Alan Turing: The Enigma The Centenary Edition
Page 10
Anything like ‘making a spectrograph’ was far beyond the resources Alan enjoyed at Guildford, but he got hold of an old spherical glass lampshade, filled it with plaster of Paris, covered it with paper (which made him think about the nature of curved surfaces) and set out to mark in the constellations of fixed stars. Typically, he insisted on doing it from his own observation of the night sky, although it would more easily and accurately have been done from an atlas. He trained himself to wake at four o’clock in the morning so that he could mark in some stars not visible in the December evening sky, thus waking up his mother, who thought she had heard a burglar. This done, he wrote to Christopher about it, also asking him whether he thought it would be advisable to try for a college other than Trinity next year. If this was a test of affection, he was again rewarded, for Christopher replied:
5/1/30
Dear Turing,
… I really can’t give you any advice about exams because it is nothing to do with me and I feel it would not be quite write [sic]. John’s is a very good College, but of course I should prefer personally that you came to Trinity where I should see more of you.
I should be very interested to see your star map when it is done but I suppose it is quite impracticable to bring it to school or anything. I have often wanted to make a star globe, but have never really bothered, especially now I have got the star atlas going down to 6th mag. …
Recently I have been trying to find Nebulae. We saw some quite good ones the other night, one very good planetary in Draco 7th mag. 10”. Also we have been trying to find a Comet 8th mag. in Delphinus. … I wonder if you will be able to get hold of a telescope to look for it with your 1 1/2” will be useless for such a small object. I tried to compute its orbit but failed miserably with 11 unsolved equations and 10 unknowns to be eliminated.
Have been getting on with plasticine. Rupert has been making horrid smelling soaps and fatty acids from … Rape Oil and Neal’s Boot Oil. …
This letter was written from his mother’s flat in London, where he was ‘to see the dentist … and also to avoid a dance at home.’ Next day he wrote again from the Clock House:
… I found the Comet at once in its assigned position. It was much more obvious and interesting than I had expected … I should say it is nearly 7th mag. It… should be obvious in your telescope. The best way is to learn the 4th & 5th mag. stars by heart, and move slowly to the right place, never losing sight of all the known stars. … In about half an hour I shall look again if it is clear (it has just clouded) and see if I can notice its motion among the stars and also see what it looks like with the powerful eyepiece ( × 250). The group of 5 4th mag. stars in Delphinus come into the field of the finder in pairs. Yrs. C.C. Morcom.
But Alan had already seen the comet, though in a more haphazard manner
10/1/30
Dear Morcom,
Thank you very much for the map for finding the comet. On Sunday I think I must have seen it. I was looking at Delphinus and thinking it was Equuleus and saw something like this [a tiny sketch] rather hazy and about 3’ long. I am afraid I did not examine it very carefully. I then looked for the comet elsewhere in Vulpecula thinking it was Delphinus. I knew from the Times that there was a comet in Delphinus that day.
… The weather really is annoying for this comet. Both on Wednesday and today I have had it quite clear until sunset and then a bank of cloud comes over the region of Aquila. On Wednesday it cleared away just after the comet had set. …
Yours A.M. Turing
Please don’t always thank me for my letters so religeously. I’ll let you thank me for writing them legibly (if I ever do) if you like.
Alan plotted the course of the comet, as it sped from Equuleus into Delphinus in the frosty heavens. He took the primitive star globe back to school to show to Christopher. Blamey had left at Christmas, and Alan now had to share another study, in which the inky sphere was poised. There were but few constellations marked in, but they amazed the younger boys with Alan’s erudition.
Three weeks into the term, on 6 February, some visiting singers gave a concert of sentimental part-songs. Alan and Christopher were both present, and Alan was watching his friend, trying to tell himself, ‘Well, this isn’t the last time you’ll see Morcom.’ That night he woke up in the darkness. The abbey clock struck; it was a quarter to three. He got out of bed and looked out of the dormitory window to look at the stars. He often used to take his telescope to bed with him, to gaze at other worlds. The moon was setting behind Ross’s house, and Alan thought it could be taken as a sign of ‘goodbye to Morcom’.
Christopher was taken ill in the night, at just that time. He was taken by ambulance to London, where he underwent two operations. After six days of pain, at noon on Thursday 13 February 1930, he died.
* Warrington Lodge, now the Colonnade Hotel, Warrington Crescent, London W9. His baptism was at St Saviour’s Church, immediately across the road.
* Alan’s spelling and punctuation, here and throughout, is faithfully reproduced.
*Unlike Sir Archibald Campbell.
* These were practice papers.
* The series is:
It was a standard result in sixth form work, but the point was that he discovered it without the use of the elementary calculus. Perhaps the most remarkable thing was his seeing that such a series should exist at all
*Usually called ‘the law of geodesic motion’.
* The piece of work was marked ‘Nine wrong genders. 5/25. Very poor.’
2
The Spirit of Truth
I sing the body electric,
The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,
They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,
And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul.
Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?
And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead?
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?
No one had told Alan that Christopher Morcom had contracted bovine tuberculosis from drinking infected cows’ milk as a small boy; it had set up a pattern of internal damage, and his life had been constantly in danger. The Morcom family had gone to Yorkshire in 1927 to observe the total eclipse of the sun on 29 June, and Christopher had been taken terribly ill in the train coming back. He had undergone an operation, and that was why Alan had been struck by his thin features when he returned to school late that autumn.
‘Poor old Turing is nearly knocked out by the shock,’ a friend wrote from Sherborne to Matthew Blamey next day. ‘They must have been awfully good friends.’ It was both less and more than that. On his side, Christopher had at last been becoming friendly, rather than polite. But on Alan’s side – he had surrendered half his mind, only to have it drop into a void. No one at Sherborne could have understood. But on the Thursday that Christopher died, ‘Ben’ Davis, the junior housemaster, did send to Alan a note telling him to prepare for the worst. Alan immediately wrote1 to his mother, asking her to send flowers to the funeral, which was held on the Saturday, at dawn. Mrs Turing wrote back at once and suggested that Alan himself write to Mrs Morcom. This he did on the Saturday.
15/2/30
Dear Mrs Morcom,
I want to say how sorry I am about Chris. During the last year I worked with him continually and I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy (to which he introduced me) as something to be shared with him and I think he felt a little the same about me. Although that interest is partly gone, I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do. I feel sure that you could not possibly have had a greater loss.
Yours sincerely, Alan Turing
>
I should be extremely grateful if you could find me sometime a little snapshot of Chris, to remind me of his example and of his efforts to make me careful and neat. I shall miss his face so, and the way he used to smile at me sideways. Fortunately I have kept all his letters.
Alan had awoken at dawn, at the time of the funeral:
I am so glad the stars were shining on Saturday morning, to pay their tribute as it were to Chris. Mr O’Hanlon had told me when it was to take place so that I was able to follow him with my thoughts.
Next day, Sunday, he wrote again, perhaps in more composed form, to his mother:
16/2/30
Dear Mother,
I wrote to Mrs Morcom as you suggested and it has given me a certain relief.…
… I feel sure that I shall meet Morcom again somewhere and that there will be some work for us to do together, and as I believed there was for us to do here. Now that I am left to do it alone I must not let him down but put as much energy into it, if not as much interest, as if he were still here. If I succeed I shall be more fit to enjoy his company than I am now. I remember what G O’H said to me once ‘Be not weary of well doing for in due season ye shall reap if ye faint not’ and Bennett* who is very kind on these occasions ‘Heaviness may endure for a night but joy cometh in the morning’. Rather Plymouth brotherish perhaps. I am sorry he is leaving. It never seems to have occurred to me to try and make any other friends besides Morcom, he made everyone seem so ordinary, so that I am afraid I did not really appreciate our ‘worthy’ Blamey and his efforts with me for instance.…
On receiving Alan’s letter, Mrs Turing wrote to Mrs Morcom:
Feb. 17 30
Dear Mrs Morcom,
Our boys were such great friends that I want to tell you how much I feel for you, as one mother for another. It must be terribly lonely for you, and so hard not to see here the fulfilment, that I am sure there will be, of all the promise of Christopher’s exceptional brains and lovable character. Alan told me one couldn’t help liking Morcom and he was himself so devoted to him that I too shared in his devotion and admiration: during exams he always reported Christopher’s successes. He was feeling very desolate when he wrote asking me to send flowers on his behalf and in case he feels he cannot write to you himself I know he would wish me to send his sympathy with mine.
Yours sincerely, Ethel S. Turing
Mrs Morcom immediately invited Alan to stay at the Clock House in the Easter holiday. Her sister Mollie Swan sent him a photograph of Christopher. Sadly, the Morcoms had very few pictures of him, and this was a poor likeness, taken on an automatic machine with a reversed image. Alan replied:
20/2/30
Dear Mrs Morcom,
Thank you very much for your letter. I should enjoy coming to the Clockhouse immensely. Thank you so much. We actually break up on April 1, but I am going to Cornwall with Mr O’Hanlon my housemaster until the 11th – so that I could come any time that suits you between then and the beginning of May. I have heard so much about the Clockhouse – Rupert, the telescope, the goats, the Lab and everything.
Please thank Miss Swan very much for the photograph. He is on my table now, encouraging me to work hard.
Apart from the photograph, Alan had to keep his emotions to himself. He was allowed no mourning period, but had to go through Corps and Chapel like everyone else. Alan’s devotion to Christopher’s memory had come as a surprise to the Morcoms. Christopher had always been reticent at home about his school friends, and had a way of referring to ‘a person called’ so-and-so as though he had never been mentioned before. ‘A person called Turing’ had featured in a few of his remarks about experiments, but no more than that, and the Morcom parents had only very briefly met Alan in December. They knew him only from his letters. At the beginning of March they changed their plans and decided to take the holiday in Spain which had been planned before Christopher died. So it was testimony to Alan’s letters that on 6 March they invited him to take Christopher’s place on the journey, instead of coming to their home. Alan wrote to his mother the next day:
… I am half sorry it is not to be the Clockhouse as I should like very much to see it and everything that Morcom has told me about there – but I don’t get invited to go to Gibraltar every day of the week.
On 21 March the Morcoms paid their farewell visit to Sherborne and Alan was allowed into Ross’s house to see them in the evening. Term ended a week later and Alan went to Rock, on the north coast of Cornwall, with O’Hanlon, whose private income allowed him to treat groups of boys in this way. The party included the tough Ben Davis and three Westcott House boys, Hogg and Bennett and Carse. Alan wrote later to Blamey that he ‘had a very good time there – plenty to eat and a pint of beer after lots of exercise.’
While he was away, Mrs Turing called on Mrs Morcom in her London flat. Mrs Morcom recorded in her diary (6 April):
Mrs Turing came to see me at flat tonight. Had not met her before. We talked nearly all the time about Chris and she told me how much he had influenced Alan and how Alan thought he was still working with him and helping him. She stayed till nearly 11 and had to get back to Guildford. She had been to Bach Concert at Queens Hall.
After ten days in Cornwall, Alan made a quick stop-over at Guildford, where Mrs Turing hastily tried to put him in order (extracting the usual quota of old handkerchieves from the lining of his overcoat), and on 11 April he arrived at Tilbury, joining the Morcom party on the Kaisar-i-Hind. Besides Colonel and Mrs Morcom, and Rupert, this included a director of Lloyds Bank and a Mr Evan Williams, chairman of Powell Dyffryn, the Welsh mining company. Mrs Morcom wrote in her diary:
… Sailed about noon. Wonderful day with bright sunshine until 3.30 when we began to come into mist and slowed down. Before tea we dropped anchor and remained just outside the mouth of the Thames until midnight. Ships all around us blowing fog-horns and sounding bells.… Rupert and Alan very excited about the fog and it really is rather alarming.
Alan shared a cabin with Rupert, who did his best to draw him out on Jeans and Eddington, but found Alan very shy and hesitant. Each night before going to sleep, Alan spent a long time looking at the photograph. On the first morning of the voyage, Alan began to talk to Mrs Morcom about Christopher, releasing his feelings in speech for the first time. The next day, after deck tennis with Rupert, was spent the same way, telling her how he had felt attracted to Christopher before getting to know him, about his presentiments of catastrophe and the moon setting. (‘It is not difficult to explain these things away – but, I wonder!’) On Monday, as they rounded Cape Vincent, Alan showed her the last letters he had received from Christopher.
They only spent four days on the Peninsula, driving over the hairpin bends to Granada where, it being Holy Week, they saw a religious procession in the starlight. On Good Friday they were back in Gibraltar and embarked on a homebound liner the next day. Alan and Rupert took early Communion on board ship on Easter Sunday.
Rupert was by now impressed with Alan’s originality of thought, but he did not think of Alan as in a different class from the Trinity mathematicians and scientists he had known. Alan’s future seemed unsure. Should he read science or mathematics at Cambridge? Was he sure of a scholarship at all? Somewhat in terms of a last resort, he spoke to Evan Williams about scientific careers in industry. Williams explained the problems of the coal industry, for instance the analysis of coal-dust for toxicity, but Alan was suspicious of this and remarked to Rupert that it might be used to cheat the miners by flourishing a scientific certificate at them.
They had done the trip in style, staying at the best hotels, but what Alan wanted most was to visit the Clock House. Mrs Morcom sensed this and gracefully asked him to ‘help’ her look through Christopher’s papers and sort them. So on the Wednesday, Alan went to her studio in London, and then after a visit to the British Museum joined her on the Bromsgrove train. For two days he saw the laboratory, the uncompleted telescope, the goats (they had replaced the guilty cow) and ever
ything Christopher had told him about. He had to go home on Friday, 25 April, but surprised Mrs Morcom by coming up to London the next day, presenting her with a parcel of Christopher’s letters. On the Monday he wrote:
28/4/30
Dear Mrs Morcom,
I am only just writing to thank you for having me on your trip and to tell you how much I enjoyed it. I really don’t think I have had such a jolly time before, except that wonderful week at Cambridge with Chris. I must thank you too for all the little things belonging to Chris that you have let me have. It means a great deal to me to have them.…
Yours affectionately, Alan
I was so glad you let me come on to the Clockhouse. I was very much impressed with the house and everything connected with it, and was very pleased to be able to help putting Chris’ things in order.
Mrs Turing had also written:
27/4/30
Dear Mrs Morcom,
Alan got home last night looking so well and happy – He loved his time with you but specially precious to him was the visit to the Clockhouse: he went off to Town today to see someone but he said he would tell me of that part another day – and I knew he meant that it was an experience quite apart. We’ve had no real talk yet but I am sure it has helped him to exchange memories with you and he is treasuring with the tenderness of a woman the pencils and the beautiful star map and other souvenirs you gave him.…
I hope you won’t think it an impertinence – but after our talk and your telling me how true to his name Chris was – and I believe is – in helping the weak – I thought how beautiful it would be to have a panel in his memory of S. Christopher in the School Chapel – a panel of your doing, and what an inspiration it would be for the boys who are so reminded that there are the followers of S. Christopher today and that genius and humble service can go hand in hand as in Chris.…