Whatever the capacities and dedication of the individuals, the system had not adjusted to the scale and significance of the information it processed. If Bletchley had its successes through traditional British virtues of teamwork and of getting on with the job without a fuss, it suffered from limitations derived from an equally traditional British shabbiness and paltriness. In Hut 4 they had their own tracking charts in order to deduce the meaning of grid references and so forth, and it must have seemed that they could easily take on all the work of plotting and guiding the convoys more effectively than the OIC.
But this was a problem common to the higher reaches of the war effort, as young scientists and academics found themselves confronting the peacetime establishment. In many ways, the war was, for Alan Turing’s generation, the continuation of the conflicts expressed in another language in 1933.
They were not taking orders from brainless brass-hats, and, more positively, government was forced to adopt the central planning, scientific methods, and remedies for depression that had been argued for in the 1930s. Bletchley was at the heart of this struggle. It was in 1941 that:26
The staff at GC and CS, recognising no frontiers in research, no division of labour in intelligence work, invaded the field of appreciation.
There were ‘unavoidable clashes of priority and personality’ as the compartment walls were breached. And such clashes were symptomatic of the difficulty which faced the Services in accepting advice from a peculiar civilian department without name or tradition:
GC and CS had increased in size four-fold in the first sixteen months of the war. At the beginning of 1941 it was by Whitehall standards poorly organised. This was partly because the growth in its size and in the complexity of its activities had outstripped the experience of those who administered it….
It was not a single, tidy organisation but ‘a loose collection of groups’, each pushing ahead in an ad hoc manner, doing its best to knock some sense into the relevant military heads before it was too late. The intellectuals, finding themselves in an unprecedented position, virtually ignored the formal structure left over from the peacetime days, and organised one for themselves. This time the war was too important to be left to the generals or to the politicians. They
inaugurated and manned the various cells which had sprung up within or alongside the original sections. They contributed by their variety and individuality to the lack of uniformity. There is also no doubt they thrived on it, as they did on the absence at GC and CS of any emphasis on rank or insistence on hierarchy.
The Service chiefs were highly indignant at
… the condition of creative anarchy, within and between the sections, that distinguished GC and CS’s day-to-day work and brought to the front the best among its unorthodox and ‘undisciplined’ war-time staff.
Alan was sheltered by Hut 4 from direct contact with the service mentality. But it was his work that was causing the trouble, and he was par excellence the ‘undisciplined’ person who ‘thrived’ on the ‘lack of uniformity’ and the ‘absence of any emphasis on rank’ – a military nightmare.
More precisely, it was the irrelevance of official rank that was so striking. The cryptanalysts were highly conscious of differences of talent and speed among themselves. If it was democracy (or ‘anarchy’, as it would appear to the military mind) it was of the Greek kind, in which the slaves did not count. Hut 8 was an aristocracy of intelligence, a dispensation which suited Alan perfectly. As Hugh Alexander saw it:27
He was always impatient of pompousness or officialdom of any kind – indeed it was incomprehensible to him; authority to him was based solely on reason and the only grounds for being in charge was that you had a better grasp of the subject involved than anyone else. He found unreasonableness in others very hard to cope with because he found it very hard to believe that other people weren’t all prepared to listen to reason; thus a practical weakness in him in the office was that he wouldn’t suffer fools or humbugs as gladly as one sometimes has to.
The problems came in dealing with the rest of the world. The civilians tended naively to suppose that the military services existed to fight the war, and did not appreciate that like almost all organisations, they expended much of their energy in resisting change and fending off each other’s encroachments. Alan had little time for Denniston, who never caught up with the change in scale and vision over which he had presided. Travis, who oversaw the naval work, and had responsibility for machinery, was a more Churchillian character, who gave some push to the new ideas; and another man, Brigadier J. H. Tiltman, won a high respect from the analysts. But there was a tardy, grudging quality to the administration which to the new recruits was simply incomprehensible. It was blindingly obvious how important the miraculous information was, and they could not understand (Alan least of all) why the system could not immediately adapt to it. The provision of six Bombes by mid-1941, for instance, fell far short of the scale he had envisaged; and parsimony of any kind seemed absurd when frantic efforts were being made to produce bombers as though all depended on them, and streams of exhortations to the public issued forth concerning matters of infinitely less importance to the war effort.
In coping with such problems, Hugh Alexander soon proved the all-round organiser and diplomat that Alan could never be. Meanwhile, Jack Good took over the statistical theory, in which he became more interested. Shaun Wylie and others could be relied upon to do any pure mathematics which arose. They were all better than he was at the day-to-day operational work. Yet there was no question that naval Enigma was Alan Turing’s, and that he was in charge of it inasmuch as anyone was. He had lived with it from beginning to end, and threw himself into the whole process, relishing the shift work on the incoming messages as much as any of the others. This was Snow White’s little hut in the forest, where they all worked together with a will, and whistled as they worked. Partly his position of leadership was because, like R. V. Jones, he was one of ‘the men who went first’. He just happened to be in at the beginning. But it was also analogous to his attack on the Hilbert problem. The Turing machine idea had owed nothing to the Mathematical Tripos, and likewise his cryptanalytic ideas stormed ahead without the benefit of books or papers to build upon, for there were none. In the British amateur tradition, he took out his pencil-box, sat down in his Hut, and set to work.
In this respect the war had resolved some of his conflicts. The business of getting to the heart of something, abstracting its meaning, and connecting it with something that worked in the physical world, was exactly what he had been searching for before the war. It was the fault of human history that he found his niche in the intellectual equivalent of filling in holes that others had dug.
If the fighting services were slow to come to terms with the significance of the Enigma decrypts, Winston Churchill was not. He loved them, as one who had been fascinated by cryptanalytic intelligence from 1914 onwards, and who regarded it as of the utmost importance. At first he had asked to read every Enigma message, but compromised by receiving each day a special box of the most exciting revelations – in which a resumé of naval Enigma took its place. Since GC and CS officially remained the responsibility of the chief of the secret service, one side-effect of Alan’s work was the restored prestige which thereby accrued to the British spying organisation.
It also strengthened prime ministerial government. Churchill alone enjoyed this overall view of Intelligence. At this stage there was no integration of the material except in his head. It was a state of affairs that did not appeal to the military departments or the Foreign Office, especially when the Prime Minister was28 ‘liable to spring upon them undigested snippets of information of which they had not heard’, and made ‘calls for action or comment from the Chiefs of Staff or the Foreign Office and sent signals direct to the operational theatres and individual commanders.’
War, Churchill had written in 1930, had been ‘completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science.’ But he still made use of democr
acy and science when necessary, and did not overlook those who produced the decrypts. In the summer of 1941 he paid a visit to Bletchley, and gave a pep talk to the cryptanalysts as they gathered round him on the grass. He went into Hut 8, and was introduced to a very nervous Alan Turing. The Prime Minister used to refer to the Bletchley workers as29 ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled.’ Alan was the prize goose.
The last of the German supply ships had been sunk on 23 June 1941. But that day there was something else to think about. Tweedledum had turned upon the slumbering Red King. It was not only Stalin who was caught napping; the Luftwaffe Enigma evidence pointing to an imminent German invasion had been the subject of another fight between GC and CS on the one hand and the service chiefs on the other. They had not been able to believe their ears. But now the world war had begun. From now on the Atlantic lay at Germany’s back, and the Mediterranean was a sideshow. The game had changed, and the period of anarchy was over.
In the spring of 1941 Alan developed a new friendship. It was with Joan Clarke, a fact which presented him with a very difficult decision. First they had gone out together to the cinema a few times, and spent some leave days together. Soon everything was pointing in one direction. He proposed marriage, and Joan gladly accepted.
Many people, in 1941, would not have thought it important that marriage did not correspond with his sexual desires; the idea that marriage should include a mutual sexual satisfaction was still a modern one, which had not yet replaced the older idea of marriage as a social duty. One thing that Alan never questioned was the form of the marriage relationship, with the wife as housekeeper. But in other ways he took a modern view, and above all was honest to a fault. So he told her a few days later that they should not count on it working out, because he had ‘homosexual tendencies’.
He had expected this to end the question, and was surprised that it did not. He underestimated her, for Joan was not the person to be frightened by a bogey word. The engagement continued. He gave her a ring, and they made a visit to Guildford for a formal introduction to the Turing family, which went well enough. On the way they also had lunch with the Clarkes – Joan’s father was a London clergyman.
He must have had thoughts of his own when, for instance, Joan went to Communion with his mother at Guildford. He might well have soft-pedalled the fierceness of his views in a way that in the long run would not have been possible. Again, the nebulous word ‘tendency’ fell short of the honesty with which he spoke to close male friends. If in fact he had suggested that there was more to it than that, she would have been hurt and shocked. He told Joan about Bob, explaining how he remained for the time being a financial commitment, and said that it was not a sexual matter – again true, but not quite the whole truth. But they were comrades in the aristocracy of talent, even if he was her superior in the work, and he specifically told her that he was glad he could talk to her ‘as to a man’. Alan was often lost when dealing with the Hut 8 ‘girls’, not least because he was unable to cope with the ‘talking down’ which was expected. But Joan’s position as cryptanalyst gave her the status of an honorary male.
Alan arranged the shifts so that they could work together. Joan did not wear her ring in the Hut, and only Shaun Wylie was told that there was an actual engagement, but the others could see that something was in the offing, and Alan had managed to find a few bottles of scarce sherry, putting them by for an office party when the time came to announce it. When off duty, they talked a little about the future. Alan said that he would like them to have children, but that of course there was no question of expecting her to leave such important work at such a time. Besides, the outcome of the war, in summer 1941, was far from clear, and he still tended to pessimism. There seemed no stopping the Axis forces in Russia and the south-east.
But when Alan said that he could talk to her as to a man, it certainly did not mean that he had to be solemn. It was the other way round: he was free to be himself, and not conventionally polite. If he came up with some scheme or entertainment then they would both join in with gusto. He had learnt how to knit, and had progressed as far as making a pair of gloves, except for sewing up the ends. Joan was able to explain how to finish them off.
The joy, or the difficulty, was that they enjoyed so easy a friendship. They were both keen on chess, and were quite well matched, even though Joan was a novice, whose interest had been drawn by attending Hugh Alexander’s course for beginners. Alan used to call their efforts ‘sleepy chess’, taking place as they did after the nine-hour night shift. Joan had only a cardboard pocket set, and proper chess pieces were unobtainable in wartime conditions, so they improvised their own solution. Alan got some clay from one of the local pits, and they modelled the figures together. Alan then fired them on the hob of the coal fire in his room at the Crown Inn. The resulting set was quite usable, if somewhat liable to breaking. He also tried to make a one-valve wireless set, telling her about the one he had made at school, but this was not such a success.
They had been to see a matinée of a Bernard Shaw play while making their London visit, and besides Shaw, Alan was currently keen on Thomas Hardy, lending Tess of the d’Urbervilles to Joan. These were, after all, with Samuel Butler, the writers who had attacked the Victorian codes. But they spent more time taking long country bicycle rides. And because she had studied botany at school, Joan was able to join in one of Alan’s enthusiasms which went back to Natural Wonders. He was particularly interested in the growth and form of plants.
Before the war he had read the classic work Growth and Form by the biologist D’Arcy Thompson, published in 1917 but still the only mathematical discussion of biological structure. He was particularly fascinated by the appearance in nature of the Fibonacci numbers – the series beginning
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 …
in which each term was the sum of the previous two. They occurred in the leaf arrangement and flower patterns of many common plants, a connection between mathematics and nature which to others was a mere oddity, but to him deeply exciting.
One day he and Joan were lying on the Bletchley Park lawn – after a game of tennis, perhaps – and looking at the daisies. They started talking about them and Joan explained how she had been taught to record and classify the arrangement of leaves on plants by following them upwards round the stem, counting the number of leaves and the number of turns made before returning to a leaf directly above the starting-point. These numbers would usually appear in the Fibonacci series. Once Alan produced a fir cone from his pocket, on which the Fibonacci numbers could be traced rather clearly, but the same idea could also be taken to apply to the florets of the daisy flower. In this case it was rather harder to see how to count off the petals, and Joan wondered whether the numbers did not then arise merely as a consequence of the method of following them. This was pretty much the view of D’Arcy Thompson, who played down the idea that the numbers had any real significance in nature. They made a series of diagrams to test this hypothesis which did not satisfy Alan, who continued to think about ‘watching the daisies grow’.
In 1941 everyone had to knit and glue and make their own entertainments. At the Clock House, where Mrs Morcom died this year, they were eating the young goats, and at Bletchley the shipping crisis was reflected not only in the work of Hut 8, but in the miserable régime of school dinners. Apart from the diet, the siege mentality suited Alan rather well, with matters of social protocol that in the 1930s seemed so important now falling into abeyance. He always liked making things for himself, be they gloves, radio sets or probability theorems. At Cambridge he had a way of telling the time from the stars. Now the war was on his side. In a more self-sufficient England, everyone had to live in a more Turingesque way, with less waste of energy.
This was well understood in the higher realms of Bletchley, in many ways a New Statesman readers’ establishment, distilling the more creative elements of the ancient universities and leaving behind the upper-class finishing school mentality a
long with the misogynistic port-passing. By this time, the establishment had sprouted clubs for amateur dramatics and so forth. Alan was as shy as ever of this sort of thing, and never became a figure in the Bletchley social world. To some extent he was a ‘character’, but without the dominating egoism of the much older Dillwyn Knox. He retained a shy boy-next-door manner which muted his detachment from convention. Among the Hut 8 people, his persona was that of ‘the Prof’; for while all the new men were ‘men of the Professor type’, the word suited him particularly well. It relieved people of the difficulty with forms of address, for women especially, and was a mark of respect while still expressing the amateur quality of his manner – more the ITMA professor than an eminent authority. Joan also called him ‘Prof’ while they were at work, although off-duty Alan commented on this, not actually objecting, but making her promise that she would not ever do so when he really was a professor, or indeed had returned to academic life. There was, in fact, a streak of vulgarity in the usage, which Mrs Turing had been quick to point out to him, comparing it with the lower-middle-class habit of wives referring to husbands by title rather than by name. But it was also that he did not want to sound presumptuous of professorial status.
Pigou was also known as ‘Prof’ to everyone in King’s, and for similar reasons. In fact, they were rather alike. David Champernowne had introduced them before the war, and Pigou became perhaps the only one of the elder King’s dons (or ‘old fogies’, as Alan was liable to call them) to know him well and indeed to find a mutual admiration. Pigou enjoyed a30 ‘sure grasp of logical relations and … fanatical intellectual integrity’, and he had ‘an astonishing capacity for simplifying life and all its important issues’, he would ‘dispense altogether with pretence as a weapon’, and his ‘eye for beauty was concerned with mountains and men’ – words that would have fitted Alan almost as well.
Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game Page 34