Community
29 December, 2022
Radio days The Sydney H. Turner Story
AN UNLIKELY partnership between a Texan and a young local man exploited the demand for a new and exciting entertainment device, the radio.
Robert Lee Hearn and Sydney H. Turner secured the franchise for Standard Telephones and Cables Ltd (S.T.C.) radios and opened their first store in Mossman in 1936. Soon after they opened their second store at 45 Abbott Street in Cairns and had a fleet of vehicles to service the district.
The pair were innovative in the promotion of their products. Their sponsorship of the S.T.C. Ambulance Benefit Dance in 1939 was particularly clever.
The event at the Aquatic Dance Hall featured “continuous dance music” provided by a Duo-Trac sound and film system which promised “all the world’s famous dance bands will be heard in life-like and faultless sound, reproduced from a film by a beam of light”.
On February 2, 1940, Sydney placed a notice in the newspapers stating that he wished to notify his customers and the public in general that he had abandoned the trade name of “Hearn and Turner” and would be conduct the business in his name alone. By then the product range included fridges, floor polishers, toasters, cake mixers and other electrical appliances.
Three months later, on May 28, 1940, Sydney Hugh Turner married Evelyn Doris McClelland. Their union would see the Turner enterprise endure for another 86 years through three generations.
Sydney continued to promote the business at public events. At the 1946 Cairns Show and Carnival, employees of Sydney H. Turner and Chandlers constructed the widely applauded Public Address System. In addition to updating the public on the progress of ring events at the show, it was also used to plead with parents to collect their missing children when officials had run out of toffee apples.
On April 3, 1949, Sydney H. Turner would be involved in the search for missing sailors. Turner’s boat joined two other craft in the search for a sailing skiff which went missing during a race after south-easterly gale blew several boats off-course.
Turner returned the wharf shortly after midnight in response to the police flashlight signal advising that the men had been rescued. The Harbour Board launch had sighted the vessel south-east of the Barron just before 10pm.
In addition to the missing skiff, they also discovered Mr. Rex Johnson’s search vessel which had broken down. The Harbour Board launch then towed both vessels and a dinghy back to Cairns. In the 1970s the range of products sold by the company included equipment for boating and fishing enthusiasts including Marina 2-way, auto-pilots, sounders and radar devices.
Sources: TROVE Newspapers, Turner Family Archives.
