Painter and draughtsman, born and lived in Bethnal Green, east London, where he was a prominent councillor and mayor in 1946. Although he was offered a place at art school Turpin chose to devote his time to the Labour Party. At various times he was in the Royal Marines, seeing service in World War I; worked as a window cleaner; was a prominent anti-Fascist in the 1930s; and was in the heavy rescue squad of the National Fire Service in World War II, also being its Official War Artist; then was a supporter of Moral Re-Armament, painting a portrait of its leader Frank Buchman’s London home in Berkeley Square for presentation on his eighty-first birthday. Turpin had studied with John Cooper, who started classes at the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute in the mid-1920s which led to the formation of the East London Group, with which Turpin showed into the 1930s at the Lefevre Gallery.