnbull’s house had Constance Mary Turnbull 1927–2008 3 its windows blown out and its roof knocked off, and a few houses around hers had suffered direct hits, but none of her neighbours were killed. All the schools that survived the bombings were closed, and Turnbull was...