Out of Africa: childhood shaped lawyer’s life
His Africa years shaped his whole being. They made him strong both physically and mentally. In times of huge stress during the war, he called on these reserves of strength.
Hugh Douglas Turnbull, lawyer, war pilot: b Canada, July 16, 1914; m Vie Connaughton; 2d, 2s; d Wellington, September 17, 2017, aged 103.
Outrunning lions on the Kenyan highlands and living a life of subsistence in 1920s Africa shaped Hugh Turnbull into a man of resilience and resourcefulness.
His long life spanning 103 years was filled with adventure, from a childhood in the wilds of Kenya to flying in the RAF in World War II and later working as a barrister. Life was about experience and hard graft.
He worked fulltime into his 90th year at the Crown Law Office and travelled the world till he was well into his 90s. He was still running marathons as an octogenarian and exercised every day till shortly before his death.
Turnbull was born in Canada in 1914, the youngest of four children. His parents were both from Nelson but had eloped to Rio de Janeiro and later moved to Canada, where his father got a job as a civil engineer working on the Canadian railway.
When World War I broke out his father headed to Europe with the Canadian forces, leaving the family to manage on a small army handout.
He was wounded at Ypres, then sent to Africa to join the British forces. After the war the British Government had a scheme where retired soldiers were offered farms in the Kenyan highlands so he stayed on and called for his family to join him in 1920.
It was a tough but adventurous life for the young Hugh. Food and money to buy it were scarce and medical help nonexistent. He contracted malaria, which was rife, and the disease would recur throughout his life.
The family grew wheat and maize, caught rabbits, birds and whatever else they could to eat. Turnbull recalls his mother saying she wished they could eat the grass.
They slept in a house made of mud bricks with no glass windows or electricity and cooking was done over a fire.
It was treacherous at night with wild animals roaming around, some of them making their way into the house from time to time.
Turnbull, who spoke Swahili fluently, would later recount stories to his own children about life in Africa – of running away from lions, discovering snakes in the bed, watching a leopard snatch his dog off the veranda, and firing stones out of slingshots to frighten the baboons away from their maize crops.
Turnbull and his siblings were sent to a boarding school but he loathed it and ran away three times before his parents decided it wasn’t worth sending him back. He told them it was like ‘‘caging up a wild animal’’. He spent the next eight years working barefoot on the farm, developing an instinct for survival that would help him in difficult times ahead.
He would later say that his Africa years shaped his whole being. They made him strong both physically and mentally. In times of huge stress during his own war years, he called on these reserves of strength, which he believed got him through those terrible times.
While strong and resourceful, Turnbull was, at 14, illiterate.
In 1928, his maternal grandparents in Wellington suggested he come to stay with them and be educated before it was too late. Travelling with his older brother Andrew, aged 18, they made their way from Mombasa to Cape Town and then on to New Zealand, arriving at the beginning of 1929.
His mother and two sisters arrived in Wellington in 1933 but his father, who suffered from postwar stress, never returned to New Zealand.
When Turnbull, who was 6’1 tall at the age of 14, turned up at Wellesley College in a suit and stetson, the students thought he was a new master.
Crushingly, as he was unable to read or write, he was put into primer one. He was so humiliated that he worked tirelessly until he caught up and eventually surpassed the other children, later becoming dux of the school.
He excelled in sport and was even nominated for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic team to compete in the 440. But as he could afford neither the cost nor the time off school, he did not go.
After graduating with a law degree from Victoria University in 1938 he embarked on a holiday to Europe. Inauspiciously, he left in June 1939 with £100 in his pocket, in utter ignorance of what was to come. What was supposed to be a three-month holiday turned into what he called ‘‘the longest holiday’’, returning in 1946.
He enlisted with the British Army when he found himself in London during the call-up, completing the Royal Artillery Officers course by the end of 1940. His regiment was sent to the Essex Coast to protect the Thames Estuary during the Battle of Britain, where he was promoted to Captain and put in charge of a mobile artillery battery. From there they moved to Norfolk, in eastern England, to take over a Canadian unit and he was promoted to Major.
In 1943 he joined the Royal Air Force, flying solo after only four hours of instruction.
He went on to fly more than 600 missions as a spotter pilot and wondered how he ever survived. He recounted later: ‘‘We were shot at on a daily basis and you never knew how bad it was until you landed and saw how many holes there were in the plane. We were in the thick of it for a long time and it was purely a matter of luck whether you survived or not.’’
In 1943 he met Vie Connaughton at a soldiers’ dance. They married six weeks later, just before he was deployed to Italy, where he remained for the next year.
The letters they wrote to one another daily remained precious possessions throughout his life. They were married for 69 years; Vie died in 2012.
After the war Turnbull worked on legal cases involving allied military personnel and German citizens. He was involved in some early work for the Nuremberg Trials, he flew doctors into Belsen, and was part of the liberation of Holland, dropping food parcels to the starving Dutch.
Turnbull, his wife and their four children returned to New Zealand in 1946. While working part-time in legal firms he saw the need for a revision of New Zealand’s legislation. He approached the Crown Law Office for a job and was appointed Assistant Compiler of Statutes in 1950. He was told he had two years in which to complete the work. Fifty-five years later, at the age of 89, he finally retired.
As well as working and studying for a Masters in Commerce, he lectured in accountancy and economics at Wellington Polytechnic, tutored at Victoria University, and marked papers for the International Correspondence School. An intrepid traveller, he often studied the language of the next country on the itinerary. In all he mastered 10 languages.
Turnbull remained fit and active well into his 90s. He walked the Milford Track for the third time at the age of 78 and would walk from Eastbourne to Pencarrow Lighthouse and back every weekend. He learned yoga in his 60s and ran marathons into his mid-eighties.
Reflecting on his work in law when he received an ONZM for services to the compiling of legislation, he remarked: ‘‘What a long way I have come from a little bare foot boy in Africa.’’
Sources: Ruth Proctor, The Dominion Post.