But the telephone call to Hanslope was not made at Darwin’s behest. It was made on the initiative of his subordinate, Womersley, who had been selected as head of the new Division on 27 September 1944. Womersley, a bulky Yorkshireman then attached to the Ministry of Supply and a member of the interdepartmental committee, was probably the nominee of D. R. Hartree, who in mathematical matters was a power behind the Darwin throne. Womersley had appeared as joint author with Hartree of a 1937 paper on the application of the differential analyser to partial differential equations.
The official research programme for the new Division in October 1944 included ‘Investigation of the possible adaptation of automatic telephone equipment to scientific computing’ and ‘Development of electronic counting device suitable for rapid computing’. Behind these words there were more definite intentions to imitate the American developments. Hartree, with his differential analyser at Manchester University, already had an interest in computing machinery, and had a finger in many wartime scientific projects. In the high levels where he moved, some details of the secret Aiken and ENIAC machines filtered through. Such knowledge was reflected in Womersley’s report in December 1944, which, though it placed emphasis upon building a large differential analyser, remarked on the speed of electronics, and suggested that ‘a machine can be made to perform certain cycles of operations mechanically … the instructions to the machine [could] depend on the result of previous operations … the problem is already being tackled in the USA.’ The press release29 in April 1945, when the new Division was officially inaugurated, only made mention of ‘analytical engines, including the differential analyser and other machines both existing and awaiting invention … it is certain that this field is capable of great developments, but it is more difficult to predict in what directions they will lie.’ But it seemed that the direction in which to look was westwards, and in February 1945, Womersley had been packed off on a two-month tour of the computing installations of the United States, where on 12 March he was the first non-American to be allowed access to the ENIAC, and to be informed of the EDVAC report.
By 15 May, Womersley was back at the NPL ‘revising his plans’. The American revelations were enough to give anyone pause for thought. But they held a particular meaning for Womersley, who held one very unusual card up his sleeve. Before the war, while employed at Woolwich Arsenal on practical computation, he had learnt of Turing machines. Even more remarkably, for a mathematician-in-the-street, he had not been daunted by the abstruse language of mathematical logic. According to his claim:30
1937–38 Paper Computable Numbers seen by JRW and read. JRW met C. I. Norfolk, a telephone engineer who had specialised in totalisator design and discussed with him the planning of a ‘Turing Machine’ using automatic telephone equipment, Rough schematics prepared, and possibility of submitting a proposal to NPL discussed. It was decided that machine would be too slow to be effective.
June 1938 JRW purchased a uniselector and some relays on Petty Cash at RD Woolwich for spare-time experiments. Experiments abandoned owing to pressure of work on ballistics.
On seeing Aiken’s machine at Harvard, Womersley had written home to his wife that he saw it as ‘Turing in hardware’. And thus it was that in June 1945, according to his account:
JRW meets Professor M. H. A. Newman.* Tells Newman he wishes to meet Turing. Meets Turing same day and invites him home. JRW shows Turing the first report on the EDVAC and persuades him to join NPL staff, arranges interview and convinces Director and Secretary.
Alan would be appointed a Temporary Senior Scientific Officer at £800 per annum. Don Bayley, when told of this, did not think much of the rank, but Alan told him that it was the highest to which they could recruit, and that he had been assured of a promotion within a few weeks. It was not quite ‘Fivepence farthing for one – twopence for two’, as of the eggs that the Sheep offered Alice in the Looking Glass shop, but at £600 for naval Enigma, and £800 for the digital computer, the British government had certainly acquired a bargain in Alan Turing. Alan claimed that Womersley had asked him whether he knew ‘the integral of cos x’, which as Don Bayley immediately said, was a ludicrously trivial question to ask any prospective SSO, let alone a B-star Wrangler. ‘Ah’, said Alan, in a joke against his own capacity for carelessness, ‘but what if I had got it wrong?’
On his side, Womersley expressed himself to colleagues as delighted with the capture of Alan Turing for his new department. And for Alan, who was careless about rank and terms of appointment, it was still the exciting prospect of having the British government itself support the realisation of a Universal Turing Machine. He had done his bit for them; now they could return the compliment. The NPL had been founded ‘to break down the barrier between theory and practice’, and this was exactly what Alan proposed to do. Whatever his doubts about the Civil Service, it offered him a chance. When he bid farewell to Joan Clarke and the others tidying up Hut 8, he talked excitedly of the future of automatic computers, and reassured them that mathematicians would not be put out of work.
In the general election of July 1945 he voted for the Labour party. ‘Time for a change’, he said vaguely later. It was hardly remarkable for one who belonged to a generation that had been champing at the bit while the ‘broad-bottomed’, as G. H. Hardy used to call them, ruled the roost. The conflicts of ‘the small back room’ were reflected in the hustings. The war had obliged the planning and state control that had been urged upon deaf ears in the 1930s, and the Labour party offered to preserve what Churchill proposed to dismantle – as Lloyd George had done in 1919. But Alan Turing was no Labour party stalwart, no more than he had been a ‘political’ person in the 1930s. The Abdication had roused him more than the Beveridge Report. As an admirer of Bernard Shaw, a reader of the New Statesman, and a wartime scientist up against the blinkered inertia of the old regime, he would approve of reform. But organisation and reorganisation did not really interest him.
His attitudes still had more in common with the democratic individualism of J. S. Mill than with the planners of 1945. But he did not share Mill’s interest in commercial competition. Indeed, he did not know anything about it. His life had been in interlocking schools, universities and government service. In his undergraduate days business had been a holiday, and the small Beuttell and Morcom firms were themselves exceptions to the twentieth-century trend, representing a spirit which had largely died with Gladstone. And during the war, the contractors for equipment had been working on carte blanche government contracts in which ordinary considerations of profit had no application.
Money, commerce and competition had played no obvious part in the central developments in which Alan Turing was enmeshed, developments which had allowed him in many ways to remain the idealistic undergraduate. His retention of a primitive liberalism, his ‘championing of the underdog’ as it was seen at Hanslope, like his obsession with the absolutely basic, had the flavour of more Utopian thinkers than Mill. Tolstoy was a figure that he brought to one person’s mind,31 and Claude Shannon had perceived him as like Nietzsche, ‘beyond Good and Evil’. But perhaps closer in spirit than either of these, and certainly closer to home, was another late nineteenth-century figure who had lurked more in the back room of political consciousness. That awkward figure Edward Carpenter, while sharing much in common with each of these European thinkers, had criticised Tolstoy for a restrictive attitude to sex and Nietzsche for overbearing arrogance. And in Carpenter, at a time when socialism was supposed to be about better organisation, lay the example of an English socialist not interested in organisation but in science, sex and simplicity – and with bringing these into mutual harmony. Born in 1844, he had written words32 during the First World War that already fitted a small boy at St Leonards-on-Sea, and which Alan Turing had continued to act out quite regardless of the opinions of more respectable persons:
I used to go and sit on the beach at Brighton and dream, and now I sit on the shore of human life and dream practically the same dreams. I
remember about the time that I mention – or it may have been a trifle later – coming to the distinct conclusion that there were only two things really worth living for – the glory and beauty of Nature, and the glory and beauty of human love and friendship. And to-day I still feel the same. What else indeed is there? All the nonsense about riches, fame, distinction, ease, luxury and so forth – how little does it amount to! It really is not worth wasting time over. These things are so obviously second-hand affairs, useful only and in so far as they may lead to the first two, and short of their doing that liable to become odious and harmful. To become united and in line with the beauty and vitality of Nature (but, Lord help us! we are far enough off from that at present), and to become united with those we love – what other ultimate object in life is there? Surely all these other things, these games and examinations, these churches and chapels, these district councils and money markets, these top-hats and telephones and even the general necessity of earning one’s living – if they are not ultimately for that, what are they for?
Behind all the foibles and funny stories, and behind all the fuss made about his appearance and manners, lay the fact that as a boy he had never been able to understand how anyone could see life in any other way than this, and that at thirty-three only the war against Nazi Germany had dented that clinging to first principles.
There was a closer parallel than this, for Carpenter had been a Cambridge mathematician, and one fascinated by the same theme of mind in a deterministic world. He had the same upper-middle-class background, a parallel interest in biological growth. And he had abandoned Christian belief, while identifying himself as a homosexual. His book Homogenic Love, appearing in 1895, had been the first English work to place homosexual desire within a contemporary psychological and social context (rather than in that of ancient Greece), and to do so as part of a wholesale attack on ‘fixed moral codes’ – very close to the ‘general rules’ that Keynes, much more privately, rejected. And although not entirely relinquishing the idea that homosexuals had some special part to play, an idea not found in Alan Turing’s book, the burden of his argument was that ‘homogenic love’ should be part of the general give and take, the creative anarchy of life – neither good nor evil in itself, but as sociable, as selfish, as messy as anything else.
By 1945 this could be taken as Alan Turing’s view, for if sometimes he had seen his sexuality as a cross to bear, it was more and more a fact of life, one as much at the heart of what he was as that equally unasked-for, equally amoral, love of natural science. But in defending this view in 1945 he was taking a line that in fifty years hardly anyone had dared say in public more clearly than Carpenter. Not all the modernity of the war had changed this fact, and since his consciousness of sex had become clearer in 1933, there had been little but ‘semi-platonic sentimentality’ allowed.* Others, of course, were more content than he to remain the deceivers of men. And they were wise in worldly terms, for it remained a taboo more dangerous than the Soviet heresy. Untouched by electronic revolutions, unmentioned in the debates of 1945, it was not a subject for political people. But Alan Turing was not one of those.
The early Labour Party had been open to Carpenter’s ideals of a more simple life, and even of a New Morality. His naively lucid questioning of what life was for, and of what socialism was going to make it, had played a part in its more innocent days. Even when in power, in 1924, the first Labour cabinet had sent him a letter of thanks on his eightieth birthday. But the thirties had put paid to that. In 1937 George Orwell had ridiculed what remained of such impractical, distracting naiveté in The Road to Wigan Pier:
One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England.
In 1944 it was E. M. Forster, a liberal rather than a socialist, who remembered Carpenter’s centenary, and his cautious eulogy33 was that of a man forgotten. Both he and Lowes Dickinson had been influenced by Carpenter’s ideas – the happy pastoral ending in the ‘greenwood’ of the still unpublished Maurice was drawn from Carpenter’s rather scandalous life near Sheffield with a younger working-class man – and the more democratic side of King’s College, its lack of ‘stuffiness’ as well as its comparative openness to sexual dissent, owed something to his legacy.
The Labour party still had Carpenter’s song England Arise! as well as The Red Flag, but the shift of support to it in 1945 reflected the success of new men and modern methods rather than the sentiments of either anthem. There was now a political consciousness of the importance of science (though hardly in the way Carpenter would have wanted), but not of sex or simplicity. In 1937 – just as the first large calculators began the arithmetical relay race – George Orwell had been as repelled by the creed of ‘mechanization, rationalization, modernization’, as by the vegetarians and simple-lifers. But the war had brought it to power, and for good reason: Britain would have succumbed without it.
Orwell escaped from the dichotomy by appealing to an England of ‘ordinary, decent’ people. Alan Turing might have liked to do the same, but he was now hopelessly saddled with a mind full of extraordinary, indecent contradictions. It contained the greatest development of ‘mechanization, rationalization, modernization’ of the war, and another which was the greatest ever conceived, while still longing for ‘the commonest in nature’, and while still being precisely what Orwell meant by a ‘sex maniac’. He could not avoid these things, and having surrendered half of his mind to the government, was not free to try. He had done something, in a way that Orwell had not, and had passed the point of no return.
The paradox was not his alone, although his life took it to a peculiar intensity. The war had dealt a sharp blow to ‘fixed moral codes’, with social changes accelerated, old authorities questioned and new talents employed. Everyone had been made conscious of the defects of the old system, and more insidiously, of the fact that systems could be changed when survival made it necessary. To the dismay of conservative forces, British society had undergone a second and more thorough shaking up, this time with knowledge and ideas communicated to those excluded from participation in peace – ordinary men, the young, and even women. Bletchley Park had seen this happen as much as anywhere else. It had not been all a story of ‘men of the Professor type’; there had been boys of eighteen, ‘female mathematicians’, and Post Office engineers who had risen from the bottom of the ladder, all playing crucial parts.
In other ways, too, the consciousness of being a community, sharing a very limited common wealth, had brought people closer to the ‘least waste of energy’ of Alan Turing, spartan but not joyless. Even at a place such as Hanslope, enmeshed in the technical machinations of the secret service, the pleasures of Mess Nights, mountain-walking holidays, mushroom-cooking, games and self-education had taken on that enhanced value that Carpenter had rather laboriously tried to explain as ‘the Simplification of Life’.
There was a new spirit, and yet it was a spirit within a machine. A much enlarged state apparatus, and the more centralised economy, were the legacy of the great battle for intelligence and coordination. This time it would not be undone. And it was the machine, rather than glimpses of workers’ control, that inspired Ernest Bevin:34 ‘Calculation of profits and all the other things that have cluttered up progress in the past has to go and the great genius of our managers and technicians is being given full play….’ It was true. Unhindered by wasteful competition and by the false economies of public parsimony, the Government Code and Cypher School and the Post Office had proved capable of managing fantastic feats. Now the development of the electronic computer was being taken over by the National Physical Laboratory for the public good. It deserved two cheers, as Forster would say, two cheers for managerial socialism. But management and techniques had not been the whole story, important as they might be. There had been something else, something now fading away while th
ey waited for the other war to finish.
With Hitler out of the way, the games of Red and White could resume. Attlee replaced Churchill at the Potsdam conference when the results of the British election were known. Alan Turing went to Germany at the same time, in a party made up of five British and six American experts to report on German progress in communications. Flowers was one of the other British members. They left on 15 July, and arrived in Paris on a fine hot day. Here they were to meet the Americans, but the military headquarters had no idea who they were, so they took the day off. Late in the afternoon the telegrams from London came through, and they were assigned to the military transit camp, a hotel near the Madeleine. The same thing happened next day at Frankfurt when they reported to the American army headquarters in the I. G. Farben building. It was Patton’s area, and they were warned not to continue into Bavaria without permission from his staff, or they would be arrested by the military police. After another day they set off in a jeep along the pot-holed roads, going ‘hell for leather’ over 200 miles to make their destination before nightfall. They were stopped thirty-seven times by the MPs because, being civilians, they had no tin hats.
So Alan Turing re-entered the ruined land of Gauss and Hilbert under watchful American eyes and in a military jeep. The party stayed at a communications laboratory at Ebermannstadt, near Bayreuth, which they had to reach by trudging up a thousand feet of mountain. It had been a hospital, and still bore a red cross on its roof, so they simply slept in the hospital beds. Women from the village came and did their washing, in return for a fragment of soap. Only he and Flowers had any cryptological interest, and the other members of the party did not (as far as they knew) know that they had. One of the captured German scientists proudly produced a machine of the Fish type, and explained how many billions of steps it would go through without repeating the key. Alan and Flowers just blinked and said, ‘Really!’ when he went on to tell them that none the less their mathematicians had reckoned it impregnable only for two years, and that then there would be a chance of it being broken.
Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game Page 49
