Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

by Andrew Hodges

  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 like 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 unswerving 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 am
ount 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

  No doubt he is very aggravating, and he should know by now that I don’t care to find him boiling heaven knows what witches’ brew by the aid of two guttering candles on a naked window sill. However, he has borne his afflictions very cheerfully, and undoubtedly has taken more trouble, e.g. with physical training. I am far from hopeless.

  Alan’s only regret regarding the ‘witches’ brew’ was that O’Hanlon ‘had missed seeing at their height the very fine colours produced by the ignition of the vapour produced by super-heated candle-grease.’ Alan was still fascinated by chemistry, but not interested in doing it in a way that pleased anyone else. Mathematics and science reports such as ‘… marred by inaccuracy, untidiness, and bad style … frightfully untidy both in written and experimental work …’ continued to reflect his lack of ability to communicate effectively, while admitting that he was ‘very promising’. ‘His manner of presenting work is still disgusting,’ wrote O’Hanlon, ‘and takes away much of the pleasure it should give.’ ‘He doesn’t understand what bad manners bad writing and messy figures are.’ Ross had passed him on to another form, but he was still placed nearly at the bottom in the spring of 1928. ‘His mind seems rather chaotic at present and he finds great difficulty in expressing himself. He should read more,’ wrote the master, perhaps more enlightened than Ross.

  It was in doubt whether he could take the School Certificate and go on to the sixth form. O’Hanlon and the science masters wanted him to try, and the rest opposed it. The decision had to be made by the new headmaster, who knew nothing of Alan. Boughey had proved himself a new broom, upsetting sacred traditions of the school. The head of the Classical Sixth was no longer automatically the head of school. The prefects had been alienated when he lectured the whole school on ‘dirty talk’. (They felt he was judging Sherborne by Marlborough standards.) The staff were horrified when he issued a fiat, in front of the school, that there would be no memorial to Carey in the chapel. This incident sealed his doom. The official history20 would record that

  A natural shyness could give an impression of self-esteem and indifference to school affairs that had perhaps no great foundation in fact … he had to fight against an ill health that was largely the result of war service and he found it increasingly hard to make the public appearances or even to provide the constant private accessibility which a headmaster’s position inevitably demands.

  Whether as cause or effect, he was ‘poisoned’, as Brewster would have put it, by alcohol. The school settled down to a power struggle between Ross and Boughey, and it was the fight between old and new that settled Alan’s future, for Boughey over-ruled Ross on principle and allowed him to be entered for the School Certificate.

  During the holidays, Alan’s father coached him in English. Mr Turing had a great love of literature, although he did not have a mind for abstract ideas. He could recite from memory pages from the Bible, Kipling and humorous Edwardian novels like Three Men in a Boat. All this was wasted on Alan, whose set work was Hamlet. For a brief moment he pleased his father by saying that at least there was one line he liked. The pleasure was dissipated when Alan explained it was the last line: ‘Exeunt, bearing off the bodies….’

  For the summer term of 1928, Alan was moved to yet another form, that of the Reverend W. J. Bensly, to prepare for the examinations. He saw no reason to depart from his usual pattern, and continued to be placed at the bottom by Bensly, who rashly offered to donate a billion pounds to any charity named by Alan, should he pass in Latin. O’Hanlon, more perceptively, had predicted:

  He has as good brains as any boy that’s been here. They are good enough for him to get through even in ‘useless’ subjects like Latin, French and English.

  O’Hanlon saw some of the papers that Alan submitted. They were ‘astonishingly legible and tidy’. He passed with credits in English, French, elementary mathematics, additional mathematics, physics, chemistry – and Latin. Bensly never paid up, authority having the privilege of being able to change the rules.

  The School Certificate passed, the system allowed him a small part to play, that of the ‘maths brain’. There was no mathematical sixth at Sherborne, as at some schools, notably Winchester. There was a science sixth for whom mathematics, Alan’s best subject, was regarded as subsidiary. Nor was Alan promoted to the sixth form immediately; he was held back in the fifth for the autumn of 1928, but allowed to join the sixth form for their mathematics classes. These were taught by a young master, Eperson, just a year down from Oxford and a gentle, cultured person, the kind of master who would constantly be played up by the boys. Here was the chance for the system to redeem itself at last, the spirit breaking through the letter of the law. And in a negative way, Eperson did what Alan wanted, by leaving him alone:21

  All that I can claim is that my deliberate policy of leaving him largely to his own devices and standing by to assist when necessary, allowed his natural mathematical genius to progress uninhibited …

  He found that Alan always preferred his own methods to those supplied by the text book, and indeed Alan had gone his own way all the time, making few concessions to the school system. During the machinations over the School Certificate, or even before, he had been studying the theory of relativity from Einstein’s own popular account.22 This employed only elementary mathematics, but gave full rein to ideas which went far beyond anything in the school syllabus. For if Natural Wonders had introduced him to the post-Darwinian world, Einstein took him into the twentieth-century revolution of physics. Alan produced a small red Memo Book of notes, which he gave to his mother. />
  ‘Einstein here throws doubt,’ Alan commented, ‘on whether Euclid’s axioms, when applied to rigid bodies, hold …. He therefore sets out to test … the Galilei-Newtonian laws or axioms.’ He had identified the crucial point, that Einstein doubted the axioms. Not for Alan the ‘obvious duties’, for nothing was obvious to him. His brother John, who by now regarded Alan with a rather patronising, but not hostile amusement, held that

  You could take a safe bet that if you ventured on some self-evident proposition, as for example that the earth was round, Alan would produce a great deal of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it was almost certainly flat, ovular, or much the same shape as a Siamese cat which had been boiled for fifteen minutes at a temperature of one thousand degrees Centigrade.

  Cartesian doubt came as an incomprehensible intrusion into Alan’s family and school environment, an intrusion that the English coped with more by laughter than by persecution. But doubt being a very difficult and rare state of mind, it had taken the whole intellectual world a very long time to ask whether the ‘Galilei-Newtonian laws or axioms’, apparently ‘self-evident’, were actually true. Only by the late nineteenth century was it recognised that they were inconsistent with the known laws of electricity and magnetism. The implications were frightening, and it had needed Einstein to take the step of saying that the assumed basis of mechanics was actually incorrect, thereby creating the Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. This then proved inconsistent with Newton’s laws of gravity, and to remove these contradictions Einstein had gone even further, casting doubt even on Euclid’s axioms of space to create the General Theory of Relativity in 1915. The point of what Einstein had done did not lie in this or that experiment. It lay, as Alan saw, in the ability to doubt, to take ideas seriously, and to follow them to a logical if upsetting conclusion. ‘Now he has got his axioms,’ wrote Alan, ‘and is able to proceed with his logic, discarding the old ideas of time, space, etc.’