Violence? One word is not enough to make a conspiracy. Cyanide can have neurotoxic effects, causing the victim to suffer tremors and convulsions. And Alan had had a large dose: the same pathologist’s report indicates that there was cyanide in his brain, lungs, blood, stomach, spleen, kidneys and elsewhere, and that his blood was red yet deoxygenated. Moreover, ‘the jaw was in powerful spasm’. It was not a comfortable death, but it was not a murder.
What needs to be taken more seriously is the circumstantial evidence which people find hard to reconcile with a suicidal mind. That means it is right to reappraise the instinctive view originally held by John, that the whole business was a tragic accident. One example will suffice, though there are several similar accounts:
Professor James Lighthill worked closely with Alan Turing and was with him the night before he died. In fact he said he had never seemed more normal and had just bought two new pairs of socks which is the last thing he would have done if he intended to commit suicide. He describes the experiment he had been doing with cyanide just as Sara Turing describes. She had warned him not to get cyanide on his hands when she last saw him. ‘Wash your hands Alan and keep your nails clean and do not put your fingers in your mouth’ she had warned in vain.
That maxim from Mother has a ring of authenticity, but it cannot explain the fact that Alan died in his bed, when the laboratory was in the next-door room; nor does it explain the half-eaten apple at the bedside. In its report of the inquest, the Manchester Guardian had published the statement by Dr Bird, the pathologist, about the purpose of the apple. Sara objected strongly to the opinion expressed by Dr Bird in his evidence:
The apple was certainly not to mitigate the taste. Alan used rashly to test his solutions with his finger: he may thus have transferred the cyanide to the apple which he customarily ate at bedtime. It is unlikely that in the state suggested he would have planned to lessen the taste – still less been able to go downstairs, fetch an apple & come up again & get into bed.
Sara firmly believed Alan’s death to be an accident; as we have seen, everything was done to encourage her in that view. To support her theory, Sara left no stone unturned in her own examination of Alan’s house. She found a teaspoon in his laboratory; knowing that potassium cyanide is used in some techniques for gold-plating, and that Alan had gold-plated another spoon, she concluded that this must show Alan’s handling of the cyanide to have been in the course of an experiment. She deposited the spoon in the King’s College Archive along with her files, Alan’s letters, and a collection of other written materials.
This labelled teaspoon, lodged by Sara Turing alongside more traditional materials in the King’s College Archive, shows how she clung to the ‘accident’ theory of Alan Turing’s death.
On 13 June 1954 Nick Furbank wrote to Robin Gandy:
I think I told you most of the things I had to tell you about Alan over the telephone. As I said, there appeared to be no messages. The brother was unsympathetic, I thought. He was desperately keen to keep any scandal out of the papers, and on the other hand, very anxious to have Alan’s public distinction brought out in the obituaries. [Alan] had written but not posted an acceptance for some reception by the Royal Society, which perhaps argues against much premeditation. I don’t know. The way he talked about suicide before, and his general way of doing things (plus the fact that he had rearranged his letters in labelled packets) still makes me think he could not have done it just on impulse.
To regard Alan’s death as an accident may be unfair to him. Why assume, just because he was untidy and disorganised, that he did not know the risks of using notoriously poisonous chemicals? Why assume that he was not choosing cyanide to reassert control of his own destiny?
What troubles many, particularly those who were close to Alan at the time, is that it is not at all clear why Alan might have felt suicidal that terrible Whitsun weekend. How could it be that Alan felt such helplessness, inner loneliness or entrapment, and could see only one way out? It can be very difficult to accept that things could have been so badly wrong without anyone suspecting that it was so. The reaction described by Donald Bayley is how many people felt:
My Dear Robin.
There is probably no need to tell you how grieved and shocked I am about the Prof. When I first heard last Thursday, my immediate reaction was that it was half expected; it’s only latterly that the full realisation of what it means is making itself felt.
Can you throw any light on why he did it? I thought at first he was in trouble again but there was no hint of it in the Press. Even if so he knew we would support him as we had before. It’s a complete mystery to me because he did enjoy life so much – apart from that one aspect, and I thought he’d begun to have hope about that too.
Yet suicides do not follow a single pattern, and you do not have to look far to find troubles in Alan’s life. Ultimately, all the speculation is pointless. Robin Gandy said – and he, as the closest of Alan’s friends, knew best – ‘Some things are too deep and private and should not be pried into’. And I think we should now accept his advice.
Notes
1 The last word is hard to read. It could be ‘duel’ or ‘dud’
1 The word is hard to read but this seems to fit best
EPILOGUE
ALAN TURING DECODED
ALAN TURING’S UNTIMELY DEATH prompted a big postbag of letters of condolence and sympathy. Many summarise the writer’s impressions of Alan; from the many I choose this, from Sir Geoffrey Jefferson to Sara Turing, written in October 1954:
Dear Mrs Turing,
Late though the hour is I must thank you for your letter about your Alan in whom the lamp of genius burned so bright – too hot a flame perhaps it was for his endurance. He was so unversed in worldly ways, so childlike, it sometimes seemed to me, so unconventional so nonconformist to the general pattern. His genius flared because he had never quite grown up, he was I suppose a sort of scientific Shelley. I was early impressed by Professor Newman’s care for him and his great opinion of him. He will miss him dreadfully. You yourself were Alan’s great friend or so I gathered from him. I trust that I have said nothing to wound you. You said ‘Don’t answer’ but I felt that I must. What happened in that last hour may well have been as you say: Alan was very absent minded. I only hope that he was not unhappy – or is not now.
Sincerely yours
Geoffrey Jefferson
He had real genius, it shone from him.
Impressions of Alan Turing are nowadays likely to be formed from the various portrayals of him in broadcast media. Notable and stirring performances by Derek Jacobi, Ed Stoppard and Benedict Cumberbatch stand out. There is of course a danger that Alan becomes defined by these interpretations; but there is more complexity to the man than any script or any actor can bring out without becoming tedious. Sometimes Alan was imperious, sometimes patient; invariably generous; often witty and sometimes biting; awkward in company not involving his peers. Contemporaries almost always mention his ability to connect with children. Mrs Webb, Alan Turing’s next-door neighbour at Wilmslow, had a small boy called Rob:
Alan seemed to both of us to be so much better during the last few months. He was easier to talk to and much more friendly, and of course, always so nice with Rob. Rob loved to go and call on him and persuade him to come out for a game … the last time they were together I came upon them in the middle of a discussion as to whether God would catch cold if he sat on the wet grass!
His generosity was noted by everyone as well. John Turing remembered how different Alan was from the standard Turing model:
My father in retirement was always ‘doing accounts’ and insisted that my mother accounted for every penny of the housekeeping money in detail and when I had an allowance from him, before I was earning, I had to do the same. He made no secret of the fact that his own ambition was to be rid of the expense of his two sons! When he died he left my brother £400 more than myself because by some obscure calculations he reckoned that I had cost
him that much more. My brother very sensibly and generously put this money straight into a trust for [a daughter of John’s] who had been born too late for [Julius] to include in his will.
Harking back to the days at Baston Lodge, and one of the daughters of the house, John said:
Many years later, after her mother died, [Hazel Ward] achieved her life’s ambition and became a missionary. It is very typical of my brother, who grudged every penny spent on himself, that he generously and of his own accord, financed Hazel in this. Quite unknown to me he had kept in touch with her for thirty years or more and they remained firm friends.
Contrary to John’s own experience – unhappy and uprooted from his family and native environment – the Wards at Baston Lodge had provided a good family home for Alan’s childhood years, even if they had provided no teddy bear. Alan was not a soldierly child and he was certainly unusual. You might expect that to be a recipe for disaster in a houseful of would-be Haigs, but Alan’s achievements must be in part attributed to the nurture provided by a tolerant foster-home and understanding schools. On the other hand, Alan’s complex relationship with his parents may well have been coloured by their early distance and later proximity.
It has been a challenge for Alan Turing’s biographers to describe his relationship with the family, and I have not found it easy either. Family relations are complicated. What is clear enough is that Alan’s interests were quite different from those of his family. Alan’s friends were not liked by the Turings, and the best thing back at home was Alan’s ability to engage immediately with the children. Alan turned up dutifully for Christmases but not for other family occasions (for example, John turned out with Julius and Sara for Aunt Jean’s funeral in December 1945, but Alan did not).
Late in life, Sara found an outlet for her energies in putting together a well-researched and well-written biography of her lost son. It is clearly a hagiography, and John cautions us not to take it at face value when it comes to relationships. By his account Mother found Alan exasperating, and he spent much of his adult life trying to swim against her stream of moral maxims. In his July 1953 letter to Nick Furbank, Alan reported: ‘Mother has been staying here, and we seem to be getting on a good deal better. I have been subjecting her to a good deal of sexual enlightenment and she seems to have stood up to it very well.’ It must have been an ordeal for them both. It’s very far from clear what Mother made of Alan’s conviction for gross indecency. The family didn’t discuss this, and the topic of Alan’s death was equally avoided. What was talked about was his genius. People who had known Alan and worked with him were in awe of his unmatched intellect, so this was the first thing they would mention. Even to the obstinately non-technical Turings – those who did not know the existence of the Entscheidungsproblem and had never heard of phyllotaxis – it was apparent that Alan had something special which the rest of us do not. Sara’s biography makes that light shine very brightly.
His achievements, as well as his insight, were massive. Alan Turing was not quite 42 years old when he died. In the course of his short life he had solved one of the great theoretical problems of mathematics; laid down the theory of multi-purpose programmable computing machines; designed a codebreaking machine which provided priceless intelligence to the Allied war effort; designed and written manuals for the first computers, and used them to explain patterns found in living things. By any reckoning this is an astonishing curriculum vitae. Yet Alan Turing’s name was hardly known outside a small circle of mathematicians and computer scientists until the present century. Why is that?
Cue music. Specifically, Mussorgsky. Perhaps Alan is best known, now, outside that academic circle, for his work on the Enigma codes. Pictures from an Exhibition was the theme music for the BBC’s series The Secret War, which was first broadcast in 1977. At home we had a small portable black-and-white television which, for family viewing, had to be placed on an unstable side table with spindly legs. The table was far too flimsy for the TV, but that’s how it had to be set up so that the long retractable aerial would actually catch enough signal to enable viewing. (Other families had big colour TV sets connected to rooftop aerials, but not the Turings.) We huddled round the set to see Episode 6, entitled ‘Still Secret’, hoping to decipher from the snowstorm of portable-TV reception what had actually happened at Bletchley Park and Alan Turing’s role in it.
Until very recently the activities of the GC&CS at Bletchley Park were a completely closed book. All participants were sworn to lifetime secrecy. In the mid-1970s only anecdotal and vague explanations could be given. None of the participants was permitted to explain; only one formal grainy photo of Alan Turing was shown in The Secret War and there was no real description of what he’d done. His was just another name in a roll call of clever and eccentric men of the professor type. After the series, life went back into the sharper focus of normal service, where few had heard of Alan Turing and absolutely nobody could spell the name correctly. And no one in the family was much the wiser about Bletchley Park or Alan Turing’s role there.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE
COMPUTING LABORATORY
27th November, 1975
Dear Mrs. Turing,
I thought you would like to know that the Government have recently made an official release of information which contains an explicit recognition of the importance of your son’s work to the development of the modern computer. They have admitted that there was a special purpose electronic computer developed for the Department of Communications at the Foreign Office in 1943. Their information release credited your son’s work with having had a considerable influence on the design of this machine.
Further, a book has recently been published in the United States entitled ‘Bodyguard of Lies’ which describes the work of the Allies during the war. This book credits your son as being the main person involved in the breaking of one of the most important German codes, the Enigma Code and thus implies that his work was of vital importance to the outcome of World War II. This latter information in the book ‘Bodyguard of Lies’ is not, of course, official information but nevertheless it will, I believe, enable many people to obtain a yet fuller understanding of your son’s genius. I am very pleased that this is now happening at last.
Yours sincerely,
Brian Randell
Sara Turing was 94 when she received this letter and living in a nursing home. She died the following March and I am unsure whether she ever had a proper opportunity to understand the true significance of her son’s achievements. A facsimile of Professor Randell’s letter is on display in the museum at Bletchley Park, next to a first-edition copy of Sara’s 1959 biography of Alan.
The first English book on Bletchley Park, The Ultra Secret by F.W. Winterbotham, was published in 1974. It did not mention Alan Turing. The first significant description of his contribution was made by Gordon Welchman in The Hut Six Story, published in 1982 – a book which (in an unhappy parallel with Alan’s own experience) led to Welchman losing his own security clearance and receiving a virulent letter of rebuke from the British government.
Stephen Kettle’s statue of Alan Turing in the museum at Bletchley Park.
The treatment of Gordon Welchman was probably the high-water mark of official resistance to disclosures about Bletchley Park. By the 1980s the tide was changing. First, Andrew Hodges’s masterly biography (and I have to acknowledge a huge debt to this work and his scholarship) explained to the world just how much there was to Alan Turing, and revealed in a majestic way the Shakespearian tragedy of Alan’s hidden life and terrible end. Even so, it took a fuller revelation of the achievements of Bletchley Park to bring Alan Turing’s story to a wider public. This has happened slowly as successive governments have felt able to release more material into the public domain; with that the role that Alan played has been put into sharper focus.
Bletchley Park itself has been the main player in a Shakespearian story of its own. After the war, the GC&CS (now rebranded as GCHQ) moved away fro
m Bletchley, leaving the mansion, the wooden huts, and the sturdy if inelegant brick-built blocks to seek other tenants. Those tenants were varied and eclectic, but by 1991 the overall ugliness of the site, the decay of the wartime buildings, and the enthusiasm for town-perimeter supermarkets meant that regeneration was planned. ‘Regeneration’ would mean bulldozing the old buildings and putting in place something new and usable by a modern world. Only when a group of veterans assembled for a farewell party was a decision reached to save the site for posterity. Imagination, determination and courage were needed in abundance to achieve that, and only recently has the majority of the Bletchley Park site been restored and reopened to visitors, who can now find out for themselves what actually happened there.
Alongside the rescue of Bletchley Park there has been spectacular growth of the market in personal computers. Before the 1990s it was rare to find that anyone had a computer in their home, and the uses to which it could be put were extremely limited. All that has changed, and with it has come curiosity as to the origins of computing and the inevitable question about ‘who invented it’. Alan’s involvement in the early days of computing became better known, not just as the person who wrote the paper on Computable Numbers, but as a designer of machinery at Bletchley and then later as a leading figure at the NPL and Manchester University.
What has remained more obscure is the work which Alan did towards the end of his life on animals and plants. The obscurity can only partly be explained by the incomplete nature of the work-in-progress on phyllotaxis. We need to look elsewhere to see why his ideas did not catch on. Perhaps it was because – as Alan foresaw – biologists have a tendency to be allergic to mathematics, or perhaps more accurately the time required to understand partial differential equations is a distraction from doing experiments, getting results, and finding funding for a research programme. However, I suspect there is more to it than that. Maybe it is because of an immense discovery in Cambridge towards the end of Alan’s life: the famous paper by Watson and Crick on the double-helix structure of DNA was published in Nature on 25 April 1953. Their work was based on the reading, through computer-generated contour maps, of X-ray crystallographs, as described by Kendrew and Bennett in their lecture to the Manchester computer conference in July 1951.
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