Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

by Andrew Hodges

  so I cycled as programme left luggage with baggage master started out of docks about 11 o’clock got map for 3/-including Southampton missing Sherborne by about 3 miles. Noted where Sherborne was just outside. With an awful strive, found General Post Office, sent wire O’Hanlon 1/-. Found cycle shop, had things done 6d. Left 12 o’clock had lunch 7 miles out 3/6 went on to Lyndhurst 3 miles got apple 2d. went on to Beerley 8 miles pedal a bit wrong had it done 6d. went on Ringwood 4 miles.

  The streets in Southampton were full of people who had struck. Had a lovely ride through the New Forest and then over a sort of moor into Ringwood and quite flat again to Wimborne.

  Alan stayed overnight at the best hotel in Blandford Forum – an expedient that would hardly have been approved by his father. (Alan had to account for every penny that he spent: no mere figure of speech, for his letter ended ‘Sending back £1-0-1 in £ note and penny stamp.’) But the proprietors only charged a nominal amount and saw him off in the morning. Then:

  Just near Blandford some nice downs and suddenly merely undulating near all the way here but the last mile was all downhill.

  From West Hill he could see his destination: the little Georgian town of Sherborne and the school itself by the abbey.

  For a boy of his class to improvise a solution without a fuss was not at all the expected thing. The bicycle journey was regarded with astonishment, and was reported in the local newspaper.13 While Winston Churchill called for the ‘unconditional surrender’ of the ‘enemy’ miners, Alan had made the most of the general strike for himself. He had enjoyed two days of freedom outside the usual system. But they were over very quickly. There was a book14 about life at Sherborne, The Loom of Youth by Alec Waugh, and this described the sensations:

  The new boy’s first week at a Public School is probably the most wretched he will ever pass in his life. It is not that he is bullied … it is merely that he is utterly lonely, is in constant fear of making mistakes, and so makes for himself troubles that do not exist.

  When his hero wrote home at the end of his second day, ‘it did not need a very clever mother to read between the lines and see her son was hopelessly miserable.’ It was worse for Alan, for he could not even merge inconspicuously while all his belongings were stuck at Southampton by the strike. At the end of his first week:

  Its an awful nuisance here without any of my clothes or anything…. It’s rather hard getting settled down. Do write soon. There was no work on Wednesday except for ‘Hall’ or prep. And then its a business finding my classrooms what books to get but I will be more or less settled after a week or so …

  But a week later Alan was not much better off:

  I am getting more and more settled down. But I won’t be quite right until my things come. Fagging starts for us next Teusday. It is run on the same principle as the Gallic councils that tortured and killed the last man to arrive; here one fagmaster calls and all his fags run the last to arrive getting the job. You have to have cold showers in the morning here like cold baths at Marlborough. We have tea at 6.30 here on Mon., Wed., Frid. I manage to go without food from lunch to then…. The general strike had a part of it as a printer’s strike the result of that is that ‘Bennetts’ booksellers had none of the books ordered and I am without a lot of them. As in most public schools new boys have to sing some song. The time has not yet come. I am not sure what to sing anyhow it won’t be ‘buttercup’…. The amount of work we are given for Hall here is sometimes absurdly small e.g. Read Acts chapters 3 and 4 and that is for ¾hr.

  Yr loving son Alan

  There was indeed a song-singing and another ceremony in which he was kicked up and down the day room in a waste paper basket. However, if his mother read between the lines, she subordinated sympathy to her sense of duty. Her comment on this letter was that it displayed Alan’s ‘whimsical sense of humour’.

  He was now at last being taught science, and reported:

  We do do Chemistry 2 hrs. a week. We have only got to about the stages of ‘Properties of Matter’, ‘Physical and chemical change’ etc. The master was quite amused by my Iodine making and I shewed him some samples. The headmaster is called ‘Chief’. I seem to be doing Greek and not Hellenics….

  The master, Andrews, was no doubt ‘amused’ that Alan already knew so much. He had arrived ‘delightfully ingenuous and unspoilt’. And the head boy of Westcott House, Arthur Harris, had rewarded Alan’s cycling initiative by appointing him his ‘fag’, or servant. But neither scientific education nor initiative were exactly Sherborne priorities.

  The headmaster used to expound the meaning of school life in his sermons.15 Sherborne was not, he explained, entirely devoted to ‘opening the mind’, although ‘historically … this was the primary meaning of school.’ Indeed, said the headmaster, there was ‘constantly a danger of forgetting the original object of school.’ For the English public school had been consciously developed into what he called ‘a nation in miniature’. With a savage realism, it dispensed with the lip service paid to such ideas as free speech, equal justice and parliamentary democracy, and concentrated upon the fact of precedence and power. As the headmaster put it:

  In form-room and hall and dormitory, on the field and on parade, in your relations with us masters and in the scale of seniority among yourselves, you have become familiar with the ideas of authority and obedience, of cooperation and loyalty, of putting the house and the school above your personal desires …

  The great theme of the ‘scale of seniority’ was the balance of privilege and duty, itself reflecting the more worthy side of the British Empire. But this was a theme to which ‘opening the mind’ came as at best an irrelevance.

  The Victorian reforms had made their mark, and competitive examinations played a part in public school life. Those who came as scholars had an opportunity to take on the role of an intelligentsia in the ‘nation in miniature’, tolerated provided they interfered with nothing that mattered. But Alan, who did not belong to this group, was quick to note the ‘absurdly small’ amount expected of him. And in fact it was the organised team games of rugby football (‘footer’) and cricket which for most boys would dominate the years at Sherborne and through which the emotional lessons were taught. Nor had the social changes of the Great War made any difference to the total, introverted, self-conscious system of house life, with its continuous public scrutiny and control of every individual boy. These were the true priorities.

  In one respect only a token concession had been made to Victorian reform. There had been a science master at Sherborne since 1873, but this was primarily for the sake of the medical profession. It was not for the Workshop of the World, stigmatised as too mundanely utilitarian in spirit to occupy the time of a gentleman. The Stoneys might build the bridges of the Empire, but it was a higher caste which commanded them. Neither did science enjoy respect for its enquiry, irrespective of usefulness, into truth. Here again the public school had resisted the triumphant claims of nineteenth-century science. Nowell Smith divided the intellectual world into Classical, Modern and Science, in that order, and held that

  it is only the shallowest mind that can suppose that all the advance of discovery brings us appreciably nearer to the solution of the riddles of the universe which have haunted man from the beginning …

  Such was the miniature, fossilised Britain, where masters and servants still knew their places, and where the miners were disloyal to their school. And while the boys were playing at being servants, loading the milk churns on to the trains until the strike was broken by the masters of their country, the shallow mind of Alan Turing had arrived in their midst. It was a mind that had no interest in the problems of would-be landowners, empire-builders, or administrators of the white man’s burden; they belonged to a system that had no interest in him.

  The word ‘system’, indeed, was one which was a constant refrain, and the system operated almost independently of individual personalities. Westcott House, which Alan joined, had taken its first boarders only in 1920,
and yet already existed as though the traditional prefects and ‘fags’ and beatings in the washroom were laws of nature. This was true even though the housemaster, Geoffrey O’Hanlon, had a mind of his own. Then a bachelor in his forties, and nicknamed (rather snobbishly) Teacher, he had extended the original house building with his own private fortune derived from Lancashire cotton. He personally did not believe in moulding the boys to a common form, and failed to instil the religion of ‘footer’ with quite the enthusiasm of the other housemasters. His house enjoyed in consequence a dim reputation for ‘slackness’. He encouraged music and art, disliked bullying, and stopped the song-singing initiation soon after Alan arrived. A Catholic classicist, he was the nearest thing to a liberal government in the ‘nation in miniature’. Yet the system prevailed, in all but details. One could conform, rebel, or withdraw – and Alan withdrew.

  ‘He appears self-contained and is apt to be solitary,’ commented O’Hanlon.16 ‘This is not due to moroseness, but simply I think to a shy disposition.’ Alan had no friend, and at least once in this year he was trapped underneath some loose floorboards in the house dayroom by the other boys. He tried to continue chemistry experiments there, but this was doubly hated, as showing a swottish mentality, and producing nasty smells. ‘Slightly less dirty and untidy in his habits,’ wrote O’Hanlon at the end of 1926, ‘rather more conscious of a duty to mend his ways. He has his own furrow to plough, and may not meet with general sympathy: he seems cheerful, though I’m not always certain he really is so.’

  ‘His ways sometimes tempt persecution: though I don’t think he is unhappy. Undeniably he is not a “normal” boy: not the worse for that, but probably less happy,’ he wrote somewhat inconsistently at the end of the spring term of 1927. The headmaster commented more briskly:

  He should do very well when he finds his métier; but meanwhile he would do much better if he would try to do his best as a member of this school – he should have more esprit de corps.

  Alan was not what Brewster called a ‘proper boy’, whose instincts, inherited from thousands of years of warfare, made him want to throw things at other people. In this respect he was more like his father, who had managed to escape games as a boy in Bedford. Mr Turing, who lacked his wife’s excessive respect for schoolmasters, made a special request for Alan to be excused from cricket, and he was allowed by O’Hanlon to play golf instead. But he made himself ‘a drip’ by letting down his house contingent at the gym with his ‘slackness’. He was also called dirty, thanks to his rather dark, greasy complexion, and a perpetual rash of ink stains. Fountain pens still seemed to spurt ink whenever his clumsy hands came near them. His hair, which naturally fell forward, refused to lie down in the required direction; his shirt moved out of his trousers, his tie out of his stiff collar. He still seemed unable to work out which coat button corresponded to which buttonhole. On the Officers Training Corps parade on Friday afternoons, he stood out with cap askew, hunched shoulders, ill-fitting uniform with puttees like lampshades winding up his legs. All his characteristics lent themselves to easy mockery, especially his shy, hesitant, high-pitched voice – not exactly stuttering, but hesitating, as if waiting for some laborious process to translate his thoughts into the form of human speech.

  Mrs Turing saw the fulfilment of her worst fear, which was that Alan would not adapt to public school life. Nor was he the kind of boy who was unpopular in the house but pleased the masters in class. He failed there too. In his first term, he had been placed in a form called ‘the Shell’, with boys a year older than himself who were not good at the work. Then he was ‘promoted’, but only to the entrance form for those supposed of average ability. Alan took little notice. The masters streamed past – seventeen in those first four terms – and none understood the dreaming boy in a class of twenty-two. According to a classmate of the period:17

  he was the cruel butt of at least one master because he always managed to get ink on his collar so that the master could raise an easy laugh by saying ‘Ink on your collar again, Turing!’ A small and petty thing but it stuck in my mind as an example of how a sensitive and inoffensive boy … can have his life made hell at public school.

  Reports were issued twice a term, and the unopened envelopes would lie accusingly on the breakfast table, while Mr Turing ‘fortified himself with a couple of pipes and The Times.’ Alan would say, unconvincingly, ‘Daddy expects school reports to be like after-dinner speeches,’ or ‘Daddy should see some of the other boys’ reports.’ But Daddy was not paying for the other boys, and was seeing the hard-won fees disappear without detectable effect.

  Daddy did not mind his divergences from conventional behaviour, or at least regarded them with an amused tolerance. In fact both John and Alan took after their father, all three believing in speaking their mind and applying their ideas with a determination punctuated by moments of recklessness. Within the family, the voice of public opinion was supplied by Mama, whose tastes and judgments were thought insipidly provincial by the others. It was she, not her husband nor John, who felt called upon to reform Alan. However, Mr Turing’s tolerance did not extend to the waste of a precious public school education. His finances were particularly tight at this point. He had finally tired of exile, and had taken a small house on the edge of Guildford in Surrey, but besides paying income tax he now had to launch John on a career. He had dissuaded his son from the ICS, predicting that the 1919 reforms, introducing Indian representation into provincial government, spelt the beginning of the end. John had spiritedly thought of going into publishing instead, and his father’s pet idea was that he should go to South America to make money out of guano, but in the end it was Mrs Turing’s safer suggestion that he should be a solicitor which won. Mr Turing was obliged to pay £450 for his son to be articled and to support him for five years.

  But Alan could not see the point of the schooling so dearly won for him. Even in French, once a favourite, the master wrote ‘His lack of interest is very depressing except when something amuses him.’ He developed a particularly annoying way of ignoring the teaching during the term and then coming top in the examination. Greek, however, which he was supposed to learn for the first time at Sherborne, he ignored completely. He was placed at the bottom of the bottom set for three terms, after which the point was conceded and he was grudgingly allowed to abandon it. ‘Having secured one privileged exemption,’ O’Hanlon wrote, ‘he is mistaken in acting as though idleness and indifference will procure release from uncongenial subjects.’

  In mathematics and science the masters wrote more approving reports, but there was always something to complain about. In the summer of 1927, Alan showed to his mathematics teacher, a certain Randolph, some work he had done for himself. He had found the infinite series for the ‘inverse tangent function’, starting from the trigonometrical formula for tan½x.* Randolph was appropriately amazed, and told Alan’s form master that he was ‘a genius’. But the news sank like a stone in the Sherborne pond. It merely saved Alan from a demotion, and even Randolph reported unfavourably:

  Not very good. He spends a good deal of time apparently in investigations in advanced mathematics to the neglect of elementary work. A sound groundwork is essential in any subject. His work is dirty.

  The headmaster issued a warning:

  I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at a Public School, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School.

  The hint of expulsion thudded on to the breakfast table, endangering all that Mr and Mrs Turing had worked and prayed for respectively. But Alan discovered a way to beat the system that Nowell Smith called ‘the essential glory and function of the English Public School’. He spent the second half of the term isolated in the sanatorium with mumps. Emerging to perform as well as usual in the examinations, he won a prize. The headmaster commented:

  He owes his place and prize entirely to mathematics and science, but he shewed improvement on the liter
ary side. If he goes on as he is doing now, he should do very well.

  In the summer holiday the Turings stayed again at a boarding house in Wales, this time at Ffestiniog. Alan and his mother strode up the peaks. Back at the boarding house was a Mr Neild who took great interest in Alan and gave him a book on mountain climbing in which he wrote a long inscription treating Alan’s climbs as symbolic of his eventually attaining intellectual heights. One person, for a brief moment, had taken him seriously.

  The human body, Natural Wonders explained, was a ‘Living Apothecary Shop’. It was Brewster’s way of describing the effects of the recently discovered hormones, whereby the ‘different parts of the body’ could ‘signal to one another’ with ‘chemical messages’ rather than through the nervous system. It was during 1927, when he became fifteen, that Alan gained his height, and presumably the more interesting and exciting changes took place at the same time.

  It was also time for the puberty rite of the Church of England. Alan was confirmed on 7 November 1927. Like the Officers Training Corps, confirmation was one of those duties for which everyone had to volunteer. But he did believe in it, or at least in something, as he knelt before the bishop of Salisbury and renounced for himself the world, the flesh and the devil. Nowell Smith, however, took advantage of the occasion to remark:

  I hope he takes his confirmation seriously. If he does, he will not be content to neglect obvious duties in order to indulge his own tastes, however good in themselves.

  To Alan, the ‘duties’ to translate silly sentences into Latin, polish the buttons on his Corps tunic, and suchlike, were far from ‘obvious’. He had his own kind of seriousness. The headmaster’s words would more appropriately have been directed at the outward conformity that Alec Waugh had written about:

  As is the case with most boys, Confirmation had very little effect on Gordon. He was not an atheist; he accepted Christianity in much the same way as he accepted the Conservative party. All the best people believed in it, so it was bound to be right; but at the same time it had not the slightest influence over his actions. If he had any religion at this time it was House football ….