“Glad to see you aboard, sir,” Turner told him. “We’ll get under way immediately. These horses are raising hell.”
Turner had been given command of the ship in November 1915, after its regular captain had fallen ill during a stop in France. He had been the only captain available to replace him. Just before Turner left Liverpool to take over command, Cunard’s chairman Alfred Booth asked him into his office. Booth began to apologize about assigning Turner to such a modest vessel, but the captain stopped him. “I told him there were no regrets on my part,” Turner said. “I would go to sea on a barge if necessary to get afloat again, as I was tired of being idle and on shore while everyone else was away at sea.”
In December 1916, Cunard reassigned Turner and put him in command of the Ivernia, another passenger ship recommissioned for war duty, though this one carried troops, not horses. Turner was not its master for long. On January 1, 1917, while in the Mediterranean off the island of Crete, the ship was torpedoed and sunk, killing 153 soldiers and crew. Turner survived. The ship had been zigzagging at the time of the attack.
Cunard made Turner a relief captain and put him back in charge of the Mauretania, but this was a thin expression of confidence, for the ship was in dry dock.
In 1918, Turner was once again compelled to relive the Lusitania disaster when a federal judge in New York opened a trial to determine whether Cunard was liable for the ship’s loss. The proceeding combined seventy lawsuits filed by American survivors and next of kin. Here too the judge ruled that the sole cause of the disaster was Schwieger’s attack and that he had fired two torpedoes.
The final humiliation for Turner came later, with publication of Winston Churchill’s book, in which Churchill persisted in blaming Turner for the disaster and, despite possessing clear knowledge to the contrary, reasserted that the ship had been hit by two torpedoes.
The old captain—“this great little man,” as his friend George Ball put it—had survived the sinking of the Lusitania with his pride intact; he’d survived the sinking of the Ivernia; but this new affront hurt him. At sixty-four, when Cunard required captains to retire, Turner left the company and traveled to Australia to try to mend things with his estranged family but found that life there did not suit him. He returned to England and retired to his home in Great Crosby, outside Liverpool, to be looked after by his longtime companion, Mabel Every. He kept bees in half a dozen hives that he had built in his yard and harvested the honey they produced. Often in conversation he would absentmindedly pick stingers from his arms and shins.
Turner was said to be a fundamentally happy man who liked a good pipe now and then. He told stories of the sea, but never the one most people wanted to hear. “Capt. Turner felt the loss of the Lusitania very much, and seldom mentioned it to anyone,” wrote Miss Every. It was this silence that told his friends how heavily the disaster weighed on him. In a reply to a sympathetic female friend in Boston, Turner wrote, “I grieve for all the poor innocent people that lost their lives and for those that are left to mourn their dear ones lost.” But that was all he was willing to say on the subject, he told her. “Please excuse me saying more, because I hate to think or speak of it.”
At the same time, he was not haunted by the disaster; nor did it leave him depressed and broken, as popular conception might have held. Wrote George Ball, “He was far too strong a character to brood over a matter that was beyond rectification and allow it to worry him to the point of melancholy—a characteristic he never at any time displayed.” Turner himself said, in an interview with the New York Times, “I am satisfied that every precaution was taken, and that nothing was left undone that might have helped to save human lives that day.”
Turner retained his good humor, according to George Ball. “Merriment and humor were always prominently observable in his company and never was he unable to keep all his associates interested and amused.” This became more difficult when, in his seventies, cancer infiltrated his colon. “The poor fellow did suffer great agony in the last year of his life,” Ball wrote.
Turner died on June 24, 1933, at the age of seventy-six. “He died as he had lived,” Ball wrote, “full of courage and spirit and without complaint. So passed to the great beyond one of the hardy and able sailors of the old hard school.”
Turner’s niece, Mercedes Desmore, attended the funeral. The captain was buried at a cemetery in Birkenhead, across the Mersey from the Liverpool docks. His name was engraved at the bottom of the family tombstone, along with a brief reference to the Lusitania.