‘A horrible looking recluse’
Whisky and a 60-a-day cocaine habit sent the dashing businessman to an early grave.
Turnbull’s fatal dalliance with cocaine remained unknown for half a century. But during research on a commissioned biography by Eric McCormick, scholars were stunned to find a reference to Turnbull as a “drug fiend” and a “horrible looking recluse” in another recently published work.
Times journalist GE Morrison’s devastating diary record of his 1918 meeting with Turnbull (see main story) appeared in a biography of Morrison by Cyril Pearl. In those pre-internet days, the Turnbull reference was slow to surface.
Library files show an urgent letter, dated November 21, 1967, from Turnbull Library boss Austin Graham Bagnall to McCormick: “A note in haste … a book published two months ago allegedly has a reference to Morrison’s meeting with Turnbull, with whom he was not impressed.”
Supporting evidence then emerged from an unlikely source. Gillian Ryan, a staffer at the Turnbull Library (still based in the original brick building in the late 1960s), had long regaled colleagues with her father-in-law’s tales of wild cocaine consumption by their most eminent and utterly respectable founder.
It appeared a doctor first prescribed doses of “Naso-pharyngeal” powders to the great man in 1916, at the rate of one dose a day. Over time, Turnbull increased this to 60, buying them through his firm and getting staff to deliver to Bowen St. “Each contained one-twentieth of a gram of cocaine; 60 would be 3g, which would be a satisfactory dose for an addict,” literary scholar Margaret Scott wrote in 1968. One day in 1917, Ryan’s father-in-law, Cornelius Ryan, the head of Wright Stephenson (which had bought out W&G Turnbull), confronted Turnbull at home, telling him the firm would no longer supply him with the drug. He’d thrown them out in a rage. Above all, the disclosures, however reputationally shocking, had a ring of truth. The Morrison paragraph appeared in full in McCormick’s commissioned 1974 biography. The files show one scholar commenting, “… it makes sense of so much that was vaguely mysterious … we’ve talked about the strange pallid rigidity of the man – quite inconsistent with his outstanding talent as a book collector.”