Alan Turing: The Enigma The Centenary Edition

by Andrew Hodges

  On 12 February 1933, Alan marked the third anniversary of Christopher’s death:

  Dear Mrs Morcom,

  I expect you will be thinking of Chris when this reaches you. I shall too, and this letter is just to tell you that I shall [be] thinking of Chris and of you tomorrow. I am sure that he is as happy now as he was when he was here.

  Your affectionate Alan.

  Others were to remember that week for another reason: on 9 February the Oxford Union resolved that under no circumstances would it fight for King and Country. There were parallel sentiments at Cambridge, not necessarily of complete pacifism, but of a kind which rejected any war fought for that slogan. Patriotism was not enough, after the First World War; there might legitimately be a defence of ‘collective security’ but not a ‘national war’. Newspapers and politicians reacted as though the Enlightenment had never happened, but enlightened scepticism was particularly alive at King’s, and Alan began to find that it was more than a rather grand and frightening house in a giant public school.

  King’s enjoyed special privileges within the university system, and was distinguished by its opulence, thanks to a fortune amassed by John Maynard Keynes. But it also prized a moral autonomy that had been at its most pure and intense in the early 1900s, as Keynes described:17

  … We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience, and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey.…

  E.M. Forster had more gently, but more widely, portrayed an insistence on the priority of individual relationships over every kind of institution. In 1927 Lowes Dickinson, the King s historian and first advocate of a ‘League of Nations’, wrote18 in his autobiography:

  I have seen nothing lovelier than Cambridge at this time of year. But Cambridge is a lovely backwater. The main stream is Jix* and Churchill and Communists and Fascists and hideous hot alleys in towns, and politics, and that terrible thing called the ‘Empire’, for which everyone seems to be willing to sacrifice all life, all beauty, all that is worthwhile, and has it any worth at all? It’s a mere power engine.

  They spoke of mere power, that was the point. Even Keynes, involved in state affairs and devoted to economics, did so in the belief that with such tawdry problems solved, people could start to think about something important. It was an attitude very different from the cult of duty, which made a virtue out of playing the expected part in the power structure. King’s College was very different from Sherborne School.

  It was also part of the King’s attitude to life that it regarded games, parties and gossip to be natural pleasures, and assumed that clever people would still enjoy ordinary things. Although King’s had only gradually moved away from its original role as a sister foundation to Eton, there were among its dons those who made a positive effort to encourage candidates who did not come from public schools and tried to make them feel at home. There was great emphasis on the mixing between dons and undergraduates in what was a small college, with less than sixty students in each year. No other college was like this, and so Alan Turing gradually woke up to the fact that by chance he had arrived in a unique environment, which was as much his element as any institution could be. It corroborated what he always knew, which was that his duty was to think for himself. The match was not perfect, for a number of reasons, but it was still a great stroke of fortune. At Trinity he would have been a lonelier figure; Trinity also inherited the moral autonomy, but without the personal intimacy that King’s encouraged.

  The year 1933 only brought to the surface ideas which in King’s had a long history. Alan shared in the climate of dissent:

  26/5/33

  Dear Mother,

  Thank you for socks etc.… Am thinking of going to Russia some time in vac but have not yet quite made up my mind.

  I have joined an organisation called the ‘Anti-War Council’. Politically rather communist. Its programme is principally to organize strikes amongst munitions and chemical workers when government intends to go to war. It gets up a guarantee fund to support the workers who strike.

  … There has been a very good play on here by Bernard Shaw called ‘Back to Methuselah’.

  Yours, Alan

  For a short time, Anti-War Councils sprung up across Britain and united pacifists, communists and internationalists against a ‘national’ war. Selective strikes had, in fact, prevented the British government from intervening on the Polish side against the Soviet Union in 1920. But for Alan the real point lay not in political commitments, but in the resolve to question authority. Since 1917 Britain had been deluged by propaganda to the effect that Bolshevik Russia was the kingdom of the devil, but in 1933 anyone could see that something had gone completely wrong with the western trading and business system. With two million people unemployed, there was no precedent for what was above all a baffling situation, in which no one knew what should be done. Soviet Russia, after its second revolution of 1929, offered the solution of state planning and control, and there was great interest among intellectual circles in how it was working. It was the testing-ground of the Modern. Alan probably enjoyed riling his mother with a nonchalant ‘rather communist’: the point lay not in this or that label, but in the fact that his generation were going to think for themselves, take a wider view of the world than their parents had done, and not be frightened by bogey words.

  Alan did not in fact go to see Russia for himself. But even if he had, he would have found himself ill-disposed to become an enthusiast for the Soviet system. Nor did he become a ‘political’ person in the Cambridge of the 1930s. He was not sufficiently interested in ‘mere power’. Buried in the Communist Manifesto was the declaration that the ultimate aim was to make society ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’ But in the 1930s, to be a communist meant identifying with the Soviet regime, which was a very different matter. Those at Cambridge who perceived themselves as members of a responsible British prefect class might well identify with the Russian rulers as with a sort of better British India, collectivising and rationalising the peasants for their own good. For products of the English public school, apt to despise trade, it was but a small step to reject capitalism, and place faith in greater state control. In many ways the Red was a mirror image of the White. Alan Turing, however, was not interested in organising anyone, and did not wish to be organised by anyone else. He had escaped from one totalitarian system, and had no yearning for another.

  Marxism claimed to be scientific, and it spoke to the modern need for a rationale of historical change that could be justified by science. As the Red Queen told Alice, ‘You may call it “nonsense” if you like, but I’ve heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary.’ But Alan was not interested in the problems of history, while the marxist attempts to explain the exact sciences in terms of ‘prevailing modes of production’ were very remote from his ideas and experience. The Soviet Union judged relativity and quantum mechanics by political criteria, while the English theorist Lancelot Hogben sustained an economic explanation of the development of mathematics only by restricting attention to its most elementary applications. Beauty and truth, which motivated Alan Turing as they had always inspired mathematicians and scientists, were lacking. The Cambridge communists took upon themselves something of the character of a fundamentalist sect, with the air of being saved, and the element of ‘conversion’ met in Alan Turing the same scepticism as he had already turned upon Christian beliefs. With his fellow sce
ptic Kenneth Harrison he would mock the communist line.

  On economic questions, indeed, Alan came to think highly of Arthur Pigou, the King’s economist who had played a slightly earlier part than Keynes in patching up nineteenth century liberal capitalism. Pigou held that more equal distribution of income was likely to increase economic welfare, and was an early advocate of the welfare state. Broadly similar in their outlook, both Pigou and Keynes were calling for increased state spending during the 1930s. Alan also began to read the New Statesman, and could broadly be identified with the middle-class progressive opinion to which it was addressed, concerned both for individual liberty and for a more rationally organised social system. There was much talk about the benefits of scientific planning (so that Aldous Huxley’s 1932 satire Brave New World could treat it as the intellectuals’ already dated orthodoxy), and Alan went to talks on progressive ventures such as the Leeds Housing Scheme*. But he would not have seen himself as one of the scientific organisers and planners.

  In fact his idea of society was that of an aggregate of individuals, much closer to the views of democratic individualism held by J.S. Mill than that of socialists. And to keep his individual self intact, self-contained, self-sufficient, uncontaminated by compromise or hypocrisy,† was his ideal. It was an ideal far more concerned with the moral than with the economic or political; and closer to the traditional values of King’s than to the developing currents of the 1930s.

  Like many people (E.M. Forster among them) he found a special pleasure in discovering Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. Here was a Victorian writer who had doubted the moral axioms, playing with them in Looking-Glass fashion by attaching the taboos on sex to the eating of meat, describing Anglican religion in terms of transactions in ornamental money, and exchanging the associations of ‘sin’ with those of ‘sickness’. Alan also much admired Butler’s successor Bernard Shaw, enjoying his light play with serious ideas. For the well-read sophisticate of the 1930s, Butler and Shaw were already out-worn classics, but for one from Sherborne School they still held a liberating magic. Shaw had taken up what Ibsen* called ‘the revolution of the Spirit’, and wanted to show true individuals on the stage, those who lived not by ‘customary morals’ but by inner conviction. But Shaw also asked hard questions about what kind of society could contain such true individuals: questions highly pertinent to a young Alan Turing. Back to Methuselah, which Alan thought ‘a very good play’ in May 1933, was an attempt at what Shaw called ‘politics sub specie aeternitatis’. With its science-fiction view of Fabian ideas, treating with contempt the sordid realities of Asquith and Lloyd George, it suited Alan’s idealist frame of mind.

  One subject, however, did not feature in Bernard Shaw’s plays, and only very rarely in the New Statesman.19 In 1933 its drama critic reviewed The Green Bay Tree, which was about ‘a boy … adopted for immoral purposes by a wealthy degenerate,’ and said it was ‘well worth seeing for anyone who finds a pervert a less boring subject for the drama than a man with a diseased liver.’ In this respect, King’s College was unique. Here it was possible to doubt an axiom which Shaw left unquestioned and Butler skated over nervously.

  It was only possible because no one breached the line that separated the official from the unofficial worlds. The consequences of being found out were the same in King’s as anywhere else, and the same double life was imposed by the outside world. It was a ghetto of sexual dissent, with the advantages and disadvantages of ghetto life. The internal freedom to express heretical thoughts and feelings was certainly of benefit to Alan. He was, for instance, helped by the fact that Kenneth Harrison derived from his father, himself a graduate of King’s, a liberal understanding of other people’s homosexual feelings. But the world of Keynes and Forster, the parties and comings and goings of Bloomsbury people, lay far above Alan’s head. There was a glossiness about King’s, whose greatest strength lay in the arts, and drama in particular, in which he had no share. He would have been too easily deterred and frightened by the more theatrical elements in expressing his homosexuality. If at Sherborne his sexuality was described in terms of ‘filth’ and ‘scandal’, he now also had to come to terms with that other kind of labelling that the world found so important: that of the pansy, an affront and traitor to masculine supremacy. He did not find a place in this compartment; nor did the King’s aesthete set, flourishing in its protected corner, reach out to a shy mathematician. As in so many ways, Alan was the prisoner of his own self-sufficiency. King’s could only protect him while he worked out the problems for himself.

  It was the same with regard to religious belief, for while agnosticism was all but de rigueur in King’s, he was not the person to follow a trend, only to be stimulated and liberated by the freedom to ask hitherto forbidden questions. In developing his intellectual life, he did not form the social connections that a less shy person could have made. Unlike most of his close acquaintances, he was a member neither of the ‘Ten Club’ nor of the Massinger Society – two King’s undergraduate societies of which the first read plays and the other discussed far into the night, over mugs of cocoa, papers on culture and moral philosophy. He was too awkward, even uncouth, to fit into these comfortable gatherings. Nor was he elected to the exclusive university society, the Apostles, which drew much of its membership from King’s and Trinity. In many ways, he was too ordinary for King’s.

  In this respect he had something in common with one of his new friends, James Atkins, who was the third mathematical scholar of Alan’s year. James and Alan got on well together, in an amiable manner that lacked any deep conversations about Christopher or science, and it was James whom Alan asked to come with him for a few days walking in the Lake District.

  They were away from 21 to 30 June, so that Alan did achieve his objective of being away from home on 23 June, his ‘coming of age’. In fact they were walking that day from the youth hostel at Mardale over High Street to Patterdale. The weather was unusually hot and sunny, leading Alan at one point to sunbathe naked, and perhaps encouraging him in the gentle sexual approach that he made a few days later, as they rested on the hillside. This almost accidental but electric moment was perhaps less important to Alan than to James, who had been particularly repressed at his public school and was catching up years of self-knowledge, mentally and physically. There was no repetition during the holiday, while he thought it over. In the following two weeks, he found himself roused to feelings of affection and desire for Alan, and expected to see him when he returned to Cambridge on 12 July for the long vacation term. This was not so much to study mathematics as to take part in concerts during the International Congress of Musical Research, for James found in music the absoluteness that Alan found in pure mathematics.

  James did not know that the same day Alan had gone to the Clock House to remember Christopher. At Easter, he had stayed there again, taken communion at his shrine, and had written:

  20/4/33

  My dear Mrs Morcom,

  I was so pleased to be at the Clockhouse for Easter. I always like to think of it specially in connection with Chris. It reminds us that Chris is in some way alive now. One is perhaps too inclined to think only of him alive at some future time when we shall meet him again; but it is really so much more helpful to think of him as just separated from us for the present.

  His July visit coincided with the dedication of the memorial window on 13 July, which would have been Christopher’s twenty-second birthday. The local children had the day off school, and laid flowers beneath the stained-glass window. A family friend preached on ‘Kindness’ in Christopher’s memory. They all sang Christopher’s favourite hymn:

  Gracious Spirit, Holy Ghost

  Taught by Thee we covet most

  Of thy gifts at Pentecost

  Holy heavenly Love

  In a marquee at the Clock House, a conjuror amused the children over their buns and lemonade; Rupert demonstrated Christopher’s experiment with the iodates and sulphites, and his uncle explained it to them. They blew bubbles and
sent up balloons.

  Alan returned to Cambridge two or three weeks after this bittersweet ceremony, and so it was not long before James indicated that he would like to continue the sexual contact that Alan had sparked off. But there was always a sense that Alan never again showed the initiative which the summer sun had elicited, and there was a complexity which James could never penetrate. The associations of Christopher, which Alan did not share with James, might have been part of the reason. The visit would have refreshed the memory of pure, intense romantic love, of a kind which did not exist within his relationship with James. Instead, they were satisfied with an easy-going sexual friendship in which there was no pretence of being in love. But at least Alan knew that he was not alone.

  Sometimes he seemed ruffled. At the Founder’s Feast in December 1933, there was an incident when an undergraduate from James’s old school said to Alan in an obnoxious manner, ‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m not a homosexual.’ Alan, upset by this attack, said to James, ‘If you want to go to bed, it’ll be one-sided.’ But this was the exceptional moment in a relationship which continued – to a lessening degree – for several years.

  No one else knew of this, although in more general terms, as the Feast incident illustrated, Alan was not particularly secretive about his sexuality. There was another undergraduate for whom Alan (as he told James) had longings, and their names were linked by scurrilous clues like ‘See under 2 down’ for a crossword puzzle in an abortive King’s rag magazine. In the autumn of 1933 Alan also made another friend, with whom the main link was discussion of sex. This was Fred Clayton, who was a very different character. While both Alan and James were reserved, but got on with it without making a fuss, with Fred it was the reverse. His father was headmaster of a small village school near Liverpool, and he had not been through the public school training. A rather small, rather young classics scholar, he had been cox of the boat in which Alan rowed, but their acquaintanceship developed as Fred became aware of Alan as someone whose sexuality seemed to be made no secret, either by himself or by others.