Alan Turing: The Enigma The Centenary Edition

by Andrew Hodges

  Mrs Turing saw the fulfilment of her worst fear, which was that Alan would not adapt to public school life. Nor was he the kind of boy who was unpopular in the house but pleased the masters in class. He failed there too. In his first term, he had been placed in a form called ‘the Shell’, with boys a year older than himself who were not good at the work. Then he was ‘promoted’, but only to the entrance form for those supposed of average ability. Alan took little notice. The masters streamed past – seventeen in those first four terms – and none understood the dreaming boy in a class of twenty-two. According to a classmate of the period:17

  he was the cruel butt of at least one master because he always managed to get ink on his collar so that the master could raise an easy laugh by saying ‘Ink on your collar again, Turing!’ A small and petty thing but it stuck in my mind as an example of how a sensitive and inoffensive boy … can have his life made hell at public school.

  Reports were issued twice a term, and the unopened envelopes would lie accusingly on the breakfast table, while Mr Turing ‘fortified himself with a couple of pipes and The Times.’ Alan would say, unconvincingly, ‘Daddy expects school reports to be like after-dinner speeches,’ or ‘Daddy should see some of the other boys’ reports.’ But Daddy was not paying for the other boys, and was seeing the hard-won fees disappear without detectable effect.

  Daddy did not mind his divergences from conventional behaviour, or at least regarded them with an amused tolerance. In fact both John and Alan took after their father, all three believing in speaking their mind and applying their ideas with a determination punctuated by moments of recklessness. Within the family, the voice of public opinion was supplied by Mama, whose tastes and judgments were thought insipidly provincial by the others. It was she, not her husband nor John, who felt called upon to reform Alan. However, Mr Turing’s tolerance did not extend to the waste of a precious public school education. His finances were particularly tight at this point. He had finally tired of exile, and had taken a small house on the edge of Guildford in Surrey, but besides paying income tax he now had to launch John on a career. He had dissuaded his son from the ICS, predicting that the 1919 reforms, introducing Indian representation into provincial government, spelt the beginning of the end. John had spiritedly thought of going into publishing instead, and his father’s pet idea was that he should go to South America to make money out of guano, but in the end it was Mrs Turing’s safer suggestion that he should be a solicitor which won. Mr Turing was obliged to pay £450 for his son to be articled and to support him for five years.

  But Alan could not see the point of the schooling so dearly won for him. Even in French, once a favourite, the master wrote ‘His lack of interest is very depressing except when something amuses him.’ He developed a particularly annoying way of ignoring the teaching during the term and then coming top in the examination. Greek, however, which he was supposed to learn for the first time at Sherborne, he ignored completely. He was placed at the bottom of the bottom set for three terms, after which the point was conceded and he was grudgingly allowed to abandon it. ‘Having secured one privileged exemption,’ O’Hanlon wrote, ‘he is mistaken in acting as though idleness and indifference will procure release from uncongenial subjects.’

  In mathematics and science the masters wrote more approving reports, but there was always something to complain about. In the summer of 1927, Alan showed to his mathematics teacher, a certain Randolph, some work he had done for himself. He had found the infinite series for the ‘inverse tangent function’, starting from the trigonometrical formula for tan1/2x.* Randolph was appropriately amazed, and told Alan’s form master that he was ‘a genius’. But the news sank like a stone in the Sherborne pond. It . merely saved Alan from a demotion, and even Randolph reported unfavourably:

  Not very good. He spends a good deal of time apparently in investigations in advanced mathematics to the neglect of elementary work. A sound groundwork is essential in any subject. His work is dirty.

  The headmaster issued a warning:

  I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at a Public School, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.

  The hint of expulsion thudded on to the breakfast table, endangering all that Mr and Mrs Turing had worked and prayed for respectively. But Alan discovered a way to beat the system that Nowell Smith called ‘the essential glory and function of the English Public School’. He spent the second half of the term isolated in the sanatorium with mumps. Emerging to perform as well as usual in the examinations, he won a prize. The headmaster commented:

  He owes his place and prize entirely to mathematics and science, but he shewed improvement on the literary side. If he goes on as he is doing now, he should do very well.

  In the summer holiday the Turings stayed again at a boarding house in Wales, this time at Ffestiniog. Alan and his mother strode up the peaks. Back at the boarding house was a Mr Neild who took great interest in Alan and gave him a book on mountain climbing in which he wrote a long inscription treating Alan’s climbs as symbolic of his eventually attaining intellectual heights. One person, for a brief moment, had taken him seriously.

  The human body, Natural Wonders explained, was a ‘Living Apothecary Shop’. It was Brewster’s way of describing the effects of the recently discovered hormones, whereby the ‘different parts of the body’ could ‘signal to one another’ with ‘chemical messages’ rather than through the nervous system. It was during 1927, when he became fifteen, that Alan gained his height, and presumably the more interesting and exciting changes took place at the same time.

  It was also time for the puberty rite of the Church of England. Alan was confirmed on 7 November 1927. Like the Officers Training Corps, confirmation was one of those duties for which everyone had to volunteer. But he did believe in it, or at least in something, as he knelt before the bishop of Salisbury and renounced for himself the world, the flesh and the devil. Nowell Smith, however, took advantage of the occasion to remark:

  I hope he takes his confirmation seriously. If he does, he will not be content to neglect obvious duties in order to indulge his own tastes, however good in themselves.

  To Alan, the ‘duties’ to translate silly sentences into Latin, polish the buttons on his Corps tunic, and suchlike, were far from ‘obvious’. He had his own kind of seriousness. The headmaster’s words would more appropriately have been directed at the outward conformity that Alec Waugh had written about:

  As is the case with most boys, Confirmation had very little effect on Gordon. He was not an atheist; he accepted Christianity in much the same way as he accepted the Conservative party. All the best people believed in it, so it was bound to be right; but at the same time it had not the slightest influence over his actions. If he had any religion at this time it was House football. …

  These were strong words for a book which had appeared in 1917 when Shirburnians were being sacrificed at the rate of one a week. It was because of such remarks that The Loom of Youth was forbidden at Sherborne, and any boy found with it was subject to an immediate beating.

  Yet the renegade author had said little more, although in different language, than was revealed by the headmaster:

  Mind you, I am not attacking the Public School system. I believe in its enormous value, above all in the sense of duty and the loyalty and the law-abidingness which it inculcates. But it cannot escape the dangers attendant upon any system of discipline, the dangers of submitting to mere routine, of adopting ready-made sentiments at second-hand, of a slavish, or perhaps I should rather say a sheepish, want of independence of character.

  ‘The system cannot escape these dangers,’ he continued, ‘but we individuals … can overcome them if we set the right way about it.’ It was, however, very difficult for individuals to go against the grain of a total organisation. As Nowell Smith said, ‘of all societies very few are so definite and easily understood as a school l
ike this … we all here live under a common life, under a common discipline. Our life is organised with great thoroughness, and the organisation is directed to a definite aim. …’ And the headmaster further observed that ‘schoolboys, however much originality they may possess as individuals, are in their conduct to the highest degree conventional.’ Nowell Smith was not a small-minded man and somehow managed to reconcile this system of education with his love of Wordsworth’s poetry, of which he was an editor. Within the classicist there beat a romantic heart, and one which perhaps troubled him.

  But the problem of inspiring ‘independence of character’ within a system of ‘mere routine’ arose principally in connection with what was called ‘dirty talk’, rather than with the more elevated questions treated by the romantic consciousness. The headmaster called upon individuals to show their true patriotism to Sherborne by avoiding it, and appealed to the boy of independent character, who

  brought up in a civilised home, has an instinctive dislike of swearing and coarse jokes and vulgar innuendoes, and yet from sheer cowardice will conceal his dislike, and perhaps force a laugh, and even begin to learn the vile jargon!

  In an all-male school there was only one kind of ‘vulgar innuendo’ possible. Contact between the boys was fraught with sexual potential, a fact which was reflected in the effective ban on associations between boys of different houses, or of different ages. These bans, and the ‘gossip’ or ‘scandal’ associated with them, were not part of the official life of a public school, but were no less real for that. Nowell Smith might condemn the fact that there was ‘one kind of language suitable for home or for a master’s ears, and another kind for the study or the dormitory,’ but it was a fact of school life. Natural Wonders explained that

  We say commonly that we think with our brains. That is true; but it is by no means the whole story. The brain has two halves, just alike, exactly as the body has. In fact, the two sides of the brain are even more precisely alike than the two hands. Nevertheless, we do all our thinking with one side only.

  It was Alec Waugh’s accusation that Sherborne provided a training in – metaphorically speaking – using two halves of the brain independently. ‘Thinking’, or rather official thinking, went on in one hemisphere, and ordinary life in the other. It was not hypocrisy: it was that no one in his senses would confuse the two worlds. It worked very well, and only went wrong when something happened to bridge the gap. Then, as Waugh said with some feeling, the real crime was to be found out.

  In 1927 the school had changed somewhat in its unofficial conventions. When the boys read The Loom of Youth (as of course they did, because it was forbidden) they were rather surprised at the tolerance shown, or at least suggested, of sexual friendships. When the games teams met their counterparts from other public schools, they were amazed at the latitude allowed at the rival establishments. Sherborne boys were at this period asserting a more puritanical, less cynical orthodoxy than that of Alec Waugh’s 1914. Nowell Smith was no longer appealing to the independent boys to stamp out what he called ‘filth’. But he had not prevented the chemical messages from flowing in four hundred budding ‘living apothecary shops’, and not even the cold baths had put a stop to ‘dirty talk’.

  Alan Turing was a boy of independent character, but this subject presented him with a problem which was the opposite of the headmaster’s. To most boys ‘scandal’ would be a quickly-forgotten bantering, alleviating the monotony of school. But to him, it touched the centre of life itself. For although he had surely learnt by now about the birds and the bees, his heart was to be elsewhere. The secret of how the babies were born was hidden well, but everyone knew there was a secret. He, however, had been made aware by Sherborne of a secret that in the outside world was not even supposed to exist. And it was his secret. For he was drawn by love and desire not only to ‘the commonest in nature’, but to his own sex.

  He was a serious person, and not what Alec Waugh called ‘the average boy’. He was not ‘in the highest degree conventional’, and he was suffering for it. For him there had to be a reason for everything; it had to make sense – and to make one sense, not two. But Sherborne was no help to him in this respect, except in making him more conscious of himself. To be independent he had to work his way through official and unofficial rules alike, and there were certainly no ‘ready-made sentiments’ for him. At Sherborne the two natural wonders of his life were ‘Stinks’ and ‘Filth’.

  If Nowell Smith sometimes had reservations about the public school system, no such doubts assailed Alan’s form-master in the autumn of 1927, a certain A.H. Trelawny Ross. A man schooled at Sherborne, who had returned there immediately from Oxford in 1911, he learnt nothing and forgot nothing in his thirty years as a housemaster.18 A stern foe of ‘slackness’, he shared none of the headmaster’s qualms about slavishness. His style of English also contrasted with that of Nowell Smith, his 1928 ‘house letter’ commencing thus:

  I have a bone to pick with my Captain of the Dayroom (height 4’ 11”). He has been telling people I am a woman-hater. This fib was started some years ago by a dame who did not find me gushing enough. My view actually is that a woman-hater has a mental kink, just as a female man-hater has, of whom there are plenty about. …

  A narrow nationalist, who had not properly learnt the lesson of loyalty to school as well as to house, Ross was little interested in his form. However, he gave them the benefit of his knowledge and experience of life. He taught Latin translation for a week, Latin prose for a week, and English for a week, this consisting of spelling, ‘how to start, write, and address a letter,’ ‘how to make a précis,’ ‘how a sonnet is built up, and by a typed summary of the main points, to show how to get good sensible, well-arranged written essays.’

  In this respect Ross urged his sensible opinion that, ‘As democracy advances, manners and morals recede’, and urged the staff to read The Rising Tide of Colour. He held that the defeat of Germany had come about ‘because she thought that Science and materialism were stronger than religious thought and observance.’ He called the scientific subjects ‘low cunning’, and would sniff and say, ‘This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!’

  Alan used the time on something he found more interesting. Ross caught him doing algebra during time devoted to ‘religious instruction’, and wrote at half-term:

  I can forgive his writing, though it is the worst I have ever seen, and I try to view tolerantly his [illegible] inexactitude and slipshod, dirty, work, inconsistent though such inexactitude is in a utilitarian, but I cannot forgive the stupidity of his attitude towards sane discussion on the New Testament.

  He ought not to be in this form of course as far as form subjects go. He is ludicrously behind.

  In December 1927, Ross placed him bottom in both English and Latin, attaching to the report an inky, blotted page which clearly indicated the negligible amount of energy conceded by Alan to the deeds of Marius and Sulla. Yet even Ross tempered his complaint with the comment ‘I like him personally’. O’Hanlon wrote of his ‘saving sense of humour’. At home, Alan’s messy experiments might be tiresome, but he had a jolly way of coming out with scientific facts, and of telling jokes against his own clumsiness, naive and free from showing off, that it was hard not to like. He was certainly foolish in not making life easier for himself; lazy and perhaps arrogant in supposing he knew what was good for him; but he was not so much obstreperous as bewildered by demands which had nothing to do with his interests. Nor did he complain at home about Sherborne, for he seemed to regard it as the fact of life which indeed it was.

  Anyone might like him personally, but as part of a system it was a very different story. At Christmas 1927 the headmaster wrote:

  He is the kind of boy who is bound to be rather a problem in any kind of school or community, being in some respects definitely anti-social. But I think in our community he has a good chance of developing his special gifts and at the same time learning some of the art of living.

/>   With that judgment Nowell Smith suddenly retired, perhaps not sorry to relinquish the contradictions of his community, and the problem of Alan Turing’s independent character.

  The new year of 1928 marked a period of change for Sherborne. Nowell Smith’s successor was a C. L. F. Boughey, who had been an assistant master at Marlborough. By chance, the headmaster’s departure had coincided with the death of Carey, the school games master. Between them, as ‘Chief’ and ‘The Bull’, the two had divided the Sherborne world into mens and corpus, and ruled them respectively for twenty years. Carey was succeeded in his role by that bulldog figure Ross.

  It also marked a change for Alan. His housemaster asked Blamey, an earnest and also rather isolated boy a year older than Alan, to share a two-boy study with him. Blamey was to try to make Alan more tidy, to ‘help him conform, and try and show him there were other things in life besides mathematics.’ In the first objective there was a lamentable failure; in the second he came up against the difficulty that Alan ‘had wonderful concentration, and would become absorbed in some abstruse problem.’ Blamey would consider it his duty to ‘interrupt and say it is time to go to chapel, to games, or afternoon classes’ as the case might be, he being a well-meaning person, who believed in making the system run as smoothly as possible.19 O’Hanlon had written at Christmas of Alan that