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  The importance of being poor

  According to the parish council website, in 1334 the Vicar of Edwinstowe was convicted of venison trespasses. The vicars holding the living of Edwinstowe in the nineteenth century were more law-abiding, but correspondingly hungry. On 8 October 1879, the incumbent celebrated the birth of a healthy boy, bringing to eight the number of children (not counting the two who died in infancy) that had to be fed and clothed from his stipend. The parish council website also suggests that parishioners had the privilege of letting their pigs root for acorns in Sherwood Forest, but rooting for acorns might be unbecoming for a vicar. So the System was introduced: on Sundays, there was a ‘great spread’ of roast beef or similar; on Mondays, there were leftovers; and on Tuesdays to Saturdays inclusive, there was bread, dripping and cocoa. In 1883, aged only 58, the vicar suffered a stroke and had to resign even this insufficient living, and the family moved to Bedford. Shortly afterwards he died. Julius Mathison Turing, the fifth of the eight children, was ten.

  The Turings did not speak of how they managed to ride this terrible storm. The eldest girl, then aged 21 and known to posterity as Aunt Jean, took over the management of the house. Aunt Jean was a formidable character – allegedly the only person of whom Alan Turing’s mother Ethel Sara was truly afraid. Later in life Aunt Jean married (and ruled over) Sir Herbert Trustram Eve, and served as a councillor for 12 years after the Great War, representing the Municipal Reform Party on the London County Council. Her training was in the Turing household of the 1880s. Aunt Jean and the other two eldest children, also girls, also resourceful, earned money through teaching, enough to keep the boys at school: Arthur and Julius at Bedford, and in due course the younger ones Harvey and Alec at Christ’s Hospital in London. Sybil, the girl between Julius and Harvey, went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and became a missionary in India when she was old enough to fly the nest; India was the destiny for Arthur and Julius as well. Bedford School was a feeder for the services, military as well as civil, in India, and these were genteel, but more importantly well-paid, occupations. Arthur headed for the remunerative staff corps in the Indian Army, until aged 27 he lost his life fighting for the 36th Sikhs in a skirmish on the North-West Frontier in 1898. Julius was bound for the Indian Civil Service.

  The senior generation – Grandpa Stoney and Aunt Jean.

  The legacy of childhood for Julius was a lifelong obsession with accounts. Alan’s brother John wrote:

  When I first left school and was articled to a firm of solicitors in London, I was allowed £5 a month for my expenses, including the midday meal, and a separate allowance for clothes. This was not ungenerous but there was one fly in the ointment: I was bidden to submit a monthly balanced account. Great was my father’s chagrin when he discovered that ‘umbrella repairs’ figured in three monthly accounts out of four and that a mistake in casting showed 2/9d in his favour for which I had failed to give him credit! The maddening thing was that I did spend the money in umbrella repairs but, being a Turing, I never thought to add verisimilitude to truth by making it something else.

  And again:

  On one occasion when we were on holiday in Wales, there arrived a bill from a Harley Street specialist for a consultation to which my mother had taken my brother and myself for advice on our hay-fever. The fee was ten guineas – a large sum in those days. There was considerable dudgeon and my father cried out loudly from the breakfast table that he was ruined. This sticks in my memory as one of the deeper dudgeons.

  But, in India, Julius met his match. On completion of his studies at Bedford School, Julius Turing won a scholarship to read history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. And there he sat the Indian Civil Service exam, passing high in the list. (Julius had to borrow a hundred pounds from a family friend to pay for his passage, his tropical outfit, an English saddle and an Indian pony. The lender asked that Julius insure his life for the amount of the loan and charge it as security. Julius faithfully paid premiums on the policy until his death, when John collected on the policy as his father’s executor. It had never occurred to Julius to discontinue it when the loan was paid off, which he had punctually done within six months.) In India, and having secured his decent salary, Julius was posted to Madras, as befitted a Turing. Madras was also where his future father-in-law was to be found, and E.W. Stoney could outsmart any Turing in the matter of book-keeping. This became apparent as soon as Alan’s parents got married. As was the custom, a red carpet was laid from pavement to porch, which the happy couple trod. John reports:

  No sooner was the honeymoon over than my grandfather sent the bill for the carpet to my father. My father deemed it to be part of the wedding expense traditionally at the charge of the bride’s father. My grandfather thought otherwise. After much fuming my father paid the bill but the incident rankled for upwards of forty years.

  In later days, Grandpa Stoney would bring to an end any family argument with a statement of ultimate finality: ‘I am off to King & Partridge to alter my will.’ But that is to get ahead of ourselves. Despite the Madras connection, it was entirely a matter of chance that Alan’s parents met, let alone got married. Really, they should not have met at all.

  An Irish upbringing

  Unlike Julius Turing, Ethel Stoney was born and spent her early childhood in India, where E.W. Stoney was working his way up the Engineering Department of the Madras Railway Company, having been appointed fourth-class engineer in 1866. He married Sarah Crawford, a suitable Irish girl, in 1875; there were four children, of whom Ethel was the third. Expatriate families all have the difficult problem of what to do with the children. In the case of the Stoneys, the answer, they concluded, was to deposit all four with Sarah’s brother William Crawford, who was a bank manager working in County Clare. The Crawfords were already a full house, with six children, two of whom belonged to William’s previous marriage. Late in her life Ethel complained that Aunt Lizzie, William’s wife and thus Ethel’s foster-mother, showed her no affection – doubtless the fostering arrangement was a trial for all involved. And the Crawfords were not the Stoneys – respectable, middle-class, and wholly lacking in connections to the Bowes family, certainly, but not engineers or fellows of the Royal Society either.

  In 1891, when Ethel was ten, the Crawfords moved to Dublin, and after a spell at school there both Ethel and her elder sister Evie were sent to board at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Evie joining aged 14 in 1892 and Ethel, aged nearly 17, in 1898. This was in the days of the pioneering and dynamic principal Miss Beale, who was offering advanced courses for young women which prepared them for university exams as well as the kind of secondary education more commonly expected of boarding schools. Her philosophy was expressed in 1898 as follows:

  How can girls be prepared for such work as falls to them as heads of great schools, and hospitals, and settlements, as doctors in foreign lands, if their education was, as I found it, minus mathematics and science, and concluded at seventeen or earlier?

  Julius Turing, Alan’s father, in 1907.

  It was also the family school. Edith Stoney had been on the mathematics staff during Evie’s time as a student, although she left the term Ethel arrived, and another cousin, Anne, the daughter of Bindon Blood Stoney FRS, joined Ethel a year later. Yet, despite the influences of family and school, Ethel was led not in the Stoney tradition of science and engineering, but in a more conventionally ladylike direction to study art and music. The norm for the Edwardian era was for girls to be educated with a view to social, not academic, achievement: a good marriage was more important than any sort of technical career. So Ethel spent six months at the Sorbonne, mastering French, and perfecting her skills as a draftswoman and watercolourist. Ethel’s portrait of Sarah, her own mother, looks at me as I write this: she has captured both the benignity of the older lady together with a hint of something sharper, the need to keep an eye on her daughter who might at any moment get up to no good. Aged 19, Ethel left the Sorbonne and went back to India with Evie – ‘thrown,’ as J
ohn puts it, ‘on the Indian marriage market – that is to say, she went out to India to live with her parents and her sister Evie at Coonoor. My mother and aunt seem to have led a life of singular futility, driving out in the carriage with their mother to drop visiting cards, doing little water-colour sketches of the Indian scene, appearing in amateur theatricals and occasionally attending dinners and balls.’

  The days of the Raj. Ethel Turing in 1909 with a very young John perched on the Ranee Sahib’s pony, and a bearer.

  Although this picture of the apogee of the Raj is perhaps characteristic of the period, it is not clear that it suited Ethel. For Ethel was a strikingly beautiful girl, and was not going to wait long for suitable, or even unsuitable, offers, occasionally vetoed by E.W. Stoney on the grounds of inadequate financial resources. And Julius Turing was not offering, or even in the offing. On the one hand, the over-nice late Victorian social stratifications put the covenanted Indian Civil Service – the so-called ‘heaven born’ – two notches above mere professionals like railway engineers. Engineers were people of whom you might be aware, but there were other people whom you might meet. But, in truth, the reason they did not mix socially was more mundane. Julius was not bidding in the marriage market because he was constantly on the move, and just too busy. The duties of an early twentieth-century subdivisional Indian Civil Service officer typically included being excise officer and collector of land revenue, issuer of stamps, land registrar, inspector of schools, minister of roads and irrigation, planning inspector, magistrate and district judge, food-and-drugs controller and inspector of distilleries, receiver of petitions, and preserver of the peace.

  So it was by chance that they met: on a homeward-bound ship, in 1907, going by the long Pacific route, almost five years after Ethel’s return to India. On reaching Japan, Julius took Ethel to dinner, and ordered the waiter to ‘bring beer and go on bringing beer until I tell you to stop’. Ethel was bowled over, and on announcing their engagement to E.W. Stoney, who was on board as well, Julius was deemed just sufficiently solvent to be allowed to wed his daughter when they reached Dublin. Provided, of course, that the red carpet was for Mr Turing’s account.

  2

  DISMAL CHILDHOODS

  ALAN TURING was born in Maida Vale on 21 June 1912. Despite all the indications, Alan would never visit India during his lifetime, even though Julius continued in the Indian Civil Service until Alan was 13.

  John Turing’s unpublished autobiography has chapters headed ‘Dismal childhood of my father’, ‘Dismal childhood of my mother’ and ‘Dismal childhood of myself’, which sums up the story of young children wrenched, in each case, away from a nuclear family. Alan, John’s younger brother, never experienced such a wrench; from the very outset he was brought up away from his parents, and on that account has been thought by some to have had the most dismal childhood of all. So much for the psychology. In the context of the times, and in the factual analysis, that easy conclusion, so readily reached from a twenty-first-century perspective, might need further scrutiny.

  Fairy princess

  The early childhoods of John and Alan Turing were, to all appearances, quite different. There are photographs of John, born in India in 1908, watched in his pram by a benign E.W. Stoney, being cuddled by his ayah, playing in the garden of the bungalow at Coonoor, and generally being made a firstborn fuss-of. John’s memories, given that he was sent away to England before his fourth birthday, were fuzzy but fond:

  I seem to remember the elephants and the fireflies – the largest and the smallest of my Indian acquaintances. Certainly I saw much of the elephants, for they were wont to wash themselves with great drenchings and slurpings from their trunks outside my father’s bungalow, so that I was soon in trouble with my ayah for attempting the elephant trick. In 1942 I returned to India by courtesy of the Army. In Deolali transit camp I was at once transported back to my wicker chair and little charpoy cot by the smell of burning cow-dung and the chitter of crickets in the hot Indian night.

  And again, in a piece written in 1964:

  I prefer to think of [my mother] as she was when I was a little boy and (as it seemed to me) a sort of fairy princess when she came to kiss me goodnight in her flouncy dinner-gown.

  But John had given his parents a scare.

  My mother incessantly inspected pots and pans and the habits and hands of her platoon of Indian servants but despite this rigorous watch on hygiene I contracted dysentery from infected cow’s milk and became dangerously ill. In despair my mother resolved to remove me from the heat of the plains where my father was stationed and risk the long train journey to the nearest hill station. In the middle of the night I was fluttering away but she revived me with a mammoth swig of brandy.

  So Alan was born, and the boys would stay, in England. John described the trip to London as a halcyon time:

  My father, perforce, had to look after me for the one and only time in his life. His solution of the problem could not have been bettered: we visited the White City, went on round-abouts, sat in restaurants and travelled around the metropolis on the tops of buses with the tickets stuck in our hat-bands. So it did not seem to me at all a bad thing that my mother should be taking a nice long ‘rest’. I was not a little astonished and put out when I was taken to the nursing home one day and found that I had a new baby brother.

  The decision to leave the boys in England was not easy.

  Probably it was the right decision for me, for I had given my parents a bad fright with my dysentery in India and by the time my father was due for long leave again I should be seven and a half. But it was a harsh decision for my mother to have to leave both her children in England, one of them still an infant in arms. This was the beginning of the long sequence of separations from our parents, so painful to all of us and most of all to my mother.

  Alan did not have a fairy princess, and his relationship with his mother would forever be asymmetrical: from her side, Alan was the baby she had left at home; for him, Ethel was, if not a princess, something not dissimilar to the queen, or, to express it differently, Mother. But that is not to say that Alan had no family when he was growing up. Quite the contrary. He had the Wards, and the Wards were, certainly, a family.

  Wardship

  There are two resolves that the Anglo-Indian mother will do well to make and keep so far as in her lies. In the first place, she should at least go home with her children, and see them safely launched upon their new path in life; in the second, she should register a vow, and keep it – Fate permitting – never to desert either husband or children for more than three or four years at a stretch.

  Maud Diver, novelist and Anglo-Indian, was writing guidance for women in 1909. It is implicit in her advice that sending the children home to Britain was an inevitability, part of the sacrifice implicit in the Service. And so, for the upper echelons of the expatriate community, it was. Keeping children in India was, according to one contemporary writer, likely to leave them puny, pallid, skinny and fretful, whereas, remarkable as it may seem to us, British food and British meteorology would convert them into fat and happy English children. Schooling in India, while theoretically available for some children of the Raj, was unlikely to be the pukka experience of a school at home, or to open the doors to a good and lucrative career. Leaving the children in Britain meant that a home had to be found for them. The historian Vyvyen Brendon explains:

  The dearth of suitable relations was a common problem for Raj families in the twentieth century. Since many [Indian Civil Service] men and army officers now came from quite ordinary backgrounds, their British relations lived in smaller houses which could not easily accommodate several extra children. To respond to the need there grew up a network of holiday homes which took in strangers’ children. Relations, whom expatriate parents did not always know very well, could turn out to be unkind or negligent while paid guardians could offer kindness and understanding to lonely children.

  Rudyard Kipling had had a miserable time with his foster-fami
ly, and Rudyard Kipling was a famous author, so it is all too easily assumed that all foster-families were awful. Mostly the ICS families accepted the separations as their lot: an unavoidable experience about which it was not the done thing to moan, whether now or later, whether you were the parents or the children. (They also devoured Rudyard Kipling’s Anglo-Indian children’s literature: my copy of the Just So Stories has the classic drawings, and is inscribed ‘John Ferrier Turing – Prize for learning to read. from Mother. June 7 1915’.) The question for the Turings was not whether separation would happen, but who would be the boys’ foster-family. Ethel Turing spent months in Britain following the birth of Alan, and she left nothing to chance.

  The Wards were numerous. Colonel Ward was a veteran of the Boer War, ‘spare, gruff and taciturn, with eyes of the palest blue. His military bearing and manner concealed a warm heart.’ Mrs Ward – known to the children as ‘Grannie’ – was from another military family, the Haigs. She was ‘dumpy, resolute, outspoken, full of zest for life, sometimes severe but always meting out justice with a faintly perceptible twinkle. We both loved her very much.’ Grannie would hand out a smart biff to a child whose back was not as ramrod-straight as hers. The Wards had four daughters of their own, ‘an assortment of Mrs Ward’s powerful Haig nieces’, and an incumbent boarder called Nevill Marryat, who was slightly older than John. The daughters were Nerina, Hazel, Kay – all significantly older than the boys – and Joan. John wrote acidly about Joan, but significantly said, ‘twelve years younger than Kay …, she was dreadfully spoilt and deserves no blame for making the most of it. She was half-way in age between Alan and myself and honesty compels me to admit that we both cordially detested her though not in the same way: I thought her a pest but my brother rated her a tyrant.’