Saxon Arnoll Sydney-Turner[note 1] (28 October 1880 – 4 November 1962) was a member of theBloomsbury Group who worked as a British civil servant throughout his life.
Sydney-Turner was the son of a Gloucester surgeon who moved toBrighton in 1893. He attendedWestminster School and then readclassics atTrinity College, Cambridge where he was a contemporary ofLeonard Woolf, Thoby Stephen andClive 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 declaimedSwinburne and SirThomas 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 theCambridge Apostles where he spoke very little at meetings. He had wide intellectual and aesthetic interests: poetry, painting, puzzles and music (particularlyWagnerian opera).[1]
Having obtained adouble 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 toTreasury following this career throughout his life.[1] He was a clerk in the Estate Duty Office from 1904-1912 and was in the Treasury from 1913.[2]
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.[1] In 1917 he joined in a scheme to purchase The Mill House,Tidmarsh, the place lived in byLytton Strachey,Dora Carrington andRalph Partridge and which he occasionally visited.[3]
Sydney-Turner never married and, unlike many associated with Bloomsbury, it does not seem he was sexually active. He fell in love with the artistBarbara Hiles, a friend ofDora Carrington, but, when she decided to marry Nick Bagenal,[note 2] Sydney-Turner refused her offer to stay as her lover.[1] 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 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".[1][4]
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.[1]
HisTimes 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.[5]
His only published writings are his contributions toEuphrosyne: a collection of verse (1905).[6]
