Born in British Columbia, Canada on December 3, 1925 to English parents from Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, Philip Turner was brought to England in 1926. He was educated at Hinckley Grammar School in Leicestershire and spent many school holidays exploring the East Anglian fens whilst staying with his grandparents. He served his National Service from 1943 to 1946 as a Sub-Lieutenant Mechanical Engineer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He then resumed his education at Worcester College, Oxford, whence he graduated in 1949. He married Margaret Diana Samson in 1950 with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

Turner was ordained a priest in the Church of England in 1951 and served in parishes in Leeds, Crawley and Northampton. In the late 1960s he became the Head of Religious Broadcasting for the Midland Region and subsequently became a teacher at Droitwich Spa High School, chaplain of Eton College and a part-time teacher at Malvern College, Worcestershire.

He began writing religious pieces in the mid 1950s, and in 1964 the first of his children's novels was published. Set in the fictional town of Darnley Mills in North East England, Colonel Sheperton's Clock involves a schoolboy mystery woven into an account of a boy's surgery to heal a disabled leg. Four subsequent books in the series told more stories of the three heroes of the first and another four created a local history from the nineteenth century up to the Second World War.

Turner won the Carnegie Medal for children's literature for his second novel The Grange at High Force in 1966.

He also wrote several books for young adults under the name Stephen Chance. The Danedyke Mystery was adapted for television in 1979.

Philip and Margaret lived in West Malvern for 30 years until his death from cancer in January 2006. He is buried at St. Mathias Church, Malvern Link.