Reginald Turnill

In his early life, the 18th century poet John Clare had a great affection for the brothers John and Richard Turnill, whose father Robert was a local farmer; Robert was Reg's great-great-grandfather. In his Autobiographical Fragments, Clare says:

Following a few months of poor health Turnill died aged 97 at the Pilgrim's Hospice in Ashford, Kent, on 12 February 2013. In 2006 he won the Sir Arthur Clarke Award Lifetime Achievement Award.

Turnill wrote many obituaries of people involved in aerospace and other figures for The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph, the last to appear during his lifetime being of Sir James Hamilton, who helped design Concorde's wing. It appeared in The Guardian in May 2012.

After retiring from the BBC staff on his 60th birthday he continued working as a freelance broadcaster, writing many books and continuing as Newsround's Space Editor until the mid-1980s. In 1990 he presented Return Ticket, a five-part Radio 4 series about the Apollo 13 mission.

In April 1970, he was the first journalist to report on the Apollo 13 catastrophe via the BBC World Service when based at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center on 13 April 1970.

He contributed to series of books notably the Observer's Book of Manned Spaceflight and the Observer's Book of Unmanned Spaceflight in the 1970s, published by Frederick Warne & Co. In the 1980s he edited the Jane's Spaceflight Directory. He was particularly disappointed by the cancellation of the Black Arrow British space programme in July 1971, at the very moment it was providing results. In 2003 he published his book 'The Moonlandings, An eyewitness account' in which he recounted how and why the first men landed on the moon.

On 2 March 1969 he was the BBC's reporter on Concorde's maiden flight at Toulouse-Blagnac Airport.

In 1958 he became the Corporation's Air and Space Correspondent, with a brief to include defence as well. He was not a War correspondent; he concentrated on technology. He became friendly with Wernher von Braun, who was only three years older, although his approach was initially frosty and reticent. He covered all the crewed spaceflights as well as the introduction of passenger jets from the Comet IV to Concorde.

He married Margaret Hennings in 1938 in Westminster. They have two sons (born 1940 and 1944). He lived in Sandgate, Kent.

Reginald Turnill began his career at the age of 15 as a reporter's telephonist at the Press Association, the British news agency, becoming a reporter by 1935. After war service as a machine gunner in the Middlesex Regiment, and as a warrant officer reporting courts martial for the Judge Advocate General's department in Naples, he returned to the Press Association in 1946, where he remained until his recruitment by the BBC in 1956 as assistant industrial correspondent.

Reginald George Turnill (12 May 1915 – 12 February 2013) was the BBC's aviation (and space) correspondent for twenty years during the beginnings of crewed space exploration and the early jet age in aviation, including the breakthrough in supersonic passenger flight represented by Concorde. He covered NASA's space missions and all the Apollo program moon missions for the BBC. Turnill's connection with the BBC, as a freelance, continued for some years after his official retirement.