Harold Worthington Turpin, agricultural scientist, was the son of George Worthington Turpin and his wife Emma Maria Louisa, born Warren. He received his secondary schooling at Selborne College, a semi-private, English medium male-only school in East London, and passed the matriculation examination of the University of the Cape of Good Hope in 1910. He continued his studies at Grootfontein Agricultural School and was awarded a diploma. He then went to the United States for further studies and remained there for six years. In about 1917 he was a Fellow in Agronomy at the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station and in collaboration with F. S. Harris, the director of the station, published a paper on "Movement and distribution of moisture in the soil" in the Journal of Agricultural Research (1917). By 1918 he was at Cornell University at Ithaca, New York State, where he was awarded the PhD degree in 1918 with a thesis on The carbon dioxide of the soil air. The thesis was published in book form in 1920.
Turpin returned to South Africa in 1919 and started working in the Department of Agriculture, where he remained until his retirement in 1953. In 1921 he was appointed as lecturer in field husbandry. During the late nineteen-twenties he was stationed at Grootfontein, where he was instrumental in distributing some fifteen varieties of the so-called Burbank Spineless cactus all over the Karoo to be grown as sheep fodder. In 1934 he succeeded E. Parish as principal of Grootfontein Agricultural School, but left this post later in the same year. However, he is best remembered as a researcher and was largely responsible for the establishment of several research stations in various parts of South Africa. In due course he rose to one of the most senior positions in the department. According to his colleagues he made lasting contributions to agronomy and pasture science. He carried out pioneer research on lucerne cultivation and his findings on the irrigation requirements of lucerne remained in use long after his retirement. He also made seminal contributions to wheat breading and selection. The results of his research were published mainly in the Journal of the Department of Agriculture and in Farming in South Africa and included papers on lucerne cultivation (1924, 1924, 1931, 1931, 1932), irrigation farming (1922, 1925, 1936), drought-resistant fodder (1925, 1928) and education and research in agriculture (1949).
After his retirement Turpin farmed in the Groblersdal district in Limpopo for 17 years and successfully applied his scientific knowledge of irrigation farming and wheat cultivation. He was married in 1920 to Magdalena Anna Dorothea ("Margie") Malherbe, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.
