ABSTRACT
The ultimate question is, I imagine, whether it is or is not in the interests of astronomy that there should be two observers in Oxford. The other question is whether it is desirable that the Savilian Professor should be an observer. Herbert Warren, Vice-Chancellor, 19071
6.1 Introduction It is rare that one observatory blights the work of another, and almost as rare for a professor's research to be reviled in The Times by a colleague. It is also now rare for controversies at the time of death of a major figure not to be swiftly restored to proper perspective by his obituarists. Professor Herbert H. Turner was not so fortunate. His close colleagues at the Oxford University Observatory and in the RAS saw the stress that he was under, and his death from a stroke probably saddened more than it surprised them. But Turner’s sudden death in 1930 added rapid momentum to Oxford University being propelled into legal confrontation with a close and powerful benefactor of the University – the Radcliffe Trust. At stake was £100,000 that would either be a windfall to Oxford science or be the only opportunity to build Britain’s much needed large reflector in the southern hemisphere. With that amount sub-judice, obituarists were therefore unusually circumspect with the result that no full assessment of Turner’s career or the detailed circumstances of his death has previously been made.2 The complex nature of the blight upon Turner’s actual opportunities at the University Observatory have been obscured by historians perceiving it as being affected by four elements: first, the re-equipment of the Radcliffe Observatory between 1901 and 1903; second, Turner’s 1907 remarks about an ‘anti-science’ lobby in the University; third, a memorable attack upon his activity in seismology; fourth, that although Turner was fully aware of advances in astrophysics, after 1913 he committed a significant part of the Observatory resources to seismology. The latter was not an eccentric decision. Since the 1890s leading astronomers had served on the British Association's Committee for Seismological Investigation (hereafter BACSI), and the RAS formally embraced geophysics in 1919. But in 1930 when in response to the city’s pressing need to extend the Radcliffe Infirmary, Lord Nuffield offered the huge sum of £100,000 to the Radcliffe Trustees for their observatory site, it became
the focus of intense politics in the University. Turner’s physicist colleague Frederick A. Lindemann, FRAS (later Lord Cherwell), sought to undermine Turner, who supported the Trustees’ plan to move their Observatory to South Africa. Lindemann suggested dismissively and sarcastically in The Times: ‘It is not impossible that the activities of his successor will be less subterranean and ... more celestial ... astrophysics ... can perfectly well be carried on in our English climate’.3 That attack might be dismissed as mere bile, but one of Turner’s obituarists, Professor Henry C. Plummer (his Second Assistant at the University Observatory, 1900-12), noted that seismology ‘deflected a part of Turner’s energies from the pursuit of astronomy in the last 17 years of his life’.4 From such a source, this might well be interpreted as criticism. Three different reasons have been offered. In 1937 Robert Gunther, an Oxford scientist who knew Turner but was not an intimate friend, asserted that because the University failed to provide a house in 1907, Turner devoted himself to seismology.5 In 1994 Jack Morrell stated that ‘Faced by the increasing obsolescence of his equipment, dating from 1888, Turner began seismological research in 1913’.6 In 1996 Dr Madge Adam, former assistant director at the University Observatory, wrote that in 1928 ‘Turner expressed the opinion that, the Cambridge astronomers having moved into astrophysics, it would be better for Oxford to move into geophysics!’.7 These three commentators of high repute, each wellmeaning in suggesting different motives, have thickened the fog that has obscured Turner’s career. In Science at Oxford (1997) Jack Morrell provides an admirable account of the complex dispute between the University and the Radcliffe Trustees between 1929 and 1935, and he is the first historian to discuss the effects upon the University’s astronomy. But his introduction seems to disparage Turner by deploying a comparison:
for at least his last twenty years Turner did not observe at the Observatory: he used it largely as a centre of calculation in astrography and seismology. Plaskett, however, was an observer who used a new solar telescope to pursue solar physics.8
