A VICTORIAN BEATLES FAN

We all know the song…

When I get older losing my hair
Many years from now
Will you still be sending me a Valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine

Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm sixty-four?

But how about when I get to 108? I love reading contemporary journalism about the Beatles, so trawling through the newspaper archives recently, this one caught my eye in the Daily Mail, from 16 June 1964.

The headline itself is unusual but is made all the more so when you think that this is 1964 and John Turner was born in 1856. The Beatles were a by-word for the modern age. How was it possible someone born the year the Crimean War ended was still alive, let alone could appreciate Beatlemania? 

Even in 1964, 1856 was an absurdly long time ago, well before the advent of recorded sound or even the general use of electricity, and certainly long before anything resembling popular youth culture as we knew it in the twentieth century. Yet John Turner had lived for 108 years. 

He professed a liking for the radio though – one of the countless inventions he had witnessed in his impressively long life. The reporter who interviewed Mr Turner for his 108th birthday celebration probably asked him with a wry smile what he thought of the pop music he heard on the Light Programme, expecting an answer befitting someone of his advanced years. 

Who knows what the reply was exactly, but one assumes Mr Turner replied that he had heard something called the Beatles and he liked them. It’s impossible to know which song in particular caught his ear, but in June 1964 the Fab Four were on to their sixth hit with Can’t Buy Me Love and a reissue of the Hamburg-era Ain’t She Sweet, recorded with Tony Sheridan, a song first published in 1927. The previous Christmas they had made number 1 with I Want to Hold Your Hand. Perhaps it was one of these that had got John Turner’s elderly feet tapping?

As Mr Turner was preparing to celebrate his birthday, Record Mirror was marking ‘ten years of pop music’ – a brief moment in the life of a 108-year-old, but a significant milestone in the pop culture of the day, when trends came and went on a sixpence. Top of the paper’s poll of the decade were Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, Cilla Black (who was riding at number 1 with You’re My World) and of course the Beatles. Joe Loss topped the ‘Large band or orchestra’ section. Maybe John Turner liked Joe Loss too – a man well out of time with the Swinging Sixties but who was born when Mr Turner was reaching middle age and who became one of the most successful acts of the big band era in the 1940s – as Mr Turner was settling into retirement. 

So who was this unlikely supercentenarian Beatles fan? I did some research.

John Mosley Turner was born in Mitcham, Surrey on 15 June 1856, over a century before the teenagers John Lennon and Paul McCartney met at Woolton Fete in Liverpool. The Turner family lived on London Road, Mitcham and John followed his father into the same occupation, working as a calico and silk cutter, until failing eyesight forced him into retirement in the 1930s. He married Jessie Meeson in 1888 and they had three children.  

After the war, Mr Turner was cared for by his daughter Violet. She must have done a good job as, remarkably, he made the papers again in June 1967. As the Summer of Love was soundtracked by Sgt Pepper and All You Need is Love, Mr Turner celebrated his 111th birthday. Newspapers reported that he was joined by 70 guests, including the Mayor and Mayoress of Haringey, at a hall in Tottenham, just round the corner from Handsworth Road where he lived. 

Here he is with his children on that occasion: left to right, Violet Lilian Savage (born 1891); Jessie May Payne (1889); and John Mosley Meeson Turner (1905). The local Red Cross Society organised the celebration and ‘supplied sherry and a lunch of ham beef salad, and fresh fruit salad’. Newspapers reported that he was a lifelong non-smoker and a teetotaller, following one drunken trip to London as a youth, and drank only orange juice at his birthday party while those around him toasted his long life with champagne. 

For many younger people, these were fast changing times. London was swinging (although maybe not quite so much in Tottenham) and Harold Wilson’s Labour government had recently won another General Election. John Turner’s memories of the past were dimmed, it was reported, but he could still discuss modern politics and his career as a silk print cutter, which had ended 40 years earlier.

The Summer of Love faded and yet, remarkably, the now famous John Turner lived into another year. When he died at Tottenham in March 1968, at the amazing age of 111 years and 280 days, the Beatles’ Lady Madonna was charting. Did he keep up with the Beatles, I wonder? What did he make of Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields? Perhaps he heard When I’m Sixty-four – an age he could perhaps just about remember. I suspect he would have liked that one. When Mr Turner turned 64 the world was still recovering from the Great War. 

Spanning one of the most turbulent periods in history, John Turner’s was an incredible life. In theory he could have met Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll and anyone alive today over the age of 52. He was 39 when the real Eleanor Rigby was born in 1895. As a child he could even conceivably have witnessed a show by Pablo Fanque’s Circus, the Victorian entertainers about whom John Lennon wrote the Sgt Pepper track Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite in 1967 and who were still touring in the 1860s (although not with the eponymous William Kite, who was apparently only with the circus until 1845). Ok, I admit that is rather fanciful! I love that generational overlap though – is there a name for such a historical study? 

John Turner was a serious record-holder. In January 1966, he became the world’s oldest verified living person, following the death of Hannah Smith. In October that year he became the oldest verified man ever – a record that stood until 1982. He remained the oldest ever British man for more than 40 years, until Henry Allingham took the record in 2008.

Sadly, he would have had no idea what the Beatles looked like – none of them were even born when Mr Turner began to lose his sight, at the age of 73, in 1929.

In an equally remarkable coda to this story, John Turner’s son, John Mosley Meeson Turner, also lived into three figures and died at Enfield in 2005, aged 100. Between them, father and son spanned the entire twentieth century and half of the nineteenth.

John Turner started out, like his father, as a calico print cutter. So here is Paul McCartney singing Calico Skies.

Long live all of us crazy soldiers
Who were born under calico skies