Prof

by Dermot Turing

  O’Hanlon’s was a house of tolerance as well as discipline. Although literature and classics were O’Hanlon’s passion, he had the largeness of soul to recognise other enthusiasms. Boarding schools are normalising, as well as rough, places, and his aim was to ensure that boys outside the mainstream could be coaxed into just enough conformity to survive, and ideally to thrive. Thus Alan found a survivable balance between conformity and indulging his more solitary passions for experimentation and mathematics. Alan became known as Old Turog. This was, in the 1920s, a loaf, rival to the longer-lasting Hovis brand. It may have been marketed as ‘the bread of health’ but as a nickname its inelegance fitted a mis-spelled Alan Turing rather well – and a nickname implied a degree of social acceptance. Westcott House did not cure Alan of untidiness, unpunctuality, or smelly experimentation; it did not convert him into a socialite, though it ensured he was never wholly alone; it did not require him to excel at games; best of all, it did not force him to devote his surplus time to mastery of the classics.

  Westcott House. Alan’s study was on the ground floor – the window nearest the tree. In my final term at Westcott I had the study on the opposite side of the corridor (window nearest the road).

  The stairwell at Westcott House where Alan set up a Foucault’s Pendulum.

  Michaelmas 1927 was Nowell Smith’s last term at Sherborne. A new headmaster, who ‘had tried (unsuccessfully)’ to teach Latin to John at Marlborough, was to replace him. And, under the new regime, the difficult issue arose as to whether Alan could be entered for the School Certificate examination – the 1920s predecessor of GCSEs. The Common Room boiled over, according to Alan’s mother:

  There was considerable tension in the common room between the literary and the scientific members of staff; the former maintained that Alan was quite unqualified for the examination, the latter protested that he should not be held back. The Headmaster, Mr. C.L.F. Boughey, gave the casting vote to permit him to have a try at a term’s notice. But Mr. Bensly, who had a special form – called by him the ‘Vermisorium’ – for School Leaving Certificate candidates, promised to give a billion pounds to any charity named by Alan should he so much as pass in Latin.

  Members of Mr Bensly’s Vermisorium – the wormery – were encouraged in their endeavours by means of a stick, in the form of an unappealing brush called Bonzo, and a carrot, or rather a weekly circular called The Weakly Worm, of which a few examples survive. The unfortunate Bensly had had to try to teach Alan French and ‘English subjects’ (Scripture, English, History and Geography), as well as Latin; his misfortune was compounded by Alan unthinkably passing his School Certificate. On Alan’s Summer 1928 report, O’Hanlon’s comment was: ‘I only hope he will dish his form-master’s [Bensly’s] expectations’. At a later date Ethel gleefully reported, ‘He did so with 7 credits in school certificate including English, French, Latin.’ Of these events, John remarked, ‘There is no evidence that Mr Bensly paid up the billion pounds.’

  The teaching of Latin requires the administration of mercy. (1) Birching, according to a mercy-seat in the choir at Sherborne Abbey; (2) Bonzo, as applied by Mr Bensly.

  Interplanetary gravitation and a supernova

  The Dinard days were over for the Turings. Now they had moved to Guildford, living in suburban obscurity, with Julius ever more bored and Ethel continuing to strain for something to do with her surplus energy. With School Certificate behind him, the way was clear for Alan to specialise and Ethel was thirsty for information; Alan obliged in his Sunday letters with stuff about Schrödinger’s theory. From here on, the school reports, covering chemistry, mathematics and physics as principal subjects, improved – with, of course, the now-customary comments about untidiness and slovenliness, and the expected grumbles from teachers of ‘subsidiary subjects’: French, English and German (‘He does not seem to have any aptitude for languages’). He was also ‘sociable & makes friends: & he seems unselfish in temper’. One such friend, in the year above Alan, was the stellar Christopher Morcom. In September 1928, Turing and Morcom came into the same orbit when they were put in the same form.

  It was easy to hero-worship Chris Morcom. He had blond, boyish good looks and he was wholly free of ink-stains. His contemporary and companion at Lyon House, Victor Brookes, described his intellect, his smile, his artistic nature and his sympathy for those in adversity. And his practical jokes:

  One term he made a star chart of the most intricate design; another he bought numbers of balloons, which he filled with gas and named after his favourite goats! These would be fitted with a fuse of waxed string, lighted and despatched over the girls school, often, I fear, complete with messages from the Upper Studies! The excitement was terrific when they exploded high in the air.

  Goats? Chris Morcom’s mother bred goats, and Chris defended this eccentricity with passion. It was just one of his charming traits. Masters like Trelawny-Ross were inclined to be dismissive, if not hostile, when boys preferred sciences to arts, fearing they would turn into ‘soulless specialists’. Trelawny-Ross was Morcom’s housemaster, and having noted mournfully ‘he could have done very well if he had stayed on the Classical side’, he acknowledged that Morcom had many redeeming features. First and foremost, games: despite his size and the handicap of illness, Chris played as a rugby forward, and he counted among his house friends the Captain of (rugby) Football. Then, he had charm, ability, modesty, kindness and loyalty. He folded up his clothes at night. He had made a positive impression in Trelawny-Ross’s Confirmation class. And, not least of all for Trelawny-Ross:

  Possibly other boys in the House did not realize it fully, for it would have been quite consistent with his unselfishness and modesty to hide the fact, but the Jazz type of ‘music’ certainly was more than a little distasteful to him and he must have spent some uncomfortable hours with it in other boys’ Studies.

  Despite their obvious differences, in deportment, tidiness and compliance with the rules and conventions, Alan Turing and Chris Morcom found each other to be kindred intellects.

  A question about the orbits of planets brought them together, and keen though Chris was upon his games it was actually during half-time at a game of football that the discussion was resumed. They soon found much common ground and worked side by side in the Science Laboratories. Chris seems to have delighted in enlarging upon the technical beauties and value of apparatus and there was hardly a subject open to Scientific investigation which did not grip him. So talk ranged from an analysis of the iodised salt prescribed for a boy in another House to the age of the stars with every imaginable sort of subject in between. Everything connected with his work, however trivial, fascinated him. He was for instance as Turing tells me, delighted to find some fungi growing in a beaker and at once took them to Mr H. Davis for a thorough investigation.

  Trelawny-Ross sent his senior students off to the school library on Wednesday afternoons for a stint of essay-writing, whereas O’Hanlon expected his own students to stay at Westcott House. Having mislaid a book one day in 1929, Alan went over to the main school buildings to the library ‘to share with someone from Ross’ [house]. I so enjoyed Chris’s company that ever since I always used to go to the library instead of my study.’ In the summer and Christmas holidays in 1929 Alan and Chris wrote each other haphazard letters on astronomy and chemistry and friction and whatever other technical topic came to mind. Morcom and Turing travelled together to Cambridge in December 1929 to try for a maths scholarship at Trinity College – Chris succeeded, Alan did not, but Alan could have another go next year.

  And then, tragically, it came to a sudden end. There was a reason that Chris was underweight for his age: he was suffering from a form of tuberculosis, which flared up on 6 February 1930. The tuberculosis had been attributed to cow’s milk, and the Morcoms’ goats were kept to provide a source of safe milk for Chris. He was whisked off to hospital, then removed to London, but on 11 February Christopher Morcom died.

  It is perhaps rather easy to conclude that Alan was
knocked sideways, and that the death of his best friend was bound to exert an influence over the rest of his life. Certainly Alan felt the loss, and keenly. Within a day, guided by Mother, Alan had written a letter of condolence to Chris’s mother, whom he’d met briefly en route to Cambridge two months before.

  But Chris was not Alan’s only friend, and not the only Sherborne student who was in his intellectual peer group. Alan’s maths teacher from the autumn of 1928 was Canon D.B. Eperson, who had been teaching Morcom for a year already. In January 1929 another boy, Pat Mermagen, joined the set; he already had a Cambridge scholarship under his belt. They all sat their Higher School Certificate (HSC) exam in July 1929; the results were Morcom 1436, Mermagen 1365, Turing 1033, ‘and some also-rans’. Mermagen stayed on for another year to be Captain of the School, Captain of Rugby and Captain of Cricket.

  Chris Morcom’s death did, however, have significant consequences. First and foremost, in the absence of the one person with whom he could collaborate, Alan Turing’s preferred approach to problem-solving – to tackle it on his own – was left unchallenged in his peer group. From now on, Alan would always do things his way. Eperson summed it up:

  In July [1930] his H.S.C. marks reached only 1079; these figures show that Turing, though potentially a gifted mathematician, never did really well in the conventional H.S.C. topics. In one sense he was difficult to teach, as he preferred to make his own independent investigations. He was reputed to have ‘discovered’ Gregory’s series, π/4 = 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 + 1/7 + ad inf., without using any calculus during his early school days. He was less interested in studying text books and developing a good style.

  Alan with Pat Mermagen, another maths student at Sherborne, in June 1930.

  His HSC examiner made similar comments:

  A.M. Turing showed an unusual aptitude for noticing the less obvious points to be discussed or avoided in certain questions and for discovering methods which would at once shorten or illumine the solutions. But he appeared to lack the patience necessary for careful computation or algebraic verification and his handwriting was so bad that he lost marks frequently – sometimes because his work was definitely illegible and sometimes because his misreading his own handwriting led him into mistakes.

  Oh dear. But Alan was not moping; rather the contrary: Old Turog was succeeding. A photograph with Mermagen shows Alan in June 1930 happy and relaxed (and with typically ghastly unpressed trousers) in the Sherborne School courts, just outside the classrooms where maths was taught. That summer he set up a Foucault’s Pendulum at Westcott House in the ‘black-and-white’ – the boys’ entrance hall, named for its floor tiles, which had a broad, open stairwell going all the way up to the second floor. This gave him awed, if uncomprehending, credibility among the junior boys. He surprised his Head of House with a useful performance on the rugby field. He became a school prefect. He was a participant in holiday trips with other senior boys, some hosted by Mr O’Hanlon – a convenient way to escape the strictures and tensions of Guildford, now that John had qualified as a solicitor and was working in London. He even wrote, with the confidence of a past master, to the Editor of the Weakly Worm, the unforgotten Mr Bensly:

  O’Hanlon and his men on holiday: the wistful Turog is second from right; the others are (L–R) Hogg, Geoffrey O’Hanlon (housemaster) and White.

  To the Editor of the Weakly Worm.

  Dear Sir,

  We hope that the following will be of use to those who intend taking the School Certificate this term. It is the result of the careful work of A.M. T… . g O.W., Fellow of Group III, sometime member of the Vermisorium.

  The formula is designed to discover the number of credits which will be obtained in the Certificate Examination.

  where:-

  C = no: of credits which will be obtained.

  m = weight of boy in lbs.

  M = momentum of Bonzo on impact with hind-quarters of boy, at last application of same.

  a = day of month on which Exam: is taken.

  v = capacity for work of boy in ‘Greek Prose Hours’ (1 G.P.H. = 550 ft. lbs. of work).

  θ = angle of inclination of body at last application of Bonzo.

  R = no. of ice-buns eaten per week in break.

  r = quantity of food consumed during working hours, in Cho-hones.1

  L = no. of impositions done per week, on average.

  From this we see that:-

  C is greatest when R = r.

  Therefore, eat as many ice-buns as possible, and consume in Form at every available opportunity.

  C = 0 if ma = v sin θ, or if M is very large.

  Therefore:-

  (1) Put on weight (see ice-buns), and avoid Bonzo.

  (2) Humour your master so that he will not beat you hard.

  Trusting this may prove useful,

  we are

  yours truly

  VERMES DUO EMERITI.

  Veritably, Turing’s first formula. Although Chris was gone, he was not wholly absent from Alan’s life. Chris’s parents endowed a prize for science, which Alan won in 1930 and again in 1931. And, as Alan matured from the Sherborne environment, he found he was accepted, on his own terms, in the wider Morcom family.

  Notes

  1 Interlineated by Alan

  2 Alan’s housemaster: more on him later

  3 O’Hanlon’s nickname

  4 Supervised homework sessions, called ‘prep’ at most boarding schools, are called ‘hall’ at Sherborne

  1 Interlineated above the crossed-out passage. The word shown by [??] is illegible. It’s not surprising that Ethel was exasperated at Alan’s untidy, blotted, unintelligible scrawl. Was she supposed to send rations or not?

  1 O’Hanlon confounded everyone by getting married in 1933 at the age of 48, and producing a family of four children

  1 An early variety of milk chocolate

  4

  KINGSMAN

  IN DECEMBER 1930 Alan Turing won a scholarship to study mathematics at King’s College, Cambridge, and his first term there began in the autumn of 1931. Alan occupied the spring and summer terms at Sherborne – in those days staying on was usual practice, as it wouldn’t do to seek a temporary job, and institutional culture was deeply embedded. John was amazed:

  Rumours of these matters reaching me, I began to realise that my brother was becoming a power in the land. He outdistanced his mathematics master and for the rest of his time at Sherborne he was borne upon his own pinions; he had out-soared the shadow of Sherborne’s night. Since nursery days I had often pondered the story of the goose which turned into a swan. In the Brown, Yellow, Green, Blue and Red Fairy Books it was an unwritten rule that the younger (usually, one must concede, the third) son should make good. Now, suddenly, all was coming true as in the Fairy Books. Alan was making good. My father and I suffered successive phases of disbelief, scepticism and recognition as Alan’s scholastic achievements smote us in rapid succession after the manner of Samson’s jaw-bone of an ass.

  To the parsimonious delight of Julius Turing, Alan’s scholarship was worth £80 a year, and on top of that Sherborne made him a grant of £50 a year. In 1931 this was more than enough to live on, particularly for an undergraduate, and it contrasted agreeably with the payment Julius had had to make to buy John into articles of clerkship with a London firm of solicitors.

  Chip off a new block

  Alan indeed had become a swan, and in more than one sense. Generations of children have been taught that the light-bulb was invented by a Mr Edison in the United States. There is, however, another story. In 1845, a 20-year-old man began experiments using coiled strips of paper to make a carbon filament, which could incandesce under the influence of electricity if placed in a vacuum. The man carried on his experiments for some years, the principal challenge being the vacuum. By 1878 the difficulties had been overcome, and he demonstrated an incandescent carbon-filament lamp at a meeting of the Newcastle Chemical Society. That man was Joseph Swan, and he was Chris Morcom’s grandfather. (Edison a
lso announced his separate achievement in 1878.) The Turings might, dimly across a family tree, claim kinship with George Johnstone Stoney, godfather to the electron, but this hardly held a candle to Sir Joseph Swan, FRS, inventor of the electric light-bulb.

  Sir Joseph’s inventions were manifold:

  Amongst these are to be reckoned, for example, the carbon process, better known in this country as the ‘Autotype’ process; bromide printing paper, familiar to all photographers; the incandescent carbon filament electric lamp; the cellular lead plate electrical storage battery, and perhaps most important of all, artificial cellulose thread, the prototype of artificial silk.

  Hardly surprising, then, that Alan Turing was fascinated by the Morcom family. In 1929, on his first trip to Cambridge, Alan had accompanied Christopher Morcom and been introduced to Chris’s mother in her flat and studio in London. Mrs Morcom wrote in her diary: