Alan Turing

Alan Turing was described in a recent

Channel 4 television documentary as
Britains greatest ever code-breaker. Alan
Turings importance to the Allied victory in
World War Two cannot be overstated
though by the time of his death and for
many years after it few knew about
Turings huge achievements at Bletchley
Park such was the secrecy that surrounded
it.

Alan Turing was born on June 23 rd 1912 at

St. Leonards-on-Sea in East Sussex. His
father was a career civil servant and for
many years of his childhood, Turings
parents were in India. A retired couple
brought up him and his brother. It soon became clear that he was academically
very different to other pupils at the first school he attended in St. Leonards-on-
Sea. At the age of fourteen, Turing joined the prestigious Sherborne School in
Dorset. Here he excelled in Mathematics and Science. However, his success in
these subjects did not please all his teachers and some complained that he should
have put as much effort into learning the Classics as he did Maths and Science.
Turing was very much a loner at the school and the one sport he excelled at was
long distance running where he could be by himself. However, he did befriend
Christopher Morcom and they became very close.

In December 1929 both Turing and Morcom took entrance exams for Kings
College, Cambridge. However, Morcom developed an illness and died of
complications shortly afterwards. In a series of interviews with a psychiatrist after
World War Two, Turing said:

I worshipped the ground he walked on.

Turing won a scholarship to Kings College, Cambridge. Here, as at Sherborne, he
excelled in Maths and Science and in 1933, aged just 23 years, Turing was made a
Fellow of the college.

Turing put a great deal of effort into computation. To his contemporaries,

computation meant getting as many people as was necessary to complete a task in
as short a space of time as was possible. For Turing computation meant something
different getting machines to do what others felt humans should be doing. Turing
became fascinated by what machines could do instead of people and it was a
subject that drove him on for the rest of his short life. The only deviation from this
topic was when he studied mathematical biology post-1945.

In May 1936, Turing handed in to the college authorities, On computable

numbers, with an application to the entscheidungsproblem. It was to become a
seminal piece of work and one that leading figures in C21st computing, such as
Apples Steve Wozniak, believes set the standards for modern computation. Turing
came up with what we know about computers today. (Wozniak)

However, it was his work at Hut 8, Station X, at Bletchley Park that made such a
huge contribution to the Allied success in World War Two. Turing, with his
mathematical background, was fascinated by cryptology. Nazi Germany had
developed the Enigma machine to send codes to military leaders on the front line.
While Enigma looked like a slightly larger typewriter it was capable of encrypting
codes in 15 million million ways. The naval Enigma machine used by U-boats was
even more sophisticated. Turing, along with his team, cracked the Enigma codes
and the Nazis were never aware of this. The advantage that this gave the Allies
cannot be overstated. However, the public never got to know about what went on
in Hut 8. Turing was not in charge of Hut 8 as he found the task people
management difficult. Hut 8 was managed by Arthur Henderson but he later
admitted that the real star of the team that worked there was Turing.

The historian Asa Briggs was also a cryptologist at Bletchley Park and he said of his
colleague:
You needed genius at Bletchley Park and Turing was a genius. I think Turings own
contribution to the war was crucial.

Anybody who worked on code breaking at Bletchley Park must have been viewed
by the authorities as a highly talented person. Rolf Noskwith was one of these code
breakers and he later said that:

I regarded him (Turing) with a certain amount of awe.

It is generally accepted that Turing enjoyed his time at Bletchley Park. He had
eccentric habits but he was one of a number of people at Station X who must have
baffled some of the military personnel there with their odd behaviour. Few people
would have chained their tea mug to a radiator to ensure it was not stolen but
Turing did. He was also known to cycle to work with his clothes over his pyjamas
or to wear his gas mask on his bike to ward off hay fever. But he was working on
codes and creating machines to break these codes so he must have been in his
element. Turing believed that if a machine was used to send coded messages, you
needed a machine to decode those messages. His answer was to build, along with
Gordon Welchman, the Bombe. By the end of the war, 200 Bombes existed
reading Nazi secret messages.

After World War Two, Winston Churchill stated that he was only concerned about
losing the war during the Battle of the Atlantic. No one thing led to the Allies
success in this battle but a massive step towards victory in the Battle of the
Atlantic was taken when Turing cracked the Naval Enigma and the Kriegsmarine
was never to know about it. Once Turing had done this, whenever, German Naval
High Command sent a coded message to its U-boats, British Intelligence was privy
to what was being sent and could act accordingly. In the great scheme of the war,
it would be difficult to overstate the importance of what Turing achieved in Hut 8.

Defeating U-boats was our most vital task. (Briggs)

Turing got engaged to Joan Clarke while he worked at Bletchley Park. However, he
was not prepared to live a lie nor hurt Clarke in later months/years. He told he
that he was gay and broke off the engagement. He later said that she was not
upset by his revelation and she obviously kept it private as his security clearance
for Bletchley Park would have been instantly revoked and he would have been
arrested if Clarke had made such information public.

After the war had ended, Turing was employed at the University of Manchester to
build on his pre-war work on computation. Such was the secrecy surrounding Hut
8 that no one knew about Turings involvement and the vital part he played in
World War Two.

After World War Two, Turing lived in a very difficult time. He was a homosexual at
a time when homosexuality and associated acts were illegal. In 1952, there were
five times more charges for homosexuality that pre-1939. This was almost
certainly a result of the belief that moral standards had dropped during World War
Two and that society had to redress itself.

Turing also lived in the early years of the Cold War. This created a feeling of
paranoia throughout most western societies where, America, for example,
experienced the Red Scare.

In 1952, Turing had published his groundbreaking Computing Machinery and

Intelligence, which many believe underpins current developments in the world of
computing. However, his life was turned upside down by his social life. Turing spent
some of his spare time in what was considered the gay district of Manchester. He
befriended a man called Arnold Murray. They spent time at Turings house. One of
Murrays associates burgled Turings house and Turing informed the police. He
somewhat naively announced to the investigating officers that the reason that
Murrays friend had burgled the house was because he was having a sexual
relationship with Murray and presumably Murray fed back to his associate what
was in the house and how it could be best broken into.
Turing was intelligent to know that homosexuality was illegal at the time. Yet he
openly told the police that he had broken the law. No one will ever know why he
did this. Both Turing and Murray were arrested and charged with gross indecency.
The newspapers of the time, totally ignorant of what Turing had achieved in World
War Two, portrayed him as a pervert. Turing was given a simple choice prison or
what was effectively chemical castration an attempt to take away his libido.
Turing was given a course of stilboestrol, a synthetic version of the female
hormone oestrogen. The process physically charged him and he began to grow
breasts. It did not destroy his libido but reduced it. However, the whole experience
clearly affected his mental capacity. Notes taken by his psychiatrist Franz
Greenbaum indicated that Turing became more and more mentally unsettled as his
treatment progressed. He had spent many of his years in some form of institution
Sherborne, Cambridge, Bletchley Park and now he clearly found it difficult to
work outside of the clear and specific boundaries found within institutions. Turing
may well have found it difficult to comprehend how vicious life could be outside of
the life he had previously experienced. He was also a victim of his time. In
America, Senator George McCarthy rose to national fame with his attacks on
communists and reds under the bed. McCarthy also included homosexuals in his
attacks:

The pervert is easy prey to the blackmailer. (McCarthy)

The UK was already reeling after the expos of Guy Burgess a Cambridge
graduate who was also a homosexual. As Turings extremely important work done
during World War Two was obviously known to the authorities, they would have
viewed him as a security risk. His prosecution for homosexuality had led to the
immediate withdrawal of his security clearance and he was no longer required for
cryptology consultancy work at GCHQ. Turing admitted to Greenbaum: I know
that they have been watching my

house. I wish theyd leave me alone.

On June 8th 1954 Turings body was found in his bed by his housekeeper. A report
stated that he had killed himself on June 7th 1954 with cyanide. Turings body was
cremated on June 12th 1954.
In September 2009, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown, on behalf of the
government, made a public apology to Alan Turing and his family. He said:

We are sorry. You deserved so much better.

Resources:

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/world-war-two-in-
western-europe/code-breaking-at-bletchley-park/alan-turing/