For all the respect afforded Turner by Cunard and by the officers and crew who served under him, his own record was far from impeccable. In July 1905, four months after he took command of the Ivernia, the ship collided with another, the Carlingford Lough. An investigation by Cunard found Turner to be at fault, for going too fast in fog. The company’s directors resolved, according to board minutes, that he was “to be severely reprimanded.” Three years later, a ship under his command, the Caronia, “touched ground” in the Ambrose Channel in New York and earned him another reprimand: “The Caronia should not have left the dock at such a state of tide.”
The winter of 1914–15 was particularly hard on Turner. One of his ships, the newly launched Transylvania, caught a gust of wind while undocking in Liverpool and bumped against a White Star liner, causing minor damage. In a second incident that winter, the ship collided with another large liner, the Teutonic, and in a third got bumped by a tugboat.
But these things happened to all captains. Cunard’s confidence in Turner was made clear by the fact that the company consistently put him in charge of its newest and biggest liners and made him master of the Lusitania for three different cycles.
The war had made the matter of passenger safety all the more pressing. For Turner’s immediate predecessor, Capt. Daniel Dow, it had become too great a burden. On a March voyage to Liverpool, Dow had guided the Lusitania through waters in which two freighters had just been sunk. Afterward he told his superiors at Cunard that he could no longer accept the responsibility of commanding a passenger ship under such conditions, especially if the ship carried munitions intended for Britain’s military. The practice of transporting such cargo had become common and made any ship that carried it a legitimate target for attack. Cowardice had nothing to do with Dow’s decision. What troubled him was not the danger to himself but rather having to worry about the lives of two thousand civilian passengers and crew. His nerves could not take it. Cunard decided he was “tired and really ill” and relieved him of command.