The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  But what of the Park’s most famous innovator and presiding genius? For Alan Turing, still only thirty-four at the end of the war, technology was drawing closer and closer to enable him to realize his concept of a “Turing Machine”; equally, though, his homosexuality, and the British establishment’s attitude toward it, were to contribute to his tragic—and wholly pointless—death.

  The transition from war to peace seemed, initially, to make little difference to Alan Turing’s working life. After his removal as head of Hut 8 and his return from the United States, he came back to intense research. But we might also see that the post-war world outside the hermetically sealed atmosphere of Bletchley—a country with a shifting, faintly neurotic moral climate—was one in which it would be extremely difficult for him to thrive.

  Late in 1944, Turing still had further cryptological challenges to take on, and he did so both at Bletchley Park and the nearby communications base, Hanslope Park. Building on ideas he had seen in the United States, he was working on a new speech encipherment system, to be given the name “Delilah”—that is, a deceiver of men.

  It was extraordinarily complex stuff, involving sound frequencies and bandwidths. According to Andrew Hodges, Turing, together with two new young recruits, Robin Gandy and Donald Bayley, installed himself in a corner of a Hanslope laboratory. Though this establishment, in contrast to Bletchley, was assuredly military, Turing was still very much the archetypal wartime boffin, in shiny trousers and with his unkempt hair and the unselfconsciously strange noises that he would make while working.

  Turing was remarkably good with electronics, given that he was entirely self-taught, but it was Bayley who provided a certain level of organization. There was one bout of turbulence when Turing told Bayley of his homosexuality; Bayley had only heard of such things through smutty jokes and was horrified. What might have ended in embarrassed silence escalated into a shouting match. But somehow, the two men were able to find an understanding, for Bayley continued to work with Turing, whatever he might have felt about his orientation. Indeed, their collaboration was to prove quite remarkable—if anyone could ever have realized it.

  Turing first of all chose to sleep in the old house of Hanslope itself, and then, rather like Bletchley, moved into a cottage near the Park’s kitchen garden, accompanied by Robin Gandy and a ginger cat. The two men would go for walks, and the ginger cat, unusually, would go with them. If Turing was annoyed at work, or by the behavior of those around him, he would, as ever, go off on long runs around the countryside.

  Although still a top secret base, Hanslope Park wasn’t Bletchley; but in one other curious respect, it was very similar. And that is that Turing found himself pulled into a social life, a sense of community. Although more military in flavor—mess jackets at smart dinners (a dinner jacket in Turing’s case) and so forth—there were parties, dances with ATS girls, gossip, and social intrigue. Turing was rather popular.

  Holding as he did the unique position of eccentric boffin, he combined this with a surprisingly youthful outlook—to some he could seem even younger than thirty-four—which made him a draw for both men and women. It was an appeal that crossed ranks; he seemed to mingle as happily with the working-class Tommys as with anyone else. He even gave complicated mathematical lectures.

  And as 1945 dawned, Turing and Bayley persisted with the labyrinth of wires and valves that comprised the Delilah system, conducting ever more complex work with equations and frequencies and kilohertz. By the spring, they had succeeded in enciphering a recording of a Churchill speech—the coded version sounded like the hiss of white noise. But the conflict was nearly over and there was no longer any sense of urgency. No matter how extraordinary the technical achievement, the military powers had other matters on their minds now. Encryption of this sort was low on the list of priorities.

  The question now was: what parts of Turing’s scientific work would find government or even private sponsorship in peacetime? His Fellowship at King’s College was renewed for another three years, which would give him £300 per annum and academic freedom. He was also awarded the OBE, or Order of the British Empire; for reasons of security, such awards were rare, for fear of the citation giving away some element of the work that had been done.

  However, with the lack of enthusiasm for the Delilah system—it seems the Post Office was working upon its own commercial sound encryption techniques—Turing wanted to return to the question that had been haunting him since the 1930s, that of constructing a thinking machine—an electronic brain. A Universal Turing Machine. A machine of such complexity that it could not only speedily handle any kind of mathematical calculation but also store a memory of the process within itself.

  In the 1930s, while the theory had been revolutionary, it was difficult to see how the current valve technology could keep pace with such a thing. Come 1943, and the successful operation of the Colossus machine, with its thousands of valves working in unison, and suddenly a whole new realm of possibilities opened up.

  King’s was to wait: for the mathematicians and physicists at the National Physical Laboratory in southwest London had—despite the security and secrecy of the last few years—come to hear of Turing’s reputation and wished to hire him. Turing saw this as a potential avenue for at last realizing his vision. The goal was simple: the logical functionings of the mind could surely be replicated inside the electronic pulses of a machine.

  In the months and years that were to follow, this work—the construction of a vast room-filling machine, all dials and wires and valves—would eventually take Turing to the University of Manchester. He bought a house in a suburb, made good friends with his next-door neighbors, and began to investigate those areas of the city in which like-minded men and opportunistic youths flashed understanding glances at one another.

  Turing became involved with a young man called Arnold Murray, inviting him home for dinner. After several of these dinners, Murray was invited to stay the night. Their relationship, by Andrew Hodges’ account, was at once awkward, odd, and in some curious way affecting, with the lad finding Turing’s intellect and superior social class eye-opening.

  But then money started to go missing; Turing instantly suspected Murray. Words were exchanged. After Turing’s house was burgled, Murray, slipping up, admitted that he knew the burglar in question—a lad he called Harry—and had happened to meet him a short while back when Harry had been planning a crime. Turing went to the police with the information on “Harry.”

  But it all suddenly backfired on Turing. The police caught up with Harry, who in his statement gave an account of Arnold Murray’s numerous visits to Turing’s home. The police now decided to turn their attention to Turing.

  Turing made no bones about the allegation of homosexual behavior—indeed, while Detective Mills was round at his house, Turing gave him wine and entertained him with a few old melodies on his violin. To his closest friends, Turing had always been open about his orientation, even going so far as to make jokes about men that he found attractive. But in 1952, there was a sort of mini-hysteria in Britain surrounding the entire subject of homosexuality.

  There was the celebrated case of Lord Montagu and the journalist Peter Wildeblood, not to mention an undercover officer entrapping the actor John Gielgud in a public lavatory. The subject made lurid headlines in the Sunday scandal sheets. Turing was charged with gross indecency. He did not seem to understand how anyone could possibly imagine that he had committed a crime.

  At Turing’s trial, Max Newman and Hugh Alexander, now at GCHQ in Cheltenham, appeared as character witnesses. Turing was found guilty, though spared prison. Hideously, though, as part of the condition of being bound over for a year, he was also required to submit, for a limited period of about a year, to “Organo-Therapic Treatment” at Manchester Royal Infirmary. In short, this was an extremely primitive form of hormone treatment involving estrogen. Turing was, for a time, rendered impotent, and grew breasts.

  Nevertheless, although the trial had obviousl
y caused a certain amount of disquiet within Manchester University—and even though GCHQ had removed his security clearance—he had been allowed to hold on to his academic post. And by this stage, he was widely admired within the British scientific community. At conferences, mathematicians would vie for his attention. Work on the Mark II Turing machine—an even larger computer than the first—was under way. He even managed a reunion with his old colleague Don Bayley, who now lived in Woburn Sands near Bletchley. And Turing remained defiantly unapologetic about his orientation, sharing the tale of a trip to Paris where he picked up a young man who insisted on putting his trousers under the mattress in order to keep the crease sharp.

  Turing nevertheless started to go for sessions with a psychiatrist. It seemed clear to some that despite his energy and good humor, the events of the trial, and the sentence, weighed heavier upon him than he liked to suggest.

  Turing’s sentence expired in 1953. The University of Manchester appointed him to a Readership in the Theory of Computing, which would have made him financially secure for a great many years to come. Turing also enjoyed foreign holidays—a genuine rarity in the pre-jet age 1950s.

  So there remains at least some ambiguity about the circumstances of his suicide in 1954, at the age of forty-two. He was found in bed by his housekeeper, with white foam around his mouth. There was a jar of potassium cyanide in the house, and of cyanide solution. On his bedside table was an apple, out of which several bites had been taken. The obvious conclusion: the apple had been dipped in cyanide. Indeed, author Andrew Hodges went so far as to recall how, some years back, Turing had become fascinated with the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the wicked queen’s chilling incantation: “Dip the apple in the brew/Let the Sleeping Death seep through.”

  According to Hodges, Turing had prepared a new will several months earlier. But the fact that he left no note, and indeed no indication whatsoever that such a course might be on his mind, has led others to speculate that his death might have had an even more macabrely random element about it.

  Keith Batey is one who cannot quite believe that Turing committed suicide. He recalls: “When I was secretary at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, I overlapped with James Lighthill. He’d been Professor at Manchester with Turing. James said he didn’t believe Turing committed suicide. He said that he [Turing] was a great man for experimenting and he was experimenting with acidification of cyanide on coke. James said he did this while he was eating an apple and that’s how he got poisoned. He went on to say that [Turing] had bought himself two pairs of new socks three days previously. And he wouldn’t have done that if he was going to commit suicide.”

  In the acclaimed Turing play Breaking the Code (1986) by Hugh Whitemore, the dramatist delicately hints at another possibility. In the final scene, Turing is enjoying a Greek holiday. He has picked up a young man. The young man says nothing and Turing assumes that he cannot speak English. As they recline, Turing, now talking almost to himself, finally talks out loud about Bletchley—about the work he did, the breakthroughs he achieved, the intolerable burden of security and secrecy. And still the Greek boy says nothing.

  But from this we suddenly, chillingly, infer: what if the Greek boy was a setup? A Soviet spy? Such things were known. If that were the case—if the boy understood every word and reported it back—would it have become plain to British security services that Turing had leaked the vital information? And if so, could they not have arranged to have had him conveniently removed?

  The play ends as our speculation begins. But that is simply theater. These days, Turing is rightly remembered for his achievements, as opposed to his eccentricities and foibles. A bust of his head now stands in the Bletchley Park museum. And in September 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized—on behalf of the government and, we presume, the nation—for Turing’s prosecution. “He was a quite brilliant mathematician,” said Mr. Brown, praising his contribution to “Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship.”

  “The debt of gratitude he is owed,” continued the Prime Minister, “makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of gross indecency—in effect, tried for being gay…

  “Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind…it is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.”

  Quite so. In this day and age—one that Turing might possibly have felt more comfortable in—there is a greater general understanding of his philosophy concerning the nature of the mind, and in particular of the electronic mind. The work that he began has led to illimitable advances.

  27 Bletchley’s Intellectual Legacy

  “There was a pub in the village of Stony Stratford that some of the chaps at Bletchley went to,” says Y Service veteran Geoffrey Pidgeon. “And it was there you’d get the sight of, say, four chaps, all gathered together with their beers, and talking in Greek.”

  In discussing the Park and its impact on the lives of those who worked there, a great many veterans acknowledge the other side of what they gained; it was a kind of university education by proxy, even if their own academic studies had become a little fuzzy round the edges. The full range of what the Park gave them only became clear to them in the years that followed the war.

  In general terms, the Second World War brought with it not merely a will to win, but also a determination that what came afterward would make life better for everyone. It was during the years of the war that the great social changes of the National Health Service and of the Welfare State were conceived, proposed through the Beveridge Report, debated and agreed.

  But there was more than that; in cultural terms, there seemed a strong thirst for the wider dissemination of knowledge. The notion that great art and literature and music and thought should be shared among as many people as possible, as opposed to simply appealing to privileged elites. Rather than being a “pause” in their young lives, Bletchley provided an unexpected and unusual further education, as many veterans of the Park have told me—an education which they would never have had in any other circumstances.

  The question of money was very important; in the years before and during the war, technological developments were already putting great works of art directly into more hands. Bryan Magee recalls in his memoirs that when he was a boy in the 1930s and ‘40s, gramophone records became slightly cheaper and more widely available; this in turn allowed him, as a boy, to listen to more and more great performances of classical music. And the effect of this was life changing; the music alone awoke in him the sense of so many other possibilities, so much other art to be explored.1

  Those years also saw the introduction of the paperback book, which instantly made literature affordable for many more people. Previously, most had to rely upon their public libraries; wonderful though these institutions once were, you could only borrow a book for two weeks at a time. If you could actually buy it, and own it, your time spent studying it was limitless.

  We learn through the diaries of Mass Observation that the war years brought an even greater enthusiasm for cinema, and in particular the glossy, expensive escapism of Hollywood. We also learn, though, through some of these day-to-day diaries, that most people seemed to have a highly tuned critical faculty, and that some films that we would regard today as classics were dismissed sharply at the time as nonsense by these diarists.

  For the young people of Bletchley, this sense of intellectual openness and curiosity was strong. Even for those who were not drawn directly from university, there had been a sense of culture in the air. Mimi Gallilee recalls with especial fondness the library within the house itself. Others had brought their libraries with them.

  “We were much into Freud,” recalls Mavis Batey. “Pelican published sixpenny editions of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. If you had been an undergraduate, as we were, then
you were pretty much bound to have had one.” Bletchley Park codebreaker (Lord) Asa Briggs subsequently saw his Social History of England published by Pelican. In many ways, the imprint was a synecdoche for a younger generation eager to absorb as much as they could. From economics to psychology to linguistics, those blue spines were signifiers of educational aspiration, a generation before Jennie Lee brought the Open University into being.

  Like a surprising number of young people of the time, Mavis Batey had, just before the war, spent a little time on the continent for the purposes of study. “I was much better acquainted than anyone else with Freud because I went to Zurich University,” Mrs. Batey says. If one was a linguist, one normally had to go for a term in a German university. But since this was 1938, and the Germans had already moved into Czechoslovakia, she instead had to go to one that was German-speaking. “And I actually heard Freud’s disciple Carl Jung.”

  One always imagines that the work of Bletchley Park would be enough of an intellectual demand on the young people who were working there. Yet as we have seen, aside from the odd lightning flash of genius, the business of decoding communications was more a question of patience, trial and error. Also, this particular generation of young people had hinterlands. Just because they had particular abilities in their own fields—mathematics, linguistics, the classics—didn’t mean that their interests were circumscribed in any way.

  “This is another thing you hear: that we were more or less incarcerated in Bletchley,” continues Mavis Batey. “That isn’t true at all, we could do anything in the town, and I enrolled for the Cambridge extramural course on psychology and used to go there with the townsfolk.”