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  CONTENTS

  Title

  Introduction

  1. Unreliable Ancestors

  2. Dismal Childhoods

  3. Direction of Travel

  4. Kingsman

  5. Machinery of Logic

  6. Prof

  7. Looking Glass War

  8. Lousy Computer

  9. Taking Shape

  10. Machinery of Justice

  11. Unseen Worlds

  Epilogue: Alan Turing Decoded

  Notes and Accreditations

  Copyright

  Blue Plaques in Hampton, Maida Vale, Manchester and Wilmslow. At Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing did the work for which he is best remembered, there is no plaque but a museum exhibition.

  INTRODUCTION

  ALAN TURING is now a household name, and in Britain he is a national hero. There are several biographies, a handful of documentaries, one Hollywood feature film, countless articles, plays, poems, statues and other tributes, and a blue plaque in almost every town where he lived or worked. One place which has no blue plaque is Bletchley Park, but there is an entire museum exhibition devoted to him there.

  We all have our personal image of Alan Turing, and it is easy to imagine him as a solitary, asocial genius who periodically presented the world with stunning new ideas, which sprang unaided and fully formed from his brain. The secrecy which surrounded the story of Bletchley Park after World War Two may in part be responsible for the commonly held view of Alan Turing. For many years the codebreakers were permitted only to discuss the goings-on there in general, anecdotal terms, without revealing any of the technicalities of their work. So the easiest things to discuss were the personalities, and this made good copy: eccentric boffins busted the Nazi machine. Alan may have been among the more eccentric, but this now outdated approach to studying Bletchley’s achievement belittles the organisation which became GCHQ, and distracts attention from the ideas which Alan, among others, regarded as far more important than curious behaviour.

  I am sceptical about that solitary genius picture of Alan Turing. It doesn’t fit well with what little was said about him at home during my childhood, and it doesn’t fit with the personal recollections of those work colleagues of his with whom I have had opportunities, over the years, to talk. A man called ‘Prof’ by his friends – who knew he wasn’t a professor and so were teasing him, gently – wasn’t shut away from intellectual or social interaction. Who, in fact, was Alan Turing, and where did his ideas come from?

  Of course, these questions have been explored before and from a variety of angles. Yet some of the people who influenced and mentored Alan have perhaps received less attention than their due: notably, M.H.A. (Max) Newman, who was not only an intellectual equal but also provided a compass to help steer Alan’s career and a social anchorage in a less rarefied family setting. There is a temptation to portray Alan as a victim of his childhood and schooling; I don’t think that is accurate or fair. There is also a tendency to zoom in on the last tragic years of his life, to view the whole of his existence through that Shakespearian lens, and then to define Alan Turing by reference to his sexuality or suicide. Again, I think that is an error. To complement my personal viewpoint I have had access to new documents and sources which were not available even to Alan’s most recent biographer. Moreover, a wealth of material has been made available to me in the form of first-hand recollections of those who lived and worked alongside Alan; I wanted to allow those voices to be heard again.

  I have been constantly surprised and delighted by the enthusiasm which each enquiry I made relating to this project was received. So many people I contacted were willing to volunteer additional information and suggestions, going far beyond any ordinary duty in the help offered to me. I had the privilege of interviewing Donald Bayley and Bernard Richards who were able to share their personal recollections with me and answer my foolish questions – a big thank you for letting me intrude into their lives. I was also allowed to preview documents scheduled for release to the National Archives, not available to previous biographers, and for that I am grateful to the Director of GCHQ. I should also like to acknowledge in particular the varied contributions of Shaun Armstrong, Jennifer Beamish, Claire Butterfield, Tony Comer, Barry Cooper, Daniela Derbyshire, Helen Devery, Juliet Floyd, Rainer Glaschick, Joel Greenberg, Sue Gregory, Kelsey Griffin, John Harper, David Hartley, Rachel Hassall, Cassandra Hatton, Kerry Howard, Paul Kellar, Miriam Lewis, Barbara Maher, Gillian Mason, Patricia McGuire, Christopher Morcom QC, Charlotte Mozley, Harriet Nowell-Smith, Brian Oakley, James Peters, Brian Randell, Hélène Rasse, David Ridgway, Rachel Roberts, Isobel Robinson, Sir John Scarlett, Lindsay Sedgley, Susan Swalwell, Turings past and present, Cate Watson and Abbie Wood. Nor would I have been able to succeed without the friendly and useful assistance from the staffs of the British Library, Chester Records Office and various local libraries in Cheshire, the National Archives, and the Science Museum; and (in the US) the Library of Congress, the Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton and the National Archives Records Administration. In none of these places was anyone anything other than welcoming, helpful and informative.

  However, I have to pay tribute in particular to Andrew Hodges’s masterly biography Alan Turing: the Enigma. I bought my copy in February 1984 as soon as it came out. It is a big book and it covers the ground with majesty as well as rigour. Nothing – certainly not what follows between these covers – can possibly stand up to it. It has been my constant reference source. It has stood thirty years without need of fundamental correction. Sure, there are materials available now which were not open to Andrew when he did his research, but these colour in points of detail, and affirm his conclusions where there was limited evidence available to him. My perspective is of course different, otherwise this book would not have been worth writing, but I commend it to the reader whose appetite I have managed to stimulate.

  Finally, a note on quotes and sources and so forth. I have not had to be as rigorous with quotations as an academic work would require. With Alan’s letters I did not want to distract the reader with repeated use of ‘sic’ to prove (when it is true) that I can spell better than him, and I have been sparing of ‘sic’ in other quoted passages where spelling or typographical conventions have changed during the last century. An ellipsis ‘[…]’ is not used in every instance where words in the original have been omitted, but restricted to those places where the reader might be misled by unacknowledged omission of words. Sources for quoted passages can be found in the section on notes and accreditations, and these should be referred to for the unedited originals. Errors are to be blamed on me, not others.

  Dermot Turing

  St Albans, UK

  John Turing’s signature is prominent among the Great and Good of British India, including Sir William Medows. Better-known names on this page include Eyre Coote, Lord Clive and Lord Mornington. © The British Library Board (OIR 954.82)

  1

  UNRELIABLE ANCESTORS

  IT IS MAY 1790. Major-General Medows, the officer commanding Fort St George (later called Madras), has been in office for three months. His governing council is not behaving in the manner which suits him, and the war with Tipu Sultan – stirred up by the French, of course, notwithstanding their own domestic upheavals – has reached a critical phase. The General needs to go on campaign, and he needs to leave a sound man, or ideally some sound men, in charge of the council in his absence. There is nothing for it. John Turing, who was put onto the council by the General in February, and has shown he can be depended upon, will take over as Acting President.

  John Turing has a long and respectable history in Fort St George. Indeed, the Turing family has been a pillar of the community since anyone can remember. Dr Robert Turing arrived in Fort St George in 1729 and was a surgeon in th
e district until the early 1760s; he even treated Sir Robert Clive in 1753. Dr Robert Turing’s daughter Mary is married to John – they are second cousins. Mary knows everybody: ‘by the marriages of her family and relatives [she is] connected with half the settlement’. Dr Turing’s house is being talked about, now that war has flared up again: in the Siege of Madras in 1758 the French approached the town through his garden, of all things. Mary isn’t going to let the citizens of Fort St George forget this. Another Robert Turing, another cousin, is serving in the Madras Army; in full time he will retire grandly to Banff Castle in Scotland and pick up the family baronetcy. John and Mary’s son William is serving as Paymaster too, and in 1813 he will be killed in Spain at the battle of Vitoria. The Turings are an Empire family, sound but not famous.

  In 1790 the Turings are also reading the Madras Courier, which has over the years carried the gossip from home. One scandal concerns another ancestor of Alan Turing, and this particular one is both unsound and infamous. One might expect that the main influences on a child born to Edwardian parents, in the Indian Empire, out of the house and lineage of the Turing family rooted in the Indian Empire, would be from the father’s side. But, while the influence of old-fashioned patriotic service is relevant to Alan’s upbringing and early years, greater direction on his life was given from Alan’s mother’s side, the Stoney family. And of all of Alan Turing’s ancestors, the best-known and most scandalous is Andrew Robinson Bowes, born Andrew Robinson Stoney in 1747.

  A close shave in heredity

  Thomas Stoney emigrated to Ireland in the 1690s, when William III encouraged Protestants to settle there. His grandson Andrew entered the Army, married Hannah Newton in 1768 for her money, and is said to have ‘locked his wife in a closet that would barely contain her, for three days, in her chemise (some say without it), and fed her with an egg a day’. To establish his right to a life interest in Hannah’s fortune after her death, Andrew Stoney had to prove that a child had been born alive; unfortunately all were stillborn, though that did not stop Stoney from ordering the church bells rung in order to rig the evidence. But being nurtured on an egg a day, and required to produce live children notwithstanding, meant Hannah died in 1775. But this merely opened the field for Stoney to try for the biggest fortune in Europe. Mary Eleanor Bowes was worth over a million pounds. Her father’s will obliged any man who married her to take the name of Bowes; when her husband the Earl of Strathmore died in 1776 she was in the market. Everyone was after her, and the hot favourite was a Mr George Gray, who had held some office in India under Sir Robert Clive. Indeed, the noble Countess had been carrying on for some time with Mr Gray. Stoney was not going to be put off by any of this. Acting in cahoots with the newspaper editor, an article was run in the Morning Post which alluded offensively to Lady Strathmore. Stoney took it upon himself to defend the Countess’s honour and call out the editor; the two of them staged an encounter at the Adelphi, at which Stoney appeared to have been mortally wounded. The Countess took pity on the one lover who had defended her honour and – a low-risk stratagem, given his imminent demise – agreed to marry him. Four days later, Stoney was carried into St James’s Church, Westminster, where the ceremony took place.

  Unfortunately for the Countess, Stoney did not do the considerate thing, and remained obstinately alive. Unfortunately for Stoney, the Countess had already become pregnant by Mr Gray – a state of affairs which, with every passing day, more urgently demanded to be covered up with a marriage to somebody, perhaps anybody – so with all that in mind she had settled all her estate on trust in such a way that it was out of reach of any convenient, or as the case might be, inconvenient husband. But Stoney was equal to this challenge. He recovered from his fatal wound with alacrity, assumed the name Bowes, coerced his wife into making a new Deed to revoke her trust settlement, locked her up wherever there was an available closet, felled her trees, sold her estates, gambled away her money, got the wet-nurse pregnant, raped the nursery-maid, and told everyone who enquired that the Countess was a little mad. After some years of this treatment she was, with the aid of her lady’s maid, able to escape, and she started legal proceedings in the labyrinthine complexity of the Georgian courts, to have Stoney Bowes bound over to keep the peace, to have the Deed of Revocation annulled, and to obtain the unthinkable: a divorce. As usual Stoney Bowes was unfazed. As insurance against such unwifely behaviour he had directed the Countess to write a lengthy account of her own wild behaviour, her extramarital affairs, and the true parenthood of her children. The Confessions were brandished in various courtrooms, but they merely served to prolong the litigation and ensure that the case received the maximum attention in the press, such as the Madras Courier. Stoney Bowes was confined to prison – but in those days, he could buy (with his wife’s money) the plushest suite and days out on licence, and he had sufficient liberty to sire two children with the daughter of a fellow inmate. In the words of Dr Foot, the surgeon who had patched up Stoney Bowes’s fake wounds after the fake duel back in 1777, Stoney Bowes was ‘cowardly, insidious, hypocritical, tyrannic, mean, violent, selfish, jealous, revengeful, inhuman and savage, without a single countervailing quality’.

  How odd, or not, it is that Andrew Robinson Stoney, Thomas Stoney’s eldest son, has not been mentioned on the Stoney family monument.

  Alan Turing was descended from the Stoneys on his mother’s side. John Turing, Alan’s brother, noted thankfully that Stoney Bowes ‘was a collateral, but it was a close shave in heredity’. Despite the high risks arising from being nearly descended from Stoney Bowes, it was the Stoney family inheritance which shaped Alan’s ideas and laid the foundation for his breakthroughs in mathematics, engineering and science. Stoney Bowes was the exception: the rest of the Stoneys were not schemers, womanisers, gamblers and deceivers. In fact, by the end of the Victorian era the Stoneys had piled up an immense portfolio of achievements.

  The descendants of Stoney Bowes’s two brothers were glittering:

  • George Johnstone Stoney FRS (1821–1911). This extraordinary scientist published 75 papers during his career, on subjects including optics, gas theory and cosmic physics. He is probably best-known for coining the word ‘electron’ when he was arguing for units of measurement to be based on real physical things – in the case of electricity, the unit of electrical charge which flows when a single chemical bond is ruptured. But to a Victorian eye, one of his most astonishing decisions was to ensure his brainy daughters Edith and Florence were given a head-start in life equal to their brothers.

  • Edith Anne Stoney (1869–1938). George Johnstone Stoney’s eldest daughter was sent to Cambridge to study mathematics, where she achieved 17th place in the formidable final exams. After lecturing in physics at three universities and teaching at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Edith became President of the Association of Science Teachers, and served in the Great War as a radiologist in France, Serbia and Greece, being awarded the Croix de Guerre.

  • Florence Ada Stoney OBE (1870–1932). Florence was a consultant radiologist. In addition to her various hospital appointments, like her sister she served in the Great War, notably during the bombardment of Antwerp in 1914, in France, and in London, using her skills to locate foreign bodies embedded in the flesh of the wounded. She was awarded the Admiralty Star as well as becoming an OBE.

  • Bindon Blood Stoney FRS (1828–1909). Bindon was George Johnstone Stoney’s brother. He was a railway engineer, wrote a treatise on strains in girders, and reconstructed the port of Dublin to accommodate deep-water ships, which involved inventing a method for placing huge concrete blocks weighing 350 tons apiece. For these and other achievements he is known, without irony, as ‘the father of Irish concrete’.

  • George Gerald Stoney FRS (1863–1942). George worked as chief designer in the Steam Turbine Department of Sir Charles Parsons’s company. In this capacity George enjoyed a moment of triumph aboard Turbinia, the experimental steam-turbine yacht part-designed by him. The yacht caused consternation by disobeyi
ng all the rules at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Review in 1897. By weaving in and out of the other craft at 34 knots and outpacing the Admiralty police vessels, it showed that bulky, slow, old-fashioned reciprocating engines were no longer appropriate for the propulsion of dreadnoughts. Later, George became professor of mechanical engineering at the Manchester College of Technology, as well as serving on the panel of the Admiralty Board of Invention and Research.

  • Francis Goold Morony Stoney (1837–1897). Francis was also an engineer. After a stint in India, working on the Madras Railway, he designed and patented a series of sluices, used in places such as the Manchester Ship Canal, the Rhône, the Clyde, and posthumously the old Aswan Dam.

  • Edward Waller Stoney CIE (1844–1931). Edward went to India in 1866 and served as a railway engineer in Madras for many years, becoming Chief Engineer in 1899 and being decorated as a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1904. He wrote numerous technical papers on bridges, flooding and other railway topics, and was a fellow of Madras University. It was in his house in Coonoor, Madras province, that E.W. Stoney’s daughter Ethel Sara lived with her husband Julius Turing.

  And this is just to mention those Stoney descendants that carried the name Stoney. In Who Was Who 1929–1940, there are three entries for Stoneys but none for Turings. With this array of Stoney achievements, nothing the undistinguished Turings had done was going to measure up. Since the early days of Empire, the Turings had been soldiers and vicars and merchants; they had been established in England, the Netherlands, and Indonesia as well as India; they had been conventional, upper-middle-class, impoverished, occasionally snobbish and always unexceptional. It was, however, the Empire that brought the Turings into contact with the Stoneys; although the laws of symmetry suggest that the contact should have come about through the province of Madras, in fact it arose from the state of poverty.