There is always something pleasing about the British propensity for bureaucratic niceties throughout periods in which it seems the entire world is having a nervous breakdown. Given that one of the reasons for moving out of London at all was to put the codebreakers beyond the range of Soviet nuclear weaponry; and given that from Malaya to Korea, the appetite for war seemed not to have been slaked in the last few years of bloodshed, one might have assumed that there would be an air of urgency about pulling off an incredibly complex moving exercise. There was apparently none. As soon as Cheltenham Council had recovered from its surprise, and expressed its enthusiasm, there were others in Whitehall who suddenly wondered if the department might not be moved rather more economically elsewhere. Doubly amusingly, among the last people to have heard about any such prospective relocation was the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin.
Also crucial to the project was that the actual buildings to house the cryptologists were either already owned by the government (as the Benhall Farm buildings were) or freshly built; the danger of a commercially owned building being compromised with enemy spying equipment was too great. These were the very earliest days of electronic surveillance but already it was possible to get functioning bugs into walls and ceilings. The site had to be utterly clean.
As the move began in 1952, one of the institution’s most consulted veterans was entering a period of huge personal crisis. Up in the wet and soot of Manchester, Alan Turing’s relationship with the young Arnold Murray was developing and becoming more complex and jagged. They talked, they met for meals, they slept together at Turing’s house in Wilmslow. Murray was from a working-class background; Turing inhabited a world he had never even glimpsed before. It was a world of ideas and of extraordinarily fascinating technology. Murray was captivated when Turing told him of the work that was taking place on fashioning electronic brains. Regardless of his lack of schooling, Murray was apparently open to discussing computers, psychology and the mechanics of the mind. Nonetheless, he and Turing operated in parallel dimensions.
At the time, Turing had begun a sideline in broadcasting, accepting invitations to give talks and take part in panel discussions on BBC Radio. Before the advent of mass television viewing, this in itself was a brush with celebrity. There was the possibility of Turing becoming a household name. He was also being sought out right the way across the scientific community for conferences on computing and artificial intelligence. He did not appear to sense the peril that a continued relationship with Arnold Murray could bring. According to Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges, the one subject that should have been brought up at the very start of their association was money. Thin-faced Murray was poor; as their assignations became more regular, Turing was prepared to pull out his wallet and give him cash. But Murray angrily rejected an initial offer: direct payment would make him a rent boy.
However, one morning after Murray had stayed over, Turing discovered money missing from his wallet. Possibly now he smelled the danger; can he have realised that whatever he did now, it was too late? He wrote to Murray, explaining straightforwardly that their association was at an end. But not long afterwards, Murray presented himself at Turing’s front door, indignant and angry. He demanded to know why he had been dismissed so curtly; and he flatly denied having taken any money from Turing’s wallet.
But at the same time, he asked Turing if he might have a loan of £3 because he had bought a new suit on credit, or hire purchase as it was called then, and he needed to repay an instalment of debt. Turing gave the young man £3; but a few days later, he received a letter from Murray asking for another £7. Turing, rather than simply handing money over, demanded to know the name and the address of Murray’s tailor, so that he could check that there really was such an arrangement. This demand resulted in Arnold Murray once more presenting himself on Turing’s doorstep in a fury of hurt indignation: why did Turing not trust him? The result of this was that Turing eventually relented and wrote out a cheque for £7.
Hodges suggests that one of Turing’s impulses upon first meeting Murray was to lift him out of the painfully circumscribed life he was living, to feed him ideas, knowledge. And Murray had initially seemed very open to the sorts of discussions he would never have had a chance of getting anywhere else. Did he have any kind of affection for Turing? Or was he simply a deprived young man who had seen an opportunity? Possibly both cases were true.
Events took a chillier turn when Turing returned home one day to find that his house had been burgled. There seemed to be minimal reasoning behind the items that were taken, among which were some shirts, fish knives and an open bottle of sherry. Turing reported the robbery to the police, who came around and dusted for fingerprints. There was an itching suspicion at the back of Turing’s mind; perhaps anyone else might have left it at that, heedful of the peril ahead, but there was an impatient directness about Turing. He wrote to Arnold Murray, demanding the repayment of that £7. On top of this, he asked that Murray should not call round at his house any more. Why did Turing imagine that Murray would accede to this? If innocent, the implied accusation would have been stingingly hurtful. If guilty, the young man would be scrambling to find a way to cover himself.
And so Murray ignored Turing and once more arrived at his front door. In the bitter argument that ensued, he apparently threatened to go to the police and tell them ‘everything’, meaning his illegal relationship with Turing. Turing was, according to Hodges, perfectly unmoved by this suggestion of blackmail and invited the young man to ‘do his worst’.2 At this Murray calmed down and somehow the atmosphere became amiable enough for Turing to offer him a drink. And it was during the course of the ensuing discussion – Turing telling Murray about the burglary – that the fateful wheels started moving. Artlessly, Murray told Turing that even though he was surprised the robbery had taken place, he nonetheless knew who had done it: an acquaintance of his called Harry. The two of them, old friends, had apparently met up and after hearing about Murray’s connection with the great scientist, Harry had announced his plan to carry out a burglary.
Armed with this intelligence, Turing did a curious thing. He went back to the police, reported his suspicion of this new suspect, and invented a story about how he had come to hold this suspicion. Would it not have made more sense simply to leave the police to get on with their own investigation? Turing also leaned on Arnold to try to get some of those stolen items back. But the act of going to the police a second time was certain to make Turing himself an object of some suspicion: how would a university academic in a middle-class household, complete with housekeeper, possibly have any kinds of connections that would lead him to burglars and petty criminals?
Curiously, it was around this time that the entire atmosphere concerning sexual orientation had changed; throughout the war, there was no secret about Turing’s homosexuality. He had propositioned his colleague Peter Twinn (who gently turned him down); in America, he had sought out sexual encounters without blinking. It was hardly as if the authorities were unaware, and even though such acts were strictly speaking illegal (on both sides of the Atlantic), there had never been any sense that anyone was interested in seeing Alan Turing prosecuted.
But then had come the post-war hurricane of Venona; the horrifying revelations of treachery so deep within the establishment. And with this came the repercussive paranoia: the sense of invisible enemies within. In part, homosexuality represented a blackmail risk, agents and operatives lured into stupid encounters with Soviet agents who could then leverage their moments of weakness. But there might also have been something more going on, a sense that homosexuality was in itself as subversive as Communism. A feeling that it was a kind of sexual treachery. Certainly, the new ferocity with which gay men were pursued by police and by the wider media could not be explained in wholly rational terms. We see this in the cases of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, journalist Peter Wildeblood and the actor John Gielgud, all arrested and prosecuted in that strange, febrile period, when Sunday newspapers labelled homo
sexual practices as evil.
Part of the tragedy of Alan Turing was his sheer incomprehension that the state could regard his sexuality as a crime. When the detectives returned to his home to question him further – and to ask exactly how it was that his informant knew so much of underworld activity – Turing responded quickly and openly to their suspicious questions about the nature of his relationship with Murray. He went further and told the detectives – who seemed at least impressed, not only his by honesty, but also by what they saw as his bravery – that he thought that there was some Parliamentary commission looking into the legalisation of such acts. In this, Turing was wrong but also ahead of his time: the Wolfenden Report, which recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality, was published in 1957, and it was not until 1967 that it was finally permitted in law. For Turing, though, a nightmare lay ahead.
No entrapment had been necessary (unlike in so many other cases); the Wilmslow detectives had their man. Turing and Murray were both charged with gross indecency. Despite his role in the burglary, and the cold extortion of money from Turing, there were a few who might have felt a pang of sympathy for the otherwise chilly Murray. He lost his job at the printing firm instantly. However, as Andrew Hodges relates, Murray was to be conditionally discharged; and although the unwelcome and hostile attention of neighbours made it impossible for him to stay in Manchester, he pitched up in London’s more Bohemian quarters, learned the guitar and fell in with a set of beatniks and poets.
For Turing, the outlook was bleaker. First he had to tell his mother and his brother of his orientation since, unlike his working peers, they had had no idea. After his arrest and his bail, he continued working and attending scientific conferences, and his colleagues were broadly sympathetic, telling him that it was unlikely that any sentence would be particularly severe.
But when the trial and the sentence came in April 1952, it turned out to be savage. It was not the two years in prison generally recommended in such cases; instead, the punishment was more futuristic and frighteningly untested: ‘organo-therapy’. In essence, Turing was required to submit to a course of oestrogen injections, the idea of which was a form of chemical castration. The course was to last for a year.
There was that, plus the unpublicised loss of his security clearance. It is difficult to imagine just how much of a psychological blow that must have been to him. The horrific and humiliating side effects of the ‘therapy’ – Turing became bloated and developed breasts – was one thing. The idea of being shut out, in perpetuity, from the most important secret work in the land must have been worse.
It has to be said that he had not been forsaken by his colleagues. Quite the reverse. Turing asked not only Max Newman but also Hugh Alexander to testify to his character throughout the trial. Either might easily have found a way of declining to do so. Neither did. Max Newman stoutly defended Turing; when asked if he would have such a man in his own home, he replied that as a matter of fact, he frequently did. Hugh Alexander went even further. Bearing in mind that no-one in that court-room, including the judge, would have had the slightest idea about Bletchley Park or GCHQ, Alexander – without going into any specifics – simply described Turing as a ‘national asset’. It was also made clear to the judge that Turing had been appointed an OBE; again, no explanation was given for it, but the honour was implicitly for war work.
The chemical treatment was crude; the side effects distressing. But Turing got on with his work, and there was no sense of being shunned by colleagues and peers in the realms of mathematics and computing. Yet he had been shut out of quite another world. There was a further consequence: as a result of his new criminal record, he would no longer be permitted to enter the United States. Any possibility that he might, like so many other former Bletchley friends, find some means of continuing that Atlantic-crossing cryptological relationship were stamped upon for good.
It is also possible to imagine the frustration that Hugh Alexander felt about the entire case. Turing was an asset in many senses. He was not, though, the only asset that the cryptanalysts would lose in 1952. Turing, before his trial, had also written to his very old friend – and sometime fiancée – Joan Clarke, who was still with GCHQ at Eastcote. He explained in that letter that the ‘homosexual tendencies’ that he had confessed to at the termination of their romance were rather more pronounced and indeed active than he had perhaps suggested to her. As always, Joan was forbearing. And any pain that she might have still felt as a result of their break-up ten years beforehand would most certainly have been erased by the development of a new relationship, this time with a fellow Eastcote cryptanalyst: Lieutenant Colonel J (Jock) Murray, a 42-year-old officer with extensive experience of India and also of the Baltic region.
Lieutenant Colonel Murray had not been at Bletchley Park; his had been a straightforward military career that had taken him from Ahmednagar to Rawalpindi, and also to Estonia where, in the 1930s, he had become an expert interpreter skilled in Russian. In India, he had served with the Bombay Grenadiers. Murray’s move into Military Intelligence came after his own lively and curious intellect had been noticed. Throughout the war, he continued to serve largely in India and throughout the Far East. When it all ended, he was transferred to work with the War Office. He retired from the military in 1948, aged 38; but such a mind was too valuable to be allowed to drift into civilian life. He was approached to join the cryptologists in Eastcote in 1948 and his work was greatly appreciated.
It was in those monotonous blocks that he first met Joan Clarke. As rare pictures of Joan with her Eastcote colleagues show, here is a striking woman surrounded by male peers, dark-haired, confident, the round spectacles denoting her studiousness, the wide smile suggesting a happy nature. Aside from the few American women who also worked there in the 1940s, GCHQ was an overwhelmingly male institution. Joan Clarke, who knew how much she was capable of achieving, looks very safe within her skin in all these smiling images. This was the woman with whom Jock Murray was soon to find such a strong connection.
The year 1952 was pivotal for them both. First, it was then that they got married. This was an era, as mentioned, in which newly married women were expected to drop their jobs instantly. There was little in the way of argument about it; it was simply one of those social norms so embedded as to be relatively unquestioned. It might perhaps had been different for the newly married Mrs Joan Murray – her abilities, after all, were rated very highly among her male superiors – were it not for the fact that her new husband was suffering ill-health. It turned out that Murray would have to be the one who would have to withdraw from GCHQ: he simply could not continue working in such a pressurised environment while his health was so poor. So both Jock and Joan stepped down in 1952, moving to a small Scottish village called Crail, on the east coast between Edinburgh and Dundee.
How does one fill the vacuum left by such crucial and fascinating work? Murray had long had a fascination for antique coins; he was an expert numismatist. Joan was beguiled by this and swiftly took up the pursuit herself. Murray had become mesmerised via the history of medals in India; it was a small step to the parallel study of ancient coinage, and the complex meanings encoded within the images and lettering. He and Joan also threw themselves into deep study of the history of Scotland. They would spend hours together in the archives of the small local town hall, examining records that stretched back as far as the 16th century. Again, there are aspects of history that are analogous to codebreaking: the ability to work with fragments of intelligence from scattered items of documentation, and the skill at interrogating these texts in order to create a simulacrum of the world.
Given both the secrecy and the privacy surrounding cryptological staff, little is known of the exact nature of Murray’s illness. But it is known that it caused him to be hospitalised, that he required several major operations, and that it caused him some discomfort and pain for a number of years. But those who knew him testified to his constant cheerful good nature throughout that period, as well as
his inexhaustible appetite for his esoteric studies. Equally, it is tempting to imagine that this is not quite the sort of life that Mrs Murray had intended for herself: a London-born Cambridge- educated codebreaking expert, now away up in what was then a rather remote part of the country. But it is equally clear that she threw herself into this life with real conviction and good humour.
This was not the end of their codebreaking careers; very far from it. Gradually, with painful slowness, Lieutenant Colonel Murray’s health improved (the keen winds of the Fife coastline might have helped somewhat), and it was clear in the years that elapsed that the couples’ former colleagues at GCHQ were consistently issuing invitations for them to return. The Cold War was not losing any of its intensity. Such expertise was needed.
And so it was that a few years later, in 1962 – not long before the outbreak of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviets that brought the planet dramatically close to a lethal exchange of atomic warheads – that Jock and Joan Murray returned to a grateful GCHQ. The assets were back in place. Pleasingly, they did not entirely leave their old Crail lives behind: when they moved down to Cheltenham to be within cycling distance of work, they also brought with them that passion for rare coin collecting. And so it was that the Cheltenham Numismatists Association suddenly found itself with two fresh experts, seemingly from out of the blue, bringing a whole new life to the society.
Given the deliberate facelessness of the organisation, one of the striking elements of the early years of GCHQ was the warmth that it had for so many of its personnel. Part of this was the ever increasing depth of secrecy: the codebreakers knew that they were in a very select company. But it was also to do with the vast and unfathomable stress of the work; the need to decrypt, translate, analyse messages from hostile regions with absolute pinpoint accuracy, and at lightning speed, for fear that at any moment the enemy might be making a strike. Working with that ever present threat thick in the air seemed to encourage an outward air of amused insouciance in the codebreakers. There could never be any question of their profound seriousness; indeed, the intensity of this life had a sort of addictive quality that made those who had been ordained to it very loath to give it up. But this meant that, in order to compensate, their off-duty personas could be as light as helium. It also meant that they were qualified to take on extra-mural challenges with a sort of tap-dancing elegance, which others would have baulked at. Though he worked very far into the shadows, senior cryptologist Hugh Alexander was about to step out into the glare of the limelight in order to deliver a heavily coded message to the Communist world about the intellectual firepower that Great Britain could still summon.
The Spies of Winter Page 34
