Turpin stared at the banner and had to be prompted to leave the car. He entered the town hall, where the first man to greet him was John 'Gerry' Gibbs, the police inspector who had founded the Leamington Boys' Club, and who first saw promise in the fourteen-year-old Turpin. The new world champion warmly shook hands with his old mentor, and then made his way up to the balcony.
Photographs of Turpin on this special day show a handsome man in a double-breasted beige suit, a smart blue silk shirt, and dapper white shoes. However, Turpin appears to be a little confused. In almost every photograph he seems to be avoiding full eye contact with the camera as though hiding from somebody, or himself. Perhaps the most disturbing photograph of the day shows Turpin flanked by the two lord mayors in a wood-panelled room in the town hall. The mayors pose stiffly in pinstriped suits, while Turpin has his right arm draped loosely around his mother and he supports his young son in his other arm. A feeling of palpable discomfort radiates from the photograph, and nobody seems entirely comfortable on what should be a joyous occasion. The modest new world champion eventually stepped out on to the balcony of Leamington Spa Town Hall, and the roar from the crowd was almost deafening, as was the high-pitched drone of cine and newsreel cameras. The mayor of Leamington Spa urged him forward ('Go on, son') and Turpin took the microphone that was proffered. For a second he looked at the sea of white faces which swam out before him in all directions, and then he began to read from a speech which his manager had prepared for the occasion. 'It was a great fight on Tuesday and I am naturally very proud to bring the honour of the middleweight championship of the world back to England and Warwickshire.' Then Turpin stopped and looked again at the crowds of people before him. 'I must tell you how grateful I am to my manager, my trainer, my family and others who have helped me so much throughout my career. .' Again Turpin stopped speaking, and this time he handed his speech to one of the mayors and addressed the crowds directly. 'Well, I'm not much at making speeches but you all know what I mean. Thanks.' He waved to the crowd and handed the microphone to somebody else. At this point George Middleton led an elderly Beatrice Manley, Turpin's mother, on to the balcony, and Turpin took her in his arms and gave her a kiss. Ailing now for some years, and suffering from a partial loss of eyesight, she was nonetheless the proudest woman in Leamington Spa and she had worn her best hat to prove the point. The coloured baby that, much to some people's disgust, she had given birth to twenty-three years ago in this very town was, on this day, the most famous man in England.
Randolph Adolphus Turpin was born in Leamington Spa on 7 June, 1928, the youngest child of Lionel Fitzherbert Turpin and Beatrice Whitehouse. There were already two older brothers, Dick and Jackie, and two older sisters, Joan and Kathy, but the cash-strapped family were struggling financially in a cramped basement flat in Willis Road. The new addition, who weighed in at 9 lb 7 oz, was the lightest of all Beatrice's children at birth, but he was still, by most standards, a heavyweight child. At a time when Beatrice and Lionel could barely afford food to put on the table the new baby was yet another mouth to feed and, to make matters worse, at the time of Randolph's birth Lionel was in hospital and ailing badly. The prognosis was not good.
Lionel Fitzherbert Turpin was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, in February 1896. He enjoyed a traditional British schooling in the sugar-rich colony on the northeast coast of South America, but the young lad had a yearning to see the world. He arrived in England as a merchant seaman on the eve of the Great War, and by the time Britain declared war on Germany in the summer of 1914, Lionel was ready to sign up. He was eventually sent out with the British Expeditionary Forces to the Western Front where he fought numerous campaigns, including the legendary Battle of the Somme. He survived the slaughter, but towards the end of the war he was badly wounded by a gas shell which burnt his lungs and left a gaping wound in his back. Lionel was shipped back to a hospital in Coventry, where they did all they could to help him before discharging the West Indian to a convalescent home near Hill House in the nearby town of Warwick. Although it was clear to the doctors that the mild-mannered coloured soldier was never going to fully recover, Lionel Turpin was eventually allowed to leave the convalescent home and he attempted to find work locally.
Lionel stood out in Warwick, for there were no other coloured people in the town, and he was regularly referred to as 'Sam', which was an abbreviation for the more pejorative 'Sambo'. He was equally exotic in nearby Leamington Spa, where the introverted West Indian veteran soon met a local teenager named Beatrice Whitehouse. Beatrice came from a rough, but tight-knit, local working-class family, her father being well known in the area as a bare-knuckle prizefighter who plied his trade at the local Woolpack Inn. Lionel wasted little time in proposing to Beatrice, and although times were hard for everybody, they settled down and tried to raise their mixed-race family in a social atmosphere that was not always friendly or supportive. Later in life, Jackie Turpin remembered that 'there was a time when nobody would cross the road to speak to the Turpins. We was just little black kids as used to run around Wathen Road and Parkes Street.' However, Beatrice prided herself on having come from tough stock, so nothing was going to deter her from protecting and supporting her children, who were often taunted as being 'dirty' or 'khaki-coloured'. Sadly, as the family grew, Lionel's condition began to deteriorate, and it became increasingly difficult for him to hold down a job. He moved back and forth between the family's Leamington home and a hospital in nearby Coventry, until it was clear that the coloured veteran required fulltime care and attention. He was eventually allocated a bed at the Ministry of Pensions Hospital in Birmingham, but on 6 March, 1929, nine months after the birth of Randolph, his fifth child, Lionel Fitzherbert Turpin finally passed away due to war injuries that he had suffered over a decade earlier. His funeral hearse was drawn by four black horses, with six soldiers as an escort, and the thirty-three-year-old former military man was buried in the Brunswick Street Cemetery, Leamington Spa, in a ceremony that was paid for by the Leamington branch of the British Legion.
At the age of twenty-five, Beatrice was left by herself to bring up five children: Dick, Joan, Jackie, Kathy, and Randy. She was entitled to a widow's pension of just under thirty shillings a week, which she could supplement with whatever she might earn cooking and cleaning for other people, but however hard she tried Beatrice could not make ends meet. As a result, she often sent her children to stay with different relatives; Dick frequently went to stay with his grandmother, while Joan spent time in Wales with her aunt. However, when circumstances allowed, Mrs Turpin would bring all of her children back together under one roof, but life was never easy for Beattie, and young Randy was particularly worrisome to her. As a three-year-old boy, Randy had contracted double pneumonia and bronchitis, and although he eventually recovered the diseases returned on two further occasions. On their final appearance, the doctor told Beattie that she should prepare herself for Randy's death, but she chose instead to sit up all night with her youngest child, sponging him down to keep his temperature under control, and feeding him to keep up his strength. Much to the doctor's surprise, and the family's relief, little Randy survived, and this served only to make Beattie all the more determined to keep her children together. She once again retrieved them from the relatives among whom they had been distributed and, having now decided to marry a local English man, in 1931 she permanently reunited her household.