Prof

by Dermot Turing

  The family, with a suitable retinue of servants, lived at Baston Lodge, in St Leonards-on-Sea near Brighton. The house is still there, with the requisite blue plaque. It was Victorian, Italianate and slightly rambling, situated in the lee of the church and just up the hill from the house of the African-adventure novelist Sir Henry Rider Haggard. John recalled, with a touch of envy, that Alan found a diamond and sapphire ring belonging to Lady Rider Haggard in the gutter (‘he always preferred the gutter to the pavement’). He was sent with it to the front door of the great man’s house, and was rewarded with a florin. What everyone wanted to know was what it was like inside, but on this question, alas, history is silent.

  Baston Lodge in about 1905.

  Alan’s nursery experience was longer than John’s, and different. The nursery was vigorously ruled according to old-school standards by Nanny Thompson, assisted by an under-nurse, who had her hands full with Nevill’s practical jokes (Wellington boots filled with water and so forth) as well as Joan’s tantrums. Alan was just the baby. John remembered the prewar smells of nappies – and bacon-fat, part of Alan’s diet, which for some reason was prescribed as a cure for rickets.

  There was a delicious sniff of release when, leaving Julius in India, Ethel braved the menace of the U-boats to spend the spring and summer of 1915 with her boys, taking rented rooms in St Leonards. Her next visit to England would be in the spring of 1916 – again the U-boats failed to find their mark – with Julius, and this time with a holiday in Scotland into the bargain.

  My mother [wrote John, commenting on Ethel’s biography of Alan] does not think fit to mention that it was by no means amusing or safe to do these long sea voyages in wartime during the submarine menace, nor that a close friend of hers had been pitched into the sea when the Egypt sank and had swum around for hours before she was rescued. Forewarned, my mother carried about her person on these voyages a mass of emergency equipment for the fatal plunge. If I remember rightly it included a whistle (to attract the attention of passing ships, whales, etc.), a small Meta stove, tabloid provisions, sea-proof matches and improving literature in waterproof bindings. Happily she was never obliged to put these aids to survival to the test.

  In all this, Alan’s childhood was not really different from that of other Empire children. The household was typical for an Edwardian army family, and the horrors experienced by Rudyard Kipling at the hands of his foster-mother were certainly absent. Ethel Turing had chosen well. Yet, notwithstanding the large household, the benevolent oversight of Grannie Ward, and the brisk attentions of Nanny Thompson, one is left with the sense that Alan was often left to his own devices. John, four years older, preferred to keep his nose in a book than engage with his little brother. In any case, in May 1917 John was despatched to board at prep-school, and about this time Nevill also left the custody of the Wards.

  Nothing in the whole range of the cussedness of inanimate objects competes with a sailor suit – Alan Turing in 1917.

  Sampled snapshots

  In John’s absence there was no one left to record the days of Alan’s infancy except the endless series of sailor-suit photos. In the Christmas holidays the Turing boys were allowed to stay with the formidable Aunt Jean, Julius’s older sister:

  The house, known as ‘Rushmoor’ (all their houses were called Rushmoor) was number 42, Bramham Gardens. It was one of those up and down houses of the Victorian era – a more inconvenient version of Baston Lodge but on a grander scale and with more storeys. All might have been well at Rushmoor but for that wretched brother of mine. At Baston Lodge he was not my responsibility. At Rushmoor I was held accountable for his clothes, deportment, hygiene and punctual appearance at meals. To make matters worse, he was dressed in sailor suits, according to the convention of the day (they suited him well); I know nothing in the whole range of the cussedness of inanimate objects to compete with a sailor suit. Out of the boxes there erupted collars and ties and neckerchiefs and cummerbunds and oblong pieces of flannel with lengthy tapes attached; but how one put these pieces together, and in what order, was beyond the wit of man. Not that my brother cared a button – an apt phrase, many seemed to be off – for it was all the same to him which shoe was on which foot or that it was only three minutes to the fatal breakfast gong. Somehow or another I managed by skimping such trumpery details as Alan’s teeth, ears, etc. but I was exhausted by these nursery attentions and it was only when we were taken off to the pantomime that I was able to forget my fraternal cares.

  Apart from John’s account, most of which was written about his own childhood experience and (because of their difference in age) features Alan only incidentally, there are few sources on which to draw. Until Alan was four, his mother was keeping oversight remotely, through correspondence with Grannie Ward. Then, for a period, Ethel managed to get a good deal of time with Alan, since she took rooms in St Leonards when Julius returned to India in late 1916 – saving her a further round of cat-and-mouse with the U-boats – and she stayed there until the end of the war.

  Alan’s Kirwan cousins might from time to time invade the household – these were Ethel’s sister Evie’s children, all older than Alan. He was not one of the boisterous crowd, with their multi-bike pile-ups at the bottom of the steep hill in St Leonards and pillow-fights versus the Baston Lodge maids. As with most children, Alan found his own way of dealing with all of this: if the occasion demanded it, he could put on his sailor suit smile and let the waves flow past. In 1919 and 1922 there were more Scottish trips when the Turing parents came home again on long leave. Alan went fishing with his father and on mountain walks with Mother. Ethel noticed a change in Alan when she came home in 1921: ‘From having been extremely vivacious – even mercurial – making friends with everyone, he had become unsociable and dreamy. I decided to take him away from his pre-preparatory school, where he was not learning much anyway, and teach him myself for a term and by attention and companionship get him back to his former self.’

  Before long, in early 1922 it was time to join John at boarding school. Hazelhurst had that inestimable quality of the small British preparatory school of the twentieth century. It had only 45 boys aged eight to 13, giving everyone a chance to achieve in something, in particular sport. The Turing parents were not sporty:

  My father [continues John] was considerably indulged by his mother, so that she contrived to have him excused from all games and athletics at Bedford. One direct result of this mollycoddling was that he could never summon up the faintest interest in games. My modest prep-school achievements – such as the magnificent 21 against Crowborough Grange which saved the side! – were wholly ignored. My brother’s even more artful and singular feats of non-gamesmanship were totally ignored in like manner: it would be a distortion to suggest that they were tacitly discouraged, certainly not – they were ignored.

  Only such past masters of the art of passive resistance as my brother Alan could fail to count themselves athletes [in the small school]. When he in turn outdistanced us all and became a marathon runner of Olympic standard, he attributed his success to his running away from the ball at Hazelhurst. ‘He believed that it was at his preparatory school that he learnt to run fast, for he was always so anxious to get away from the ball’: so wrote my mother. But it isn’t true: he propped himself on his hockey stick and studied the daisies.

  John might have been over-harsh about his parents’ attitude to sports: the Hazelhurst Gazette reports that on Saturday 11 March 1922, the hockey season had opened with the fixture School v The Staff. ‘J.F. Turing (inside right) – rather slow, but combines well: a very poor shot’ – was playing for School. Both Mr and Mrs Turing had been co-opted to play for the Staff. The Staff won 6–1. The Hazelhurst Gazette prudently did not offer commentary on the performance of individual members of the Staff team.

  The sporting life. Alan is fully devoted to something on the hockey field.

  Perhaps Hazelhurst’s greatest asset was its headmaster, W.S. Darlington. Mr Darlington wrote up the school ma
gazine every term, and this gives us a wry insight into Alan’s time at prep-school. For the first term all was not easy, since John (due to go to Marlborough imminently) was head boy and Alan was the youngest in the school. The Hazelhurst Gazette hinted at Alan having made his mark immediately. First he started an origami craze: ‘not just darts and paper boats which all of us knew how to make, but paper frogs, paper kettles, paper donkeys, paper hats of all sizes and shapes. Seemingly you could boil water in a paper kettle over a naked flame – so Alan assured all the lower echelons, who were now industriously acquiring his skills and dropping paper all over the place.’

  Practical skills were honoured at Hazelhurst. Naturally, there was scouting: Mr Darlington commented, in his benignly sardonic way, on the deterioration in fire-lighting technique in his report for May 1922. But more importantly, there was carpentry. From time to time the excitement of carpentry got the better of Mr Darlington:

  As we sit down to write, we can only think of doors, doors, dovetails and bookshelves! As we think of the first of these our memories go back a term or two when we mentioned a door as being still unfinished. Oh! just as it was receiving the final touches before being put together, one of those final touches was too much for one of the tenons and it broke off; our present belief is that the door of happy memory is not yet finished, but we are quite sure the maker has learnt much more in the way of joinery than one who only puts together about six pieces of wood, more or less decently planed up, and then calls the article a book-case.

  And there was also the triumph of the geography exam, to which all the school were subjected. Alan had been poring over maps, both at Baston Lodge and at school, and this habit had caught Mr Darlington’s eye. ‘We departed somewhat from our usual custom,’ writes Mr Darlington on the subject of end-of-term exams: there was an ‘innovation [which] took the form of three prizes, one for each division of the school, for filling in blank maps with given names. The experiment was popular and successful.’ Successful for some, but not so popular with everyone. Turing ii distinguished himself with 77 marks, beating by a wide margin all the other boys in his division and all but five in the whole school; Turing i, despite being top of Form I, mustered only 59 marks. The end-of-term song celebrating the forthcoming holidays included the shameful line: ‘and no Map will make an Elder Brother take a lower place’.

  Another perspective on Alan’s time at Hazelhurst is provided by Alan himself, in his letters home, of which 16 survive. Most of the letters are dated, and all but two bear Sunday dates. Like many prep-schools, it seems that Hazelhurst obliged its pupils to write a letter home as part of the regular Sunday routine. Children at prep-school have no idea what to write about to their parents; the weekly letter can be an ordeal for all involved, particularly given that even in the 1920s it would take at least a month for a letter to get to India from Sussex. It seems that Ethel kept these 16 – and then gave them to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1960 – because they actually have something of interest in them. No tales of magnificent 21s against Crowborough Grange can be found in this collection, then. The ones that remain, though, have more than something of interest; here are some samples from the sample:

  • (1 April 1923): ‘Guess what I am writing with It is an invention of my own it is a fountain pen like this:- [diagram follows]’

  • (undated, summer 1923): ‘This week I thought of how I might make a Typewriter like this [uninterpretable partly crossed-out diagram follows] you see the the funny little rounds are letters cut out on one side slide along to the round and along an ink pad and stamp down and make the letter, thats not nearly all though’

  • (8 June 1924): ‘I do not know whether I told you last week but once when I said how much I hated tapioco pudding and you said that all Turings hated tapioco pudding and mint-sauce and something else I had never tried mint-sauce but a few days ago we had it and I found out very much that your statement was true.’

  • (21 September 1924): ‘In Natural wonders every child should know it says that the Carbon dioxide is changed to cooking soda in the blood and back to carbon dioxide in the lungs. If you can will you send me the chemical name of cooking soda or the formula better still so that I can see how it does it.’

  Alan Turing as THE WIDOW in the Hazlehurst School play in 1925.

  Many of the letters contain meticulous accounting in accordance with Julius’s standing requirements, and an inordinate proportion go on about Alan’s handwriting, which appears to have been an obsession with Ethel. And perhaps of greatest interest is that, from the very earliest, the letters all begin with the startling salutation ‘Dear Mother and Daddy’. Here is fertile ground for psychologists, so perhaps it is not necessary to add any commentary. John corroborates the conclusion, easily reached from these letters, that Alan was already showing a bent towards mathematics and sciences at Hazlehurst, and this early indication was to influence the choice of Alan’s public (secondary) school.

  Natural Wonders, by E.T. Brewster, does deserve some particular commentary. Ethel gave Alan’s copy to the Sherborne School Archive, and inside it she wrote: ‘Natural Wonders Every Child should know was given to Alan Turing aged 101/2. This book greatly stimulated his interest in science and was valued by him all his life.’ Alan had, however, developed an interest in the sciences (as well as geography) at an earlier age: Ethel mentions in her own biography of Alan how he was trawling gutters with a magnet to pick up the iron filings left by iron-tyred cartwheels, and asking questions about the bonding of hydrogen to oxygen in water in 1921; he had been reading other nature-study materials aged seven; and at the age of eight he had written ‘a book entitled About a Microscope – the shortest scientific work on record for it began and ended with the sentence, “First you must see that the lite is rite”’.

  Hazelhurst followed the traditional preparatory school curriculum. The ‘preparation’ offered by the school is for the Common Entrance examination to public schools, which was introduced in 1904, with papers in Latin, French, English, and Mathematics, plus a General Paper (Scripture, History and Geography). Greek could also be taken; so could Latin Verse. Science did not make it onto the core curriculum until 1969. Science at Hazelhurst was covered through occasional lectures on Natural History. It was fun, but it was not mainstream. To indulge his interests, Alan was having to make his own way; but that was fine, it was the way that suited him.

  Science in the cellar

  In the summer holidays of 1923 there was a short stay in Rouen at the house of a Madame Godier. John had been to the Godiers’ once before. Getting solo to France was no mean feat:

  Mother left nothing to chance and I was armed with her travel notes which Alan and I always called ‘moral maxims’. We were constantly bidden to chant ‘tickets, money, passport, keys’; many travellers have come to grief for want of this useful piece of advice. Admittedly my brother soon developed his own methods of travel and always tended to pay little attention to mother’s moral maxims. There was one occasion when they were travelling to Switzerland and somewhere en route to Dover mother requested Alan to throw some rubbish out of the window. Thereupon he picked up a bundle comprising tickets, money, passport and keys and made for the window, remarking that he hoped it would not injure any workmen on the line. Mother made a frantic grab and averted disaster by inches.

  On the first trip to Rouen John had taken his bicycle, giving rise to a troublesome encounter with the French customs – a contingency not provided for in Mother’s moral maxims. ‘I flatly declined to take my bicycle to Rouen on the second occasion. This was not because I feared another encounter with the customs but because my brother Alan had just learned to ride a bicycle and would have to bring his along as well. I was greatly alarmed at the prospect which opened before me of navigating wobbly Alan through French traffic and over greasy cobblestones.’ John soon realised this was a mistake, since there was now no means of escape with Madame Godier to the countryside, and to make matters worse for him, Madame Godier took a shine
to Alan:

  It did make things awkward for I was neatly impaled upon Morton’s fork. If Alan did not wash his ears (and he never did, save under threat), it was my fault for not supervising him; and if by chance he did, ‘comme il est charmant’. But I must give Alan his due and declare that his loyalty to me was unwavering. This in no way helped to soften Madame Godier and much did I deplore my folly in leaving our bikes behind in England.

  In 1923 John had asked for a change from the Wards. It had been ten years, more or less, and Ethel agreed, finding a new foster-family for the summer holidays and then on. The destination to which the boys were bound after their three weeks in Rouen was the Hertfordshire vicarage of the Meyers, a Church of England parson and his family, whose house was much more relaxed than the military Baston Lodge.

  What was it going to be like? [wrote John.] Had I made a dreadful mistake in urging mother to remove us from the Wards? On arrival I knew it was no mistake. The sun shone upon rose-beds and tennis-court. I was never happier than at the Meyers; even Alan – games-hater and nonconformist that he was – fitted in there. Alan’s stock rose several points when a gipsy revealed to Mrs Meyer at the Church fete that her younger charge was a genius. All credit to her that she half believed it!