Alan Turing

The Enigma Man

Nigel Cawthorne

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781784280420
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

Spring 1940: The Battle of the Atlantic rages. Vulnerable merchant convoys are at the mercy of German U-boats controlled by a cunning system of coded messages created by a machine called Enigma. Only one man believes that these codes can be broken - mathematician and Bletchley Park cryptanalyst Alan Turing.Winston Churchill later described Turing's success in breaking the Enigma codes as the single biggest contribution to victory against Nazi Germany.Unheralded during his lifetime, Turing is now recognized as the father of modern computer science and as possessing one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Drawing on original source material, interviews and photographs, this book explores Turing's groundbreaking work as well as revealing the private side of a complex and unlikely national hero.

CHAPTER 1

Birth of a Genius

Alan Turing was a child of the Empire. His father Julius Mathison Turing was an assistant administrator and magistrate in the Madras province of British India. His mother, Sara, was the daughter of the chief engineer of the Madras Railway. Born in Madras and brought up in Ireland, she attended lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris before meeting Julius, a history graduate of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, on a cruise ship in the Orient. When they reached Japan, he asked her out. They married a few months later in Dublin in 1907. The following year their first son, John, was born in her parents’ house at the hill station of Coonoor.

TROUBLED TIMES

In 1912, Sara was pregnant again. By then political unrest had made India a dangerous place for British administrators. The viceroy, Lord Charles Hardinge, was the target of a number of assassination attempts by militant Indian nationalists and that year he was wounded by a bomb during his state entry into Delhi.

Julius took leave and the family travelled back to England. They rented a house in Maida Vale, north London, and their second son was born in Warrington Lodge, a nursing home in Little Venice, on 23 June 1912. He was christened Alan Mathison at St Saviour’s Church in Warrington Avenue two weeks later.

When Alan was nine months old, his father returned to India. Six months later, his mother Sara followed. She had intended to take Alan with her, but the toddler was suffering from rickets. So the two boys were left in the charge of Colonel and Mrs Ward in Hastings. Once the First World War had got under way, the colonel encouraged the boys to play with toy guns, cannons and battleships, but they rebelled.

In 1915, their mother risked the journey through submarine-infested waters to pay a visit. She found Alan disturbed. Writing home to her husband, she said:

‘Alan will in a moment cry with rage and attempt to hold his breath, and in the next moment he will laugh at his tears, saying, “Look at my big tears,” squeeze his eyes and say, “Ah” with his mouth wide open trying to squeeze out more tears for fun.’

However, he was a pretty, outgoing and engaging boy, quite free of the shyness that would afflict him later at public school. His mother said: ‘I was not alone in my opinion when I wrote that he was “a very clever child, I should say, with a wonderful memory for new words”.’

After three months in her care, his mother wrote: ‘Alan has improved greatly. He has many charming traits. He misses nothing.’ He had a lively mind and that summer, she noted, he made his first attempt at experimenting.

‘One of the wooden sailors in his toy boat got broken,’ she recalled. ‘He planted the arms and legs in the garden, confident that they would grow into toy sailors.’

When his mother returned to India that autumn, she asked Alan to be a good boy while she was away. He said: ‘Yes, but sometimes I forget.’ Even John, something of a rebel himself, said: ‘Alan was quite a nuisance.’

In March 1916, Julius and Sara braved the U-boats again, wearing life-belts all the way from Suez to Southampton. They took a holiday in Scotland before Julius returned to India. Given the U-boat menace, it was decided that Sara should stay in England with the boys. By then John was at prep school, so Alan lived with his mother in rooms in St Leonards-on-Sea.

EARLY SIGNS OF BRILLIANCE

From an early age, Alan was interested in figures. Even before he could read he would study the serial numbers on the lampposts around Hastings. At first, he did not know whether to read the numbers from right to left or vice versa. However, he noticed a red spot on his left thumb which he called the ‘knowing spot’. When he came across a number he would pull back his glove and look for the spot, then he would know which way to read the figures.

It was clear that he had an unusual mind. At five, he announced that rhubarb made his teeth feel as if the white had come off. Later, when his father was back in England again, he told young Alan off for having the tongues of his boots twisted. ‘Those tongues should be as flat as a pancake,’ said Julius.

‘Pancakes are usually rolled up,’ Alan shot back.

He also made up words. ‘Quockling’ was his word for the noise made by seagulls fighting over food, a ‘greasicle’ was the rivulet of wax down the side of a candle when it is caught in a draught and ‘squaddy’ was Alan’s word for being squat and square.

However, Alan lagged behind when being taught to read. Then he came across a book called Reading Without Tears and taught himself to read in three weeks. This self-reliance when it came to problem solving would become a trademark.

In 1918, he went to St Michael’s Primary School where he began to learn Latin. When he left at the age of nine, the headmistress there said: ‘I have had clever boys and hard-working boys, but Alan is a genius.’

Outside school, Alan was precocious. He pounded up dock leaves to make a cure for nettle stings, precisely recording the formula, and began compiling what he called an ‘encyclopaedio’. Waking early he would write down sundry facts such as the width of England. Geography held a special appeal and he asked for an atlas for his birthday. Later, when Alan arrived at his prep school, Hazelhurst, he beat older brother John in a school-wide geography test.

Alan’s other passion was reading nature-study books and at the age of eight he began writing a book called About a Microscope. That summer, the family took a holiday in Scotland where Alan carefully observed the flight of bees and tracked them to their nest to get their honey. In the evenings Sara read Pilgrim’s Progress to the two boys, but when she decided to skip some of the heavier theological discussion Alan was indignant. Shouting ‘You spoilt the whole thing’, he dashed from the room and stamped up and down in a huff.

That autumn Julius and Sara returned to India once more. Alan wrote to them regularly, talking of his newest concoctions including the recipe for his ‘gobletoe drink’, which contained grass roots, radish leaves and nettles. He then wrote an advertisement for Dunlop in the hope that they would send him free tyres for his bicycle. But Mrs Ward wrote to his parents, complaining of Alan’s continued stubbornness and disobedience. He rode round and round the lawn on his bicycle and refused to come in, saying: ‘I can’t get off until I fall off.’

When his mother returned to England in 1921, she found Alan had changed. Formerly outgoing, he was now withdrawn and dreamy. She took him out of school and taught him at home for a term. They spent the summer in Brittany. In London that autumn, he spent his time collecting bits of metal from the gutters with a magnet and he was full of questions. At nine, his mother recalled, he asked: ‘What makes the oxygen fit so tightly to the hydrogen to make water?’ She had no answer.

After a skiing holiday in Switzerland, Alan began at Hazelhurst where he spent his spare time making paper boats and, to start with, getting into fights. He was soon unpopular at school. Poor at games, he preferred to play chess – though few would play with him – and he spent hours working out complex chess problems on his own. Later in life he became an accomplished runner and said he got his start at school, fleeing from the ball. Teachers considered him both lazy and insolent. He complained that his algebra teacher ‘gave a quite false impression of what is meant by x’.

That summer, while holidaying with his family in the Highlands, he went climbing and after hearing a lecture on Everest expressed an interest in joining the next expedition to the as yet unconquered peak. In the evenings, the family dined in the garden and competed to see who could spit gooseberry skins the farthest. Alan won by applying scientific methods. He inflated his skins so they would be more aerodynamic.

At school, he was always building gadgets, including a far from successful fountain pen, and the library records show that he never borrowed fiction. In the holidays, he cycled out to the nearby woods where he experimented, once returning covered in soot and with his eyelashes singed after firing clay pipes he had made. There were experiments with baking soda and muddy jam jars in the coal cellar. Archdeacon Rollo Meyer and his wife, who looked after the boys in the school holidays, wrote to their parents complaining that Alan was always doing dangerous things.

In 1922, he came across the American book Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know by E.T. Brewster which, he told his mother later, opened his eyes to science – particularly biology, which became a lifelong interest – and after a holiday in Rouen he began writing to his parents in halting French. Climbing in Wales, he drew maps of the places he had visited. He also took an interest in family trees. Then the gift of a chemistry set afforded new opportunities for experimenting. In the basement, he extracted iodine from seaweed. But his mother fretted, telling a friend: ‘I am sure that he will blow up himself and the house one day.’

A schoolmaster gave him private tutoring. He also tutored himself using the form’s encyclopaedia. At the age of twelve-and-a-half, he wrote home: ‘I always seem to want to make things from the thing that is the commonest in nature and with the least of waste energy.’

PROBLEM PUPIL

In 1924, his father retired, but to avoid heavy taxation on his pension he did not return to England. He and Sara settled in France. By then, though, Alan was used to his parents being some way away. He even took himself to school by taxi, tipping the porter and the driver.

His clear aptitude for science and mathematics did not stand him in good stead in a school that specialized in teaching Latin, Greek, literature and the classics in preparation for public school. Turing’s spelling and grammar were poor – and remained so throughout his life. Nevertheless, he passed his Common Entrance examination and seemed to be destined to follow his brother to Marlborough College. But John warned: ‘For God’s sake don’t send him here. It will crush the life out of him.’

Instead Alan was sent to Sherborne, a 300-year-old public school in Dorset where the husband of one of his mother’s friends was science master. Travelling to school from his parents’ new home in France, Turing took the ferry from St Malo to Southampton. But when he arrived back in England, it was the first day of the 1926 General Strike and no buses or trains were running. His only option was to cycle the sixty miles to Sherborne, stopping for the night in a hotel on the way and keeping detailed accounts to justify the outlay to his father.

Alan Turing did not excel at his new school. Even his mathematics was ‘not very good’. His report said: ‘He spends a great deal of time in investigations in advanced mathematics to the neglect of his elementary work.’ In his science lessons, which occupied just two hours a week in the classical curriculum, ‘his knowledge is scrappy’, while his housemaster complained that he was ‘trying to build a roof before he has laid the foundations’. However, knowing Alan’s aversion to games, his father had requested that Alan substitute golf for cricket. This gave him the opportunity to walk around thinking out problems. As a result he won the school’s Plumptre Prize for mathematics. His maths teacher, Mr Randolph, declared him to be a ‘genius’ after being shown an algebraic exposition. Randolph at first thought Turing must have copied it from a book, but he had worked it out from first principles. But this counted for little at a school that valued the humanities and classics. Generally, his work was so poorly presented that it was thought he ought to be sent down. As his headmaster remarked: ‘It is only the shallowest of minds that can suppose… scientific discovery brings us appreciably nearer the solution of the riddles of the universe.’ He considered Turing ‘anti-social’ and said that he was ‘the kind of boy who is bound to be a problem in any kind of school’, though the headmaster did concede that Turing had ‘special gifts’.

Pupils in a science class at Sherborne School

As a boy, Turing was also scruffy and unkempt. This was a particular problem when it came to the Officer Training Corps parade on Fridays. His failure to bond with other boys, and his general ‘slackness’ in gym, meant that he was considered a ‘drip’ and was teased for his shyness, his high-pitched voice and his hesitant delivery that almost amounted to a stammer. A classmate said that Turing was ‘an example of how a sensitive and inoffensive boy… can have his life made hell at public school’.

What annoyed his teachers the most was his ability to pay no attention to them during lessons and then cram at the last minute and score high marks in the final exam. As it was, most of his work in his new obsession, mathematics, was done outside the classroom.

Turing’s greatest bête noire was his English and Latin teacher A.H. Trelawney Ross, who believed that Germany had lost the First World War because it thought ‘science and materialism were stronger than religious thought and observance’.

‘As democracy advances, manners and morals recede,’ he said. Scientifi...