 His father, Frederick William Turner, "a churchgoer and a teetotaller, [and] a desk-man in the Post Office Engineering Department in Liverpool," was a descendant of Sir Barnard Turner, an Alderman and sheriff in London who commanded troops attempting to curb looting in the 1780 Gordon Riots in 1780, but who later died penniless less than a month into Parliament's assembly, after his election in 1784.Turner's mother, Bertha Pixton Norbury, was an amateur portrait and landscape painter, and oversaw a home "built for a class… [her son E.S.thought] extinct, that of ‘meritorious artisans’", with a "family bookcase... weighted with the massed works of Swedenborg… and a ‘splendid’ volume called "The Bible in Pitman's Shorthand"."