Percy Turnbull

Percy Turnbull (14 July 1902 – 9 December 1976) was an English composer and pianist best known for his piano character pieces and songs. Early life Percy Purvis Turnbull trained as a chorister at the Cathedral Church of St Nicholas in Newcastle and took piano lessons from Sigmund Oppenheimer. After leaving school in 1916 he began working for the Tyne Improvement Commission, but kept up his musical interests in his spare time, encouraged by one of the leading musicians of the area, William Gillies Whittaker, founder and conductor of the Newcastle Bach Choir. He won a scholarship to attend the Royal College of Music in 1923 and studied there with Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland. While there he won the Mendelssohn Scholarship and Arthur Sullivan Prize for his composition. He also began to give piano recitals and worked as an accompanist for 2LO and early BBC radio. Career After college, Turnbull took on a variety of musically-related jobs, editing piano rolls at the Aeolian Company (where his boss was Percy Scholes), playing for the Empire Theatre in Swansea and working as a music copyist for Hubert Foss at the Oxford University Press, as well as teaching piano.