ALEXANDER TURNBULL – SOME BIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 3, Issue 2, 1 August 1970, Page 78

ALEXANDER TURNBULL - SOME BIOGRAPHICAL REFLECTIONS

Address delivered at the Alexander Turnbull Library on Thursday, 16 July 1970, by Dr E. H. McCormick

With some reluctance, I must confess, I have interrupted my shamefully protracted labours to speak informally this evening on Alexander Turnbull. I hope I am committing no grave breach of confidence in disclosing that when Mr B agnail invited me to do so he anticipated my unwillingness 'to tear myself away from Auckland', as he expressed it. But, he pointed out, I would have to visit the Library at some stage to check up personally on a number of outstanding points - and, he may well have implied, to give some relief to his staff distracted by my constant inquiries. Further, he wrote, it might be an advantage for me to stand off from my subject, disregard the detail, and look at it in what he termed 'a much smaller compass'. Taking my cue from these hints, I shall try to present an objective view of the enterprise to which I am committed, attempt to see Turnbull in summary - or at least in relatively simple - terms, and touch on my aims, methods, and assumptions.

I say assumptions, for I have no theories of my own and in the course of fairly extensive reading I have discovered none that seemed directly relevant to the particular problems that confronted me. But I have occasionally come across some statement by masters of the art - or craft - of biography that seemed to illuminate and confirm my pragmatic approach. There is, for example, the much quoted passage by Dr Johnson. The biographer, he wrote, should 'pass slightly over those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and to display the minute details of daily life'. Or again there is Virginia Woolf presenting a rather similar view in a series of concrete questions. 'When and where did the . . . man live;' she asks, 'how did he look; did he wear laced boots or elastic-sided; who were his aunts and his friends; whom did he love and how; and when he came to die did he die in his bed like a Christian, or . . .

However reassuring the dicta of one's illustrious forerunners, they are again of little practical use and perhaps raise more questions than they answer. The minute, mundane details rather than the public performance, yes, one assents. But which details from the overwhelming multiplicity to be found in the least complicated of lives? And what if it happens that no personal minutiae have survived - particulars of the hero's taste in footwear, for instance? Ultimately the biographer must deal with his problems according to circumstances and with such skills

as he can muster. In the act of composition when he is seated at his desk and must choose this fact or that, one word or a synonym, a particular document or some alternative, it all depends. It depends on the nature of his subject, on the kind and extent of his sources, on the purpose for which he is writing, and, not to be exhaustive, on his own preferences and limitations.

To turn from the impersonal biographer to myself, what, I ask, has guided me thus far in writing the life of Alexander Turnbull? What are my aims? They are so simple and self-evident that I would blush to name them if I were still capable of that youthful accomplishment: I have been seeking to create a true picture of the man. Though my purpose is simplicity itself, how different the realization. It has meant establishing - or attempting to establish - innumerable facts not only about Alexander Turnbull but about his parents, his relatives, and his friends: when they were born, when they were married, when they died, how much money they left, details of their occupations, their diversions, their perpetual travels in the First Saloon. Hence the continuous flow of questions from Green Bay, Auckland, to the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, and from there to Somerset House, London, the Commissary Office, Edinburgh, the Sheriff’s Office, Jedburgh, to name only some of the repositories called on to supply dates and documents. And hence, I must emphasize, the immensity of my debt to Mr Bagnall and his staff, especially Miss Margery Walton who with more than saintly patience has borne the brunt of my inquiries.

A framework of verified facts is an indispensable part of any biography - or such is my pedantic assumption. But the truth about a man will not, of course, be revealed by the registrars of births, deaths, and marriages. More personal sources are required if the biographer is to penetrate to the region of domestic privacies or create even a faint semblance of the living man. He needs letters, diaries, journals, together with first-hand impressions and fragments of gossip if they can be found. Some such records of the Turnbull family do exist, covering a period of about six decades. For the early years Walter Turnbull, Alexander’s father, is the chief witness with half-a-dozen shipboard narratives, including two versions of a journal he kept when he emigrated to New Zealand in 1857. In addition there is a small packet of letters sent to his elder daughter Isabella while she was at school in Britain during the seventies and an unfinished memoir of his childhood. His wife, Alexandrina or Alexa, is represented by only one document, a long journal-letter describing part of the 1857 voyage. It is unfortunate there is not more, for Alexa was a livelier observer than the rather prosy Walter and remains a shadowy figure after her arrival in Wellington. Alexander, the youngest son, contributes most to the family archives.

Nothing survives from his first sixteen years, but towards the end of 1884 he acquired a bulky notebook which he continued to use until 1890. Here he entered so-called 'Logs' of voyages to and from New Zealand, a detailed account of his journey through the country in 1886, and other items, among them two bibliographical exercises. In 1891 he began to copy his letters - or most of them - and presumably continued the practice until shortly before his death. The extant volumes run on with minor breaks for the next decade, but the later ones were lost in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained. So for the last eighteen years there remain only such of Turnbull's letters as a handful of friends and associates chose to preserve. There are, besides, miscellaneous letters addressed to him and a mass of invoices and receipts recording his transactions with booksellers from 1887 onwards. Finally come the legends and the gossip, some on record, some still circulating orallv.

Altogether, it is a pretty mixed collection, spread unevenly over the years between Walter's departure for Wellington in 1857 and Alexander's death in 1918. But there are enough personal records to disclose at irregular intervals some of the innocent privacies of bedroom, billiard-room and cabin. Moreover, they are sufficiently full to permit an approach which I find best suited to my tastes and limitations: namely one that allows the biographer to retire into the background, leaving facts and people to speak for themselves as far as possible. If this method were carried through to its conclusion, the biographer, as such, would of course retire completely, adopt the role of editor, and publish the documents in their entirety, appropriately introduced, annotated, and indexed. Some family remains are suitable for such treatment but not the Turnbull papers, as even a casual inspection will show: they are too wordy and repetitive (Alexander's letters alone would, I estimate, run to three or four thick printed volumes), and they are, for the most part, too trivial in content. Nevertheless, they provide the indispensable raw material of biography and, as I have remarked, lend themselves to an indirect approach on the part of the writer. The biographer of this persuasion, to elaborate briefly, uses the hint in place of the assertion, he favours the implication rather than the direct statement, and he prefers to withhold judgement - that duty he relegates to God and his reader. His method is exploratory, tentative, non-committal. It is closer to the one adopted by such novelists as Henry James and E. M. Forster than to that of the didactic, moralizing biographer of a more robust age. Lest I am raising expectations that cannot be fulfilled, I hasten to add that the prospective reader will find no drama of Jamesian depth and complexity in the biography of Alexander Turnbull. Nor will he often be called on to exercise his divine prerogative. The Turnbull papers are in general a record of ordinary events and mundane activities relieved

here and there by an element of the melodramatic, the scandalous, or the tragic. In fact, they are more or less what you find in similar collections left by middle-class families with the foresight or imprudence to preserve their archives. In many respects they resemble the FieldHodgkins papers, but the correspondence of a gifted artist lends that collection a peculiar distinction. There is no such character in the Turnbull circle, and Alexander, who stands at its centre, was in some ways a very ordinary person. 'ls he worth a biography?' commented a young scholar when, in answer to his inquiry, I mentioned my current occupation. Though I did not say so, he echoed the question I have pondered in recurring moods of depression. 'We are nobodies', Alexander once wrote of his family and himself. Pursuing that train of thought, I have occasionally wondered whether I wasn't engaged in compiling the life of a Mr Pooter. The correspondence of Alexander Turnbull abounds in Pooterisms, while the score of his limitations is an impressive one. Unlike Napoleon, the hero of his youth, he was not a great man - he led no conquering armies and founded no dynasty. Unlike one of his minor heroes, Nelson, or Cook, who ultimately seems to have replaced Napoleon, he never won a battle or explored an ocean. He was not a political leader or a social reformer or even a writer. On the other hand, he was never responsible for the death of another human being; he never ordered a flogging; he never (to the best of my knowledge) lived in adulterous union with someone else's wife; and his life was innocent of the intrigue and the ambition that beset the careers of most politicians and many literary figures. The list of his negative achievements and negative virtues could be extended, but they can be disregarded in the light of his one claim to distinction: Alexander Turnbull rounded the library that bears his name. (And, as it has since occurred to me, the young scholar whose slighting remark touched off these reflections had drawn mainly on that same library for his own research into New Zealand history.)

This sedentary, unspectacular achievement - the foundation of a unique library - was at the centre of Turnbull's life and must necessarily be one of his biographer's chief concerns. But not, of course, to the exclusion of all else. Indeed, it would be a false view of Turnbull that presented him as a bibliophile and nothing more. Further, important clues to his development as a collector would be missed by disregarding other interests and activities. Here I speak with the authority of my own shortcomings, for some years ago I attempted to do precisely that. The simplified account I gave in The Fascinating Folly contains some errors of fact and, as I now realize, did less than justice to the variety of Turnbull's collection and the complex influences that shaped it. The new venture will, I hope, make amends for past omissions and misdeeds. But pending its completion - in the not too distant future, if my

routine is not again disturbed - let me, as a sample of the whole, summarize the earlier sections until Turnbull established himself as a collector. In deference to Mr Bagnall's wishes I shall avoid detail, as far as I can, and I shall permit myself greater licence to assert and comment than I have done in the biography.

I begin not with Turnbull or his birthplace but in Scotland some centuries before his appearance and with his remote forebears. I adopt this approach not merely as a conventional gesture towards the unseen generations that helped to form him but also because Scottish genealogy and history were among Turnbull's continuing interests and contributed one substantial section to his library - a section I failed to mention in the earlier essay because I was unaware of its existence. Moreover, the ancestral past formed the subject of his first bookplate - Walter Crane's rendering of the clan's eponymous founder, that man of great spirit who seized a charging bull by the horns and turned it aside from Robert Bruce, thus earning rich estates from his grateful monarch. When the Turnbulls emerge from the mist of legend in the early nineteenth century their estates are gone and the head of Alexander's branch of the clan, his great-grandfather William, is a general storekeeper in the town of Galashiels. These last two facts again seem to have some bearing on the central theme. In due time Alexander adopted the family's mercantile calling and, obviously enough, if he had not been a wealthy business man there would have been no Turnbull Library - at least no library as we know it. The relevance of of Galashiels is not quite so plain, but it seems worth noting that Sir Walter Scott lived two miles away at 'Abbotsford'. Was this perhaps one source of Alexander's baronial pretensions which, transmitted through his father and mingled with other influences, finally took shape in the present library building? One can't be sure. Nor is it possible to assert that because Walter grew up near this venerated figure he developed bookish interests and a taste for self-expression. Only the interests are certain, recorded in his shipboard journals. Whatever their origins and their possible effects on his youngest son, his literary attainments found no direct outlet in his chosen career. He also took up the family calling, established himself in the town of Peebles, went into partnership with a namesake, George Turnbull, and in 1856 decided to transfer the business to New Zealand. Before leaving the next year he married Alexandrina Horsburgh who seems to have stood a step or two higher on the social scale than Walter: her father was deputy lieutenant of county Sutherland and she is described as gentlewoman in the marriage register.

This was a decisive move, for if Walter and Alexa had stayed in Scotland the Turnbull Library would, of course, never have been founded. Why did they migrate?

Walter supplies an answer in the entry of his shipboard diary for 12 August 1857, a week after he left Plymouth: 'Rested very ill last night as usual and had recourse twice to a soporific called aqua vitae but with indifferent Success: a Sound Sleep is a luxury I have not enjoyed for, I am afraid to say how long, but certainly not for Six months at least, and this I attribute in a great measure to intense mental anxiety; during that time two very important matters have been engrossing my attention, and are still: the first was getting married, and this, with all right thinking and well meaning people, is a matter not lightly gone into, nor without much thought; luckily for me, I had no distracting doubts as to the qualifications of the young lady I made choice of for a wife, but I had a very great many as to how I would support her properly when I got her and So powerful were they also, that they induced me to leave my own country, where I could not see I had any chance of making a comfortable living, to go to New Zealand, whither my good wife and I are now bound, in the good Ship the John Macvicar, to seek there for a larger share of the world's wealth, than we could possibly have found at home The preparation for the marriage therefore, the preparations for going abroad, the establishing connexions at home for the purpose of trade, the canvassing for consignments, and the anxiety of mind connected with all as to whether the step I was taking would prove a Success or a failure, have kept my mind so much on the rack night and day that sleep has all but gone from me, but I trust less anxious times are in Store for me yet.

Walter is not often so revealing and when revising the journal in later life suppressed the passage - an example the biographer, in his zeal for uncovering domestic privacies, has seen no reason to follow. Alexa also wrote of her husband's sleeplessness but not of his soporifics, and both conscientiously recorded the novel phenomena of shipboard life - the sunsets, the storms, the flying fish, the dying children, the boredom, the drunkenness, the scandal. A glimpse of her husband and fellow passengers supplied by Alexa: 'W., though troubled with sleepless nights, has become stout - his appearance Similar to a "Whiskered Pandour" or "a fierce Hussar" If you could have a glimpse just now of the Saloon of the John Macvicar you w d think us a busy community. It is not teatime yet, many are writing - others Sewing & talking - M r Gaby is mounted on the table making himself useful, by cleaning out the water filters, the Sounds of music come from M B Lambert's Cabin - promenaders are above our heads, the report of a gun is heard now & then. The Quarter Deck is like a fair, on a small scale - children Swinging on a real Swing - women washing & baking - a number of men are occupied cutting up a pig, which has just fallen a Sacrifice to our Carniverous tendencies - the old highland wifie sits apart with folded hands looking on - thinking - thinking -'

The Turnbulls, it is clear, were highly literate and both were great readers: among the writers represented in the small library they carried with them to New Zealand were Macaulay, Marryat, Dickens, Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, with Colonel Mundy, author of Our Antipodes, and Charles Hursthouse Junior, author of New Zealand. Nor must I omit to mention that both were pious, though not oppressively so: Alexa distributed tracts to the sailors but also danced in the cuddy; Walter censured his fellow travellers' laxity on the Sabbath but sometimes joined them in a game of cards - a relief, he found, from continuous reading.

After four months at sea they landed in Wellington and for more than a decade disappear from view - that is, in their private aspect. Public or semi-public activities have been uncovered, a few by myself, far more by Miss Walton - far more, indeed, than I have found it possible to use. Walter established himself with his partner in Willis Street, he bought land, he sat on committees and councils, he undertook a brief business trip to Britain, he dissolved the partnership with George Turnbull, he bought more land, he built stores, warehouses, shops - in a word he prospered. More than that, in collaboration with Alexa he initiated a new and fruitful chapter in the history of the Turnbull clan. As children appeared in rapid succession their advent was announced in the Wellington Independent or the New Zealand Spectator', a daughter and three sons, born in a house in Tinakori Road, and two sons, Robert and Alexander, born in the next home, situated in Dixon Street. 'Precisely where in Dixon Street?' some pedantic reader may ask. The question is, alas, unanswered and apparently unanswerable, for it has baffled even the ingenuity and pertinacity of Mr Bagnall himself. Hence, if Wellington should ever decide to affix a memorial plaque to some building associated with Alexander Turnbull, it will encounter serious problems: his birthplace is unknown, his office on Customhouse Quay is demolished, and two of his homes are soon to meet a similar fate. One of them, the present nurses' home of Bowen Street Hospital, known to the Turnbulls as 'Elibank', was bought by Walter in 1869 when Alexander was six months old. There the last child was born, a daughter christened Joanna but usually called Sissie, and there for a while Walter and Alexa lived with five of their children: the eldest son had died of croup in 1867 and a year later Isabella, the elder daughter, had left to go to school in England.

The Turnbulls had now been thirteen years in the colony and, as Walter remarked when opening a new shipboard journal, Alexa was 'yearning greatly to see again her native land and the few friends that were still left of the many she had parted with'. Accordingly they set offin December 1870, taking with them the three elder boys but not the baby Joanna and not Alexander, then two years of age. Only after

anxious thought, Walter was careful to explain, had they decided on this course. 'lt was', he wrote, 'a hard trial to both my Wife and myself to leave our two youngest children behind us, but we believed it was much better for the dear children themselves to leave them behind than to Subject them to the hard fare and the rough usage of a long Sea voyage, the more So as our Contemplated absence from them was to be Short, and we were leaving them in the care of a most Kind & tender hearted friend . . .' Apart from this there are few intimacies in the new journal, not much about natural phenomena, and no references at all to reading. But Walter does mention the ship's newspaper to which both he and Alexa contributed he praises the captain who dispensed free drinks on festive occasions; he sometimes complains of sleeplessness and more frequently he writes of the three boys, their health, their high spirits, their engaging pranks. The revelation during this voyage is of Walter as the fondest of parents. A more perfunctory journalizer now than he had been in 1857, he ends in mid-ocean soon after the passengers celebrated crossing the Line with potations of champagne supplied by the generous captain. That the Turnbulls reached London and travelled to Scotland can be inferred from an incident recorded not by Walter but by some anonymous journalist, with the heading, Sad Fatality. This paragraph from the Wellington Independent for 4 November was the reward of Mr Bagnall's inspired and persistent searching:

'By the arrival of the English mail yesterday, the friends of Mr Walter Turnbull, of this city, received the intelligence of his having sustained an extremely distressing family bereavement. It appears that, by a sad accident, two of his children have been drowned - both fine young boys, aged eight and nine years. The accident happened in the river Tweed, in the vicinity of Peebles, and during the visit of Mr Turnbull to the city of Edinburgh. Accompanied by a servant girl, they had gone to the river to bathe. When the girl thought they had been sufficiently long in the water, she called to them to come out. Robert, the youngest of the three, did so at once; the other two replied that they would be out immediately. While engaged dressing the youngest, she turned to look to the river where the boys were, and missed them. She at once gave an alarm, and it was found that the poor boys had gone over a bank or a ledge on the bottom of the stream into a pool ten feet deep - the Tweed being in that neighbourhood a succession of shallow streams and deep pools. The bodies were got out, and everything was done to restore animation, but without avail. . . . Yesterday, on the news being received, the vessels in harbour showed their colors half mast in recognition of the general regret it had caused.' In their extremity the Turnbulls were supported by their unquestioning faith - or so Walter's one extant reference to the tragedy seems to

imply. In another journal begun on the homeward voyage he wrote: 'We came to the house of our fathers with three as strong & healthy boys as ever lived, and in one day we were bereft of two of them; let us not boast ourselves therefore of tomorrow, but Watch and be prepared for our own Call, at whatever hour we may be Summoned.' There was 'no help for it' in Walter's phrase but to pack up, say their farewells, and return by the fastest route to the two infants left in Wellington. They travelled across America and reached home early in December, to find the children both in good health, reported Walter in bringing the journal to a close.

Outwardly in good health but perhaps not wholly unaffected by the absence of their parents. His younger son certainly gave Walter reason for mild anxiety in the months that followed their return. To Isabella, a pupil of Miss Dransfield's seminary in Camberwell, he writes in April 1872, 'Alick is a terrible Turk, and rules over every one in the house with a rod of iron, when he does not get his own way, but I think he is getting more easy to deal with than he was at first; in our absence he had been left very much to do as he liked.' And again in September: '. . . Alick . . . Seems to have far greater enjoyment in destroying his Toys than playing with them, and his face just beams with delight when he has been detected Knocking the head off a Doll or Smashing to pieces a Noah's Ark and its Contents.' But, as the correspondence unfolds, this picture is modified by glimpses of a sheltered and, it would seem, a happy childhood: Alick gardening with the nursemaid in the grounds of'Elibank'; Alick picnicking with the family at Worser Bay or on holiday in Masterton and Auckland; Alick riding on his pony or playing with Sissy on the beach at the foot of Bowen Street; and, in due course at the age of five, Alick cheerfully following Robert to school. 'Which school?' again asks the nagging, inquisitive reader. And again the biographer is forced to admit that he doesn't know, adding in mitigation of his ignorance that the problem has baffled the combined brains of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

The elusive fact, one reflects with a slight twinge of conscience, is probably not essential to an understanding of Alexander's development. He spent little more than a year at the nameless Wellington school before setting out at the age of six on his first ocean voyage - a fact that is undoubtedly of the profoundest significance. In February 1875 Walter embarked for London with his wife and family, so initiating a new phase in his career. For more than a decade he was to commute between two hemispheres, one the focus of his affections, the other the centre of his commercial interests and the source of his increasing wealth. Of his numerous voyages in this period records of two survive - affectionate, nostalgic, tedious journal-letters dutifully compiled for the benefit of Alexa and the children. They add further to the score of

oceans travelled, drinks consumed, nights passed in sleepless discomfort. And they disclose two more facts bearing on his younger son's future. In the earlier series, written in 1876, Walter describes a day ashore at the coaling port of Saint Vincent. 'When wandering up and down the Town', he writes, 'we entered a Wine Shop to get a drink, and when there I bought a few Portugese and Russian Coins for Alick's Collection, and I will try to pick up a goodly quantity before I return.' At the age of eight Alexander had already begun his career as a collector. The second series is written four years later on notepaper headed with the printed address, 'Mount Henley, Sydenham Hill, S.E.'. 'Mount Henley' was within easy walking distance of Dulwich College, the only one of Alexander's schools that can be positively identified. He entered it in April 1881 while his father was absent in New Zealand.

Dulwich is not one of the great public schools. A. E. W. Mason, Turnbull's older contemporary, described it in one of his novels as 'a brand-new day-school of excessive size, which gathered its pupils into its class-rooms at nine o'clock in the morning and dispersed them to their homes at four.' Nevertheless, it could boast cultural amenities unknown in more famous institutions. It possessed a unique collection of manuscripts, inherited from the founder, Edward Alleyn, and it owned a gallery hung with works by the masters - Poussin, Veronese, Gainsborough. Moreover, Dulwich and the surrounding district fairly bristled with literary associations: both Shakespeare and Donne were remotely linked to the village through Alleyn; Byron had lived there as a boy; Dickens had chosen it as Mr Pickwick's place of retirement; and Browning had often walked to the gallery from his native Camberwell, two miles away. But perhaps the most powerful of these unseen presences in the eighties was Ruskin, once a resident of nearby Denmark Hill but now withdrawn to Coniston in the Lake District. It might be assumed that the young Turnbull, already a collector by instinct and now exposed to these influences, would have transferred his attention from coins to manuscripts, books, and pictures, thus creating the nucleus of his future library. If only things were so simple! There is no evidence that either he or his articulate contemporaries were aware of the great Dulwich collections - at least during their schooldays. And if Turnbull shared his parents' literary interests at this time the fact has left no trace in the records. He spent only three years at the school and, except for winning a prize for mathematics in his first term, achieved no academic distinction. He took the compulsory subjects - Latin, French, mathematics - with special classes at various times in German and geography, and so far as rather meagre information shows, was a good average pupil. He shone only in outdoor activities, winning a place in the school's shooting team and, true son of his native land, playing for the first fifteen in his final year. Altogether his school career

was not a brilliant one, but the influence of Dulwich can by no means be discounted.

He left school in 1884, worked for a time in his father's London office (or more accurately, it seems, the office of Turnbull and Smith, wholesale drapers), and in the following years paid two visits to New Zealand, both recorded in the notebook mentioned earlier. On the first outward voyage, made at the end of 1884, he went alone on the lonic, entering only bare details of the passage and none at all of his stay in the colony. The second time he accompanied his father, who was going out to arrange for his retirement, and travelled by the Doric, reaching Auckland early in 1886. (I apologise for the multiplicity of detail, but it cannot be avoided.) During this trip Alexander again kept what he termed a log and in addition wrote a very full account of the journey he made through the country with a friend of his own age. In his unformed hand and limping, schoolboyish prose he records the wonders of the Hot Lakes, as he calls them - the Pink and White Terraces, the boiling mud, the geysers; he writes at length of the Maoris, their songs, their legends, their religious views, their hospitality; he describes Taupo and Wairakei and the long, dusty coach drive to Napier. After a brief interlude in Wellington, the youths cross the Strait and, armed with a tourist guide, make for the Cold Lakes, first Manapouri: 'the loveliest scene, I think I have ever seen', to quote Alexander at his least felicitous and introduce a note of topical propaganda. Here they fall in with a character known only as George, rough it for a week, search the fields for moa bones, shoot rabbits, fish for eels. Finally, the more civilized pleasures of Queens town and then, as so often in the Turnbull narratives, a blank. As other sources confirm, after this baptism - or rebaptism - of place, Alexander returned to England to resume his career in the wholesale drapery business, to continue a solitary course of selfeducation, and to build his library on the foundation of The King Country or Exploration in New Zealand by J. H. KerryNicholls.

Or such is my tentative solution to a problem that is ultimately insoluble. On the fly-leaf of his copy of that book Turnbull wrote in his mature hand, 'This was the first book of my collection. I bought it to read going out in lonic in Dec. 1885.' Now, as I was at excessive pains to emphasize, in December 1885 he travelled by the Doric, not the lonic, the vessel which had taken him to New Zealand on his first visit the year before. Since The King Country was published in 1884, he could have read it during the earlier voyage, but 1885 seems the more likely date. For it seems at least possible that a recent reading of the book on the Doric had prompted him to undertake the tour and visit some of the places mentioned by Kerry-Nicholls. And there can be no doubt that in his North Island narrative he draws on The King Country

for Maori anecdotes and local lore as if it were fresh in his mind, not something he had read in the past.

A year more or less, one again reflects, is of little moment to anyone save a pedantic biographer. Whatever the precise date of his initiation, by the late 18 80s Turnbull had become an ardent book collector. A handful of accounts survive from the last months of 1887, recording some of the young tyro's early purchases. In view of his recent travels it is not wholly surprising that voyage narratives figure prominently - Cook's in eight volumes quarto (presumably the official eighteenth century set), Parkinson's and Dampier's. In the New Zealand collection, narrowly defined, foundation works were Brees's Pictorial Illustrations (of special interest to a Wellingtonian), Cruise's Journal of a Ten Months' Residence, Domett's Ranolfand Amohia (bought soon after the poet's death), Grey's Mythology of the New Zealanders. Early in 1888 he acquired most publications of the Hakluyt Society, while a large purchase later in the year enriched and diversified the New Zealand collection. Certain items take on added significance in the light of the 1886 journey. S. Percy Smith's Eruption of Tarawera, for example, is a report on the disaster which occurred less than five months after Turnbull visited the Terraces. Then, as pictorial mementos of the tour, there are The Sounds, Lakes, and Rivers of New Zealand and the companion brochure, The Thermal Springs of the North Island. Works on the Maoris abound - White's Ancient History, Gudgeon's History and Traditions, Grey's Polynesian Mythology, Pope's Health of the Maori - and, less directly related to Turnbull's recent experiences, Buller's Birds of New Zealand, Buchanan's Grasses of New Zealand, Jervois's Defence of New Zealand, et cetera and so forth. His aims in this native field were not yet comprehensive but he was already casting his net very widely.

Voyages and works on New Zealand represent only two of Turnbull's interests in this early formative period. The invoices disclose that he bought 'Bewicks Works' and 'Fitzgerald's Works' and the 'Oeuvres de Moliere'; he bought Craig Brown's History of Selkirkshire and 'Lay's Scottish Cavaliers'; he also bought 'Piers Plowman' and 'England's Helicon' and 'Valpy's Shakespere' in fifteen volumes. And with particular zeal he seems to have hunted out and bought the works John Ruskin. 'Why Ruskin in particular?' asks the biographer and remembers that he once lived on Denmark Hill near both Dulwich College and the Turnbull'sJhome' v, on Sydenham Hill. Pushing his inquiries farther, he consults the invaluable notebook kept by Turnbull in the eighties and comes to a section entitled 'Trip to English Lakes begun 6 th August 1887'. This laboured account of solitary rambles and coach excursions, of ruined castles and inspiring sunsets, even more stilted in expression than the New Zealand journal, describes an excursion he made on the third day of his visit. In the morning he took a coach to

Coniston and after lunch at the hotel and a walk of two miles arrived at his destination - and perhaps the goal of his journey from London. 'Brantwood', he writes, was 'an irregular built cottage' that seemed to have been added to from time to time; 'at one corner', the account continues, 'a little tower has been built the sides consisting of small panes of glass where no doubt the Great Thinker often sits & scans the lake'. He passed on, returned to London, and in the following month bought The Stones of Venice, soon adding to this nucleus other works - Hortus Inclusus, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Praeterita, Examples of the Architecture of Venice. The Great Thinker also seems to have inspired the purchase at four guineas, of 'Woodcuts after Giotto frescos at Padua', for the invoice adds, 'Mr Ruskin's Notes on same' (10/-).

Before I attempt to sum all this up, let me take one further example or series of related examples of slightly later date. With the sale of Turnbull and Smith to the firm of Sargoods in 1888, Turnbull had been freed for the single-minded pursuit of his vocation and now entered on a period of great activity. One acquisition probably made about this time was the Catalogue of the Pictures in the Dulwich College Gallery. Had he belatedly discovered the resources of his old school and immediate neighbourhood? A positive reply to the question is suggested by a companion volume, the Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments . . . at Dulwich compiled by G. F. Warner of the British Museum. Turnbull's copy bears an inscription suggesting that it was sent to him with the 'Compliments' of a College official, evidently at his own request, in December 1889. The catalogue is a model of its kind, listing the extant correspondence of Edward Alleyn and other documents including the diary of Philip Henslowe, Mrs Alleyn's stepfather. Warner performed a further service by discussing the forgeries which the notorious John Payne Collier had introduced into these papers in support of his theories on the Elizabethan theatre. Was Turnbull aware of these revelations? Again the answer seems to be in the affirmative, for on 15 August 1890 he bought from John Galway of Garrick Street The Old Dramatists from Lillis to Dryden which was, he wrote on the fly-leaf, 'Said to be in hand-writing of J. Payne Collier'. It is his first recorded purchase of a manuscript. And here again I must acknowledge my debt to another over-taxed member of the Turnbull staff, Mrs Margaret Scott who drew my attention to Collier's manuscript.

Turnbull was only at the outset of his career as a bibliophile and the greater part of his life was still before him, but if I am not mistaken the pattern of his collecting was already beginning to emerge. Generally speaking, something in his life or background - some special interest or combination of interests - would impel him to gather material in a certain field, mainly books but sometimes manuscripts and pictures or occasionally medals and Wedgwood medallions. If the interest waned,

as it seems to have done with Napoleon, or if for any reason the field proved unprofitable, he simply ceased collecting. But when he was deeply engaged there was no limit to the effort and resources he was prepared to expend - in such circumstances he was a perfectionist. The most notable instance of this sort was his New Zealand collection where he proclaimed as early as 1893 that his aims were comprehensive. Here, too, one can see, as with the Dulwich catalogues, how one thing led to another. By the late nineties he had widened his range to include the Australian colonies and Pacific islands; but how thoroughly he collected in this area, vast in both the geographic and the bibliographic senses, I cannot say. To this broad thesis, I should add, certain qualifications must be made. For the origin of some special collections I can find no clue in the facts of Turnbull's life. Why, for example, did he decide to gather all he could by or about Milton? The decision, made soon after his return to New Zealand in 1892, simply came from the blue, as far as I can see. Then again outside the special collections there are in a library of the Turnbull's dimensions numerous books that cannot be worked into any biographical thesis unless of the vaguest kind. Many are there, I suppose, because they fitted into Turnbull's conception of a gentleman's library - the complete range of English classics, for instance, or those of Greece and Rome.

I am in danger of repeating my earlier error - that is of considering the bibliophile in isolation and ignoring other aspects of the man. And recollecting Virginia Woolf's catechism, I realize how imperfectly I have discharged my functions. Where and when did he live? she asks. That information at least has been supplied. Next, how did he look? To be brief, handsome in an Edwardian fashion, well-groomed, welltailored, tall. Question: Did he wear laced boots or elastic-sided? Questioner is referred to a vast correspondence on the subject, often illustrated by sketches. Question: Who were his aunts and friends? Answer: Of aunts he had only one by marriage and of her nothing is known. Friends few, of acquaintances and correspondents a multitude. Then the absorbing modern question: Whom did he love and how? His father, the biographer replies evasively, his brother and his sister, but his mother less certainly. For the rest nothing but hints, gossip, legend - perhaps the answer may be found in his library. Finally, did he die in his bed like a Christian, or . . . ? A complex question, summoning up spectres from the past and the rumoured frailties of his later years - too complex for summary discussion. And since this is after all a commemorative occasion, I must assert my view that despite human frailties - of which his biographer has more than a share - there was in Alexander Turnbull a kind of greatness. The evidence may be found in his library.