Alan Turing: The Enigma (115 page)

In fact his crime was of the kind that everyone agreed should continue to be the object of state attention; meeting people in the street (‘importuning’), and having an affair with a working-class nineteen-year-old exemplified what was to be ‘condemned and rooted out’. But the number of prosecutions peaked in 1955, and then fell back until 1967. The government failed to set up the special hospitals or camps suggested by the medical profession, and the great panic dissipated rapidly after summer 1954. The most important effect was that the silence was broken – a first BBC radio talk being allowed on 24 May. If in fact it was the case of Alan Turing that had frightened the Churchill government out of its wits, he also played a posthumous part in the defusing of the taboo.

He also died just before the international situation relaxed a little; at the Geneva conference China agreed to the temporary partition of Vietnam. Meanwhile McCarthy’s star fell rapidly after he attacked the US Army and the CIA. Churchill went to Washington on 24 June and repaired the Anglo-American rift. British military expenditure rose to a dramatic peak in 1954 but thereafter declined until the mid-1960s. Everyone but Alan Turing had a reprieve.

Postscript

As I lay with my head in your lap camerado,

The confession I made I resume, what I said to you

and the open air I resume,

I know I am restless and make others so,

I know my words are weapons full of danger, full of death,

For I confront peace, security, and all the settled

laws, to unsettle them,

I am more resolute because all have denied me than

I could ever have been had all accepted me,

I heed not and have never heeded either experience,

cautions, majorities,
nor ridicule,

And the threat of what is call’d hell is little or nothing to me,

And the lure of what is call’d heaven is little or nothing to me;

Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward

with me, and still urge you, without the least

idea what is our destination,

Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.

Alan Turing’s body was cremated on 12 June 1954 at the Woking Crematorium. His mother, brother, and Lyn Newman attended the ceremony. The ashes were dispersed in the gardens at the same place as those of his father. There is no memorial.

Author’s Note

For a figure in world history, there is very little source material from which to reconstruct a picture of Alan Turing – few original documents, and little in the way of published commentary. Secrecy and embarrassment of various kinds are partly responsible, but there is a paucity of information even where taboo subjects are not involved. The early
development of the ACE, for instance, is covered incompletely by the surviving records – and some of the most interesting exist only thanks to unofficial individual initiative. The ACE represented a major act of public enterprise, and the events of 1946-9 largely determined the shape taken in Britain by what was soon to be seen as a second industrial revolution. Had cooperation between government, industry and brain power been continued in peace as in war, the future of the British economy might have been very different. But no special effort was made to record the course of decisions made, nor has the subject subsequently attracted the interest of historians or journalists or political theorists. And what is true of the ACE as a whole is even more true of Alan Turing’s personal part.

One must recognise, however, that Alan Turing did not conduct his life as that of a figure in world history: he tried as best he could to continue the life of an ordinary mathematician. And mathematicians (as compared with literary or political figures, entertainers or spies) do not usually expect to be heard of or written about, whatever their contribution. They do not really expect other people to know what mathematics is, and are generally happy to be left alone. When judged by mathematical standards, one could not say that for a figure of his stature there has been any particular deficiency in records or neglect in reputation.
^*
Pathetically small by worldly standards, the corpus of biographical material is still substantial in comparison with that of others in his profession.

Taking first the question of what was written of him after his death, over the next twenty years or so, there were of course obituaries: Max Newman in
The Times
, Robin Gandy in
Nature
, Philip Hall in the King’s College
Annual Report
, and various more minor tributes. Newman followed by writing the Biographical Memoir to which Alan, as a Fellow of the Royal Society, was entitled. One of the fuller and more penetrating of the series, it treated his life and work from the point of view of a pure mathematician. The Second World War thus appeared as an interruption to his work on logic and the theory of numbers. The subject of his war work had to go unmentioned but so, with ruthless consistency, was the subject of practical computers relegated to a few lines. This analysis embodied the outlook of an intellectual tradition to which Alan Turing had certainly half-belonged, but it was not the whole story.

One person was not satisfied with this assessment, and sensed that some other kind of recognition was due. This Was Mrs Turing, who in 1956 embarked upon writing a biography of her son – an extraordinary development by any standards, in which a seventy-five-year-old Guildford lady, not hitherto notable for literary or social confidence, and knowing almost nothing about science, was left to piece together some of the debris from the wreck of the modern world’s dream. Her Victorian values still unshaken, she retained a strong belief in the idea that Alan’s work had been and would be for the benefit of humanity.

Her slim volume appeared in 1959. There was perhaps a better book in Sara Turing, one that would have been a genuine
memoir
which placed the death alongside the other mysteries (as they were to her) of what her son had spent his life doing: something that could have pointed tellingly to the twentieth century separation of science from ordinary life, and to the efforts both he and she had made to overcome that separation – though not succeeding. But this was not what she did: her book was in the form of a biography and written with an apparent emotional detachment which was in itself remarkable, considering the frightful circumstances which had inspired it.

One reason that Alan’s mother could cast herself as a detached observer was that in so many ways she
was
writing about a stranger. The reader was not to know, but there was very little in her narrative of his early life – and the period up to 1931 absorbed a third of her account – which did not come from surviving letters and school reports. She was surely trying to prolong in her mind the lately increased
rapport
with her son, by projecting it back into a past life of which she knew little – not an inkling, for instance, of Christopher Morcom’s significance for her son’s development. The objective stance then obliged her to set out his scientific career – another impossibility. Alan had once compared the work of writing programs to imitate intelligent behaviour as like being set to write an account of ‘family life on Mars’. Mrs Turing had set herself a task of nearly equal diffficulty; rather as a computer might be programmed to write sentences of grammatical form, she was able to make a jigsaw of the titles of his papers, bits cribbed from the extant obituaries, comments solicited from other
people, and newspaper cuttings. Yet she had little conception of what it meant.
^*

Her position of weakness was accentuated by an extraordinarily obsequious attitude to anyone of rank or office, which meant that by implication she put her son at the level of a promising sixth-former. Indeed her whole book read much like a school report. The flow of tributes bore witness to the fact that she was still having to convince herself that he had turned out satisfactorily after all, and indeed to her astonishment that there was a world in which he had actually been admired. Undercutting him again and again,
Computable Numbers
was good because Scholz had been impressed by it, his interest in the brain was significant because Wiener and Jefferson approved. … Alan might have seen this assessment as a fate worse than death, although it was partly the outcome of his own failure to promote himself.

Yet there was one point his mother grasped that better informed people could be too sophisticated to see, namely that in 1945 he had set out to build a computer. She stuck to this at a time when everything surrounding the subject was still suffused in embarrassment. And more generally, she displayed an amazing tenacity and nerve in tackling the male institutions from which she was excluded, and in refusing to be daunted by the polite evasiveness that she met. For of course there were two areas that were out of bounds – what he had done in the war and his homosexuality. A number of people felt they could not contribute anything whatever with honesty unless the unmentionable were mentioned – and of course it was
not
mentioned, no more than in any of the other written pieces. With the war she got a little further, being allowed to say that ‘he was one of a team whose joint work was an important factor in our winning the war’ – a hint which was as strong as anything that appeared in the next ten years.
^†
Tiptoeing among the minefields – and perhaps anyone but her would have found it impossible to continue – she did, ultimately, stand up for him as few others would.

What was sad was not that she failed to do what was manifestly beyond her powers; it was that although she had her own insights and stories they
did not, in fact, add up to an understanding or even a formulation of the particular enigma that Alan had posed for her. At the end she closed with a comparison of what she had written with the
Lives of the Saints –
Alan would have derided this attempt to get him through the eye of the needle, and yet had she pursued with any seriousness the subtle conflict of the ‘pure’ and the ‘applied’ she could quite legitimately have expressed it in religious language and found something quite special to say. But here she offered nothing: for examination marks, government service, and the building of machines appeared alike as undifferentiated Good Things. The absence of any question mark around the place of science was perhaps one reason why her book, pitiful by the standards that would be expected of a literary or political biography, attracted the gentle praise of critics. It was a holiday for a world trying to forget Dr Strangelove. At last, it seemed, here was a scientist untouched by the traumas of the 1940s and 1950s! There was a half-truth in this notion, there being something of the 1880s in Alan Turing as well as in his mother; but again it was hardly the whole story.

During the 1960s, and into the 1970s, Newman and Sara Turing were the sources upon which various encyclopedia entries, potted biographies and popular articles drew. But by the turn of the decade there were small sprouts of a different kind of comment pushing their way through the Stoney ground. One factor was simply the expansion and greater sophistication of what had become ‘computer science’, slightly modifying the status of computers as altogether
infra dig
. for a mathematician. It was in 1969 that Donald Michie published the NPL report
Intelligent Machinery
, he himself being concerned to set a lead in British developments. He commented in this period on how the prevailing attitude was that ideas about machine intelligence were a diversion from serious work; but the 1970s ushered in a greater appreciation of the computer as a universal machine, concerned with any and every form of logical manipulation, and not necessarily at work on arithmetical calculations. This general development encouraged a clearer understanding of what Alan Turing had envisaged from the beginning.
^*

It was also in 1969, as the computer came of age, that it was first noted, in articles by Mike Woodger and R. Malik, that Alan Turing had emerged from the war with a practical knowledge of electronics. This fact, quite at odds with the prevailing stereotype of ‘the logician’, as he appeared in H.H.
Goldstine’s standard academic account of
The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann
in 1972, took some time to be assimilated; so likewise did the place of the ACE in computer history. The compilation by B. Randell of classic papers documenting the origins of digital computers (see note 5.23) relegated mention of the ACE to its bibliography, but the mini-boom of computer history did not entirely pass it by: in 1972 the original report was issued by the NPL, and it received a first serious review in 1975.

Meanwhile the turn of the decade had also seen the purpose of Bletchley Park become mentionable, although the first outright claim for its strategic significance came only in 1974 with F.W. Winterbotham’s
The Ultra Secret
. This book made no mention of Alan Turing, but in the same year A. Cave Brown’s imaginative work
Bodyguard of Lies
contained many sentences in which the word ‘Turing’ appeared, sometimes in conjunction with words such as ‘machine’ and ‘Bombe’. The floodgates were opened. Meanwhile Jack Good and Donald Michie had published certain disclosures concerning the electronic machinery at Bletchley. Drawing these developments together, the inquiries of B. Randell, motivated partly by the question of understanding Alan Turing’s part in the origin of the computer, enjoyed some success. His revelations of the Colossus technology did in fact reflect the achievement of Newman and Flowers rather than anything directly attributable to Alan Turing, but it meant that a first serious glimpse of the gigantic scale of operations had been given. Much of this, together with other mid-1970s disclosures, was brought together in a BBC television programme, one of a series on
The Secret War
, broadcast early in 1977.