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Bruce Bligh Turnbull

Born 2 Nov 1926 in Tumut, New South Wales, Australia

Ancestors

Son of Frederick Bligh Turnbull and Mary Agnes (Brown) Turnbull

Husband of Coral Magnolia Lansbury — married 29 Dec 1955 (to about 1963) in Campbell Street Presbyterian Church, Balmain, New South Wales, Australia

Husband of Judith Womersley — married about 1980 [location unknown]

Father of Malcolm Turnbull AC

Died 11 Nov 1982 at age 56 in Gloucester, New South Wales, Australia

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Profile last modified 31 Dec 2023 | Created 14 Sep 2015

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Biography

Per the Sydney Morning Herald^[1]:

He [Bruce] was born in Tumut, to the west of Canberra, and grew up in Maitland in the lower Hunter Valley.

Bruce had a less-than-promising career as an electrician, injuring himself early on. He soon switched to selling real estate and wound up specialising in buying and selling pubs. He would remain a hotel broker for the rest of his life, eventually making a small fortune out of it.

Bruce hauled himself off to Sydney, then a provincial outpost of not quite two million people. Having gravitated to the fashionable eastern suburbs, the handsome 20-something was swimming in the sparkling harbour at Lady Martins Beach, at the tip of Point Piper, when he caught the eye of a young actress who lived there.

Many years later Turnbull asked his mother what had drawn her to Bruce, and she told him he had "swum up and down outside her apartment, diving up and down, pretending to be a porpoise".

If Bruce Turnbull was no-one in particular in 1953, Coral Lansbury was already a budding radio star.

Coral was precocious: a child actress in productions for the legendary theatrical agency J.C. Williamson, she established herself as a promising writer from an early age; her first radio script was accepted when she was just 13.

A brilliant student, enrolled at North Sydney High, her mother wanted her to leave school at 11, by which time Coral had already completed her intermediate certificate, but the education department wouldn't allow it. Coral finished her schooling by the age of 15, but never matriculated. At 17 she'd written her first play – she would write eight more over the next few years. Coral kept performing, too, picking up roles in Noel Coward's Hay Fever and also The Critic. As one regional paper put it in 1947, "the vivacious young actress … is rapidly making her name for herself in radio".

Several decades later, Lansbury would open up about the difficulties she faced juggling her career with early motherhood, describing her son as a somewhat trying child who loved to argue, and who would burst in from kindergarten at the nearby leafy Vaucluse Public like a "bundle of demonic energy".

"There were times when I wondered if I would ever survive his childhood," she says. If Malcolm was a handful, he was more so because the young boy struggled with asthma.

In one letter to Bruce, Coral wrote: "Poor little Malco, do you remember once when he was having static asthma, and I gave him the white rabbit with floppy ears, he couldn't breathe, but he still smiled, and put out his hands for it."

But Lansbury would also say that her only regret in life, her greatest sorrow, was that she had only one child: "I should have married less and had more children, because I love children so much."

As radio plays began to give way to television, Coral shifted her career focus to academia. She achieved terrific grades and completed her degree at Sydney University with double honours in English and History, but was ineligible to graduate because she had never matriculated.

CHILDHOOD

When the young Turnbull family settled into their flat in Vaucluse, Sydney's eastern suburbs were not quite so outrageously wealthy as they had been before or have become since. By the mid-20th century, many of the grandest eastern suburbs estates of the previous century had been carved up, subdivided or reclaimed for public use. After Japanese submarines bombarded Sydney in 1942, many families moved inland and coastal property prices plunged.

In the 1950s and '60s, if Sydney's east was privileged, it was still an exciting place to grow up, as Malcolm Turnbull recalled in late 2004 in his maiden speech to federal parliament, after he had finally won the local seat of Wentworth:

"Like many Wentworth residents, I grew up living in flats – mostly rented – and, in the style of the times, with small rooms running of a long, dark corridor. I did not feel deprived of anything – apart, perhaps, from a dog. I was rarely inside. The best things in Wentworth – the waves at Bondi, the ducks at Centennial Park or even the brisk nor'-easter whipping down the harbour on a summer's day – take no account of your bank balance. Most mornings my father and I went for a swim at North Bondi Surf Club. The surf club showers were no respecters of rank or privilege. Our companions included judges and garbos, teachers and policemen and businessmen of all types – from shmattas [rag traders] in Surry Hills to high finance in Martin Place."

Perhaps overplaying it a little, Turnbull hoped to soften his public image as a silvertail by highlighting his humble, even rough and-tumble, upbringing. But Turnbull had a pretty good start in life – except that his parents' marriage became increasingly unhappy.

The sporty, knockabout salesman, often out of town on pub business, and the ambitious writer, juggling a career and a kid, were a poor match. In 1963 Coral got a position as a research assistant in the UNSW School of History, where she met professor John Salmon. They started an affair; Coral left Bruce and later they were divorced. In 1966, after Salmon had taken up a professorship at Waikato University in his native New Zealand, Coral left Australia to join him, and they married. She would complete her doctorate at Auckland University in 1969 before they moved again, this time to the United States.

Turnbull has spoken often about the profound impact of his parents' divorce – a stock feature in almost every profile. There are two recurring themes. One is for Turnbull to affectionately and gratefully acknowledge that his father protected him from much of the fallout. His other is to ponder whether his mother's abandonment spurred him to succeed from an early age, a subconscious desire to win her back or prove she was wrong to leave him.

By Turnbull's account, the split was brutal: Coral simply upped and left young Malcolm without warning and she did not return to Australia in his childhood. She took the family furniture; she even took the cat. Turnbull told one reporter that after moving into another flat, he and Bruce had to make do without chairs, sitting on boxes until the dentist downstairs decided to redecorate and passed on his old seats.

Without doubt, this was a rough time in Turnbull's life. There was a rental shortage and at the end of 1964, Bruce and Malcolm moved again, this time into a red-brick block of flats called Gladswood Gardens at Double Bay.

The building was full of pensioners and widows. While it wasn't struggle street, it wasn't too flash either.

The most candid, in-depth interview Malcolm has given on the topic of his parents' divorce was for the ABC's Australian Story in 2009, long after both parents had passed away and he had been able to look back over their letters and piece together what had happened when he was too young to understand.

"[My father] had every reason to feel very let down by my mother because of the circumstances and the fact that when she left, you know, the little flat we were living [in] Vaucluse was sold, and we didn't have anywhere to live. There was a degree of financial hardship associated with all this. Bruce, nonetheless, never spoke ill of her. He always talked her up, and he … rather confused me I think about whether she was actually leaving or just going away on holiday … in his own way, [he] tried to ease me into the knowledge that she was going …

"You know, I have letters of his that he wrote to her filled with reproach and bitterness. 'How could you leave us? How could you leave your son?' … And she kept them, which is interesting. A lot of people would have destroyed them. She kept them, and I got them when she died. But he wrote her those letters of reproach and then would put down the pen after writing that letter, sealing it up, and then he'd say to me in the next breath as it were, 'Your mother loves you, she hasn't really left you. No, she's just gone to New Zealand to do some studies, she'll be back. She's coming back, don't worry. Everything's OK.'"

Per the Canberra Times^[2]:

Four people died yesterday when a single-engined Piper Warrior crashed at Gloucester, 294 kilometres north of Sydney. Witnesses said the aircraft spiralled out of the sky after losing one wing, which landed in the town.

The dead were the pilot, Mr William James Ford, 49, of Cessnock, and passengers Mr Desmond Curran, of Kotara near Newcastle, Mr Bruce Bligh Turnbull, 55, of Aberdeen, near Cessnock, and Mr Dennis George Parkinson, 31, of Wallsend, west of Newcastle.

Sources

People Australia
Source Citation for Ancestry Family Trees
NSW BDM death 108656/1982

Notes

Does anyone know why one of the merged profiles has Aberdeen as the place of death given that the obituary states that he died near Gloucester?

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Bruce Bligh Turnbull (1926 - 1982)

Biography

Sources

Notes