Alan Turing: The Enigma (14 page)

Yours sincerely, Ethel S. Turing

Mrs Morcom immediately invited Alan to stay at the Clock House in the Easter holiday. Her sister Mollie Swan sent him a photograph of Christopher. Sadly, the Morcoms had very few pictures of him, and this was a poor likeness, taken on an automatic machine with a reversed image. Alan replied:

20/2/30

Dear Mrs Morcom,

Thank you very much for your letter. I should enjoy coming to the Clockhouse immensely. Thank you so much. We actually break up on April 1, but I am going to Cornwall with Mr O’Hanlon my housemaster until the 11th – so that I could come any time that suits you between then and the beginning of May. I have heard so much about the Clockhouse – Rupert, the telescope, the goats, the Lab and everything.

Please thank Miss Swan very much for the photograph. He is on my table now, encouraging me to work hard.

Apart from the photograph, Alan had to keep his emotions to himself. He was allowed no mourning period, but had to go through Corps and Chapel like everyone else. Alan’s devotion to Christopher’s memory had come as a surprise to the Morcoms. Christopher had always been reticent at home about his school friends, and had a way of referring to ‘a person called’ so-and-so as though he had never been mentioned before. ‘A person called Turing’ had featured in a few of his remarks about experiments, but no more than that, and the Morcom parents had only very briefly met Alan in December. They knew him only from his letters. At the beginning of March
they changed their plans and decided to take the holiday in Spain which had been planned before Christopher died. So it was testimony to Alan’s letters that on 6 March they invited him to take Christopher’s place on the journey, instead of coming to their home. Alan wrote to his mother the next day:

… I am half sorry it is not to be the Clockhouse as I should like very much to see it and everything that Morcom has told me about there – but I don’t get invited to go to Gibraltar every day of the week.

On 21 March the Morcoms paid their farewell visit to Sherborne and Alan was allowed into Ross’s house to see them in the evening. Term ended a week later and Alan went to Rock, on the north coast of Cornwall, with O’Hanlon, whose private income allowed him to treat groups of boys in this way. The party included the tough Ben Davis and three Westcott House boys, Hogg and Bennett and Carse. Alan wrote later to Blamey that he ‘had a very good time there – plenty to eat and a pint of beer after lots of exercise.’

While he was away, Mrs Turing called on Mrs Morcom in her London flat. Mrs Morcom recorded in her diary (6 April):

Mrs Turing came to see me at flat tonight. Had not met her before. We talked nearly all the time about Chris and she told me how much he had influenced Alan
and how Alan thought he was still working with him and helping him. She stayed till nearly 11 and had to get back to Guildford. She had been to Bach Concert at Queens Hall.

After ten days in Cornwall, Alan made a quick stop-over at Guildford, where Mrs Turing hastily tried to put him in order (extracting the usual quota of old handkerchieves from the lining of his overcoat), and on 11 April he arrived at Tilbury, joining the Morcom party on the
Kaisar-i-Hind
. Besides Colonel and Mrs Morcom, and Rupert, this included a director of Lloyds Bank and a Mr Evan Williams, chairman of Powell Dyffryn, the Welsh mining company. Mrs Morcom wrote in her diary:

… Sailed about noon. Wonderful day with bright sunshine until 3.30 when we began to come into mist and slowed down. Before tea we dropped anchor and remained just outside the mouth of the Thames until midnight. Ships all around us blowing fog-horns and sounding bells.… Rupert and Alan very excited about the fog and it really is rather alarming.

Alan shared a cabin with Rupert, who did his best to draw him out on Jeans and Eddington, but found Alan very shy and hesitant. Each night before going to sleep, Alan spent a long time looking at the photograph. On the first morning of the voyage, Alan began to talk to Mrs Morcom about Christopher, releasing his feelings in speech for the first time. The next day, after deck tennis with Rupert, was spent the same way, telling her how he had felt attracted to Christopher before getting to know him, about his presentiments of catastrophe and the moon setting. (‘It is not difficult to explain these things away – but, I wonder!’) On Monday, as they rounded Cape Vincent, Alan showed her the last letters he had received from Christopher.

They only spent four days on the Peninsula, driving over the hairpin bends to Granada where, it being Holy Week, they saw a religious procession in the starlight. On Good Friday they were back in Gibraltar and embarked on a homebound liner the next day. Alan and Rupert took early Communion on board ship on Easter Sunday.

Rupert was by now impressed with Alan’s originality of thought, but he did not think of Alan as in a different class from the Trinity mathematicians and scientists he had known. Alan’s future seemed unsure. Should he read science or mathematics at Cambridge? Was he sure of a scholarship at all? Somewhat in terms of a last resort, he spoke to Evan Williams about scientific careers in industry. Williams explained the problems of the coal industry, for instance the analysis of coal-dust for toxicity, but Alan was suspicious of this and remarked to Rupert that it might be used to cheat the miners by flourishing a scientific certificate at them.

They had done the trip in style, staying at the best hotels, but what Alan wanted most was to visit the Clock House. Mrs Morcom sensed this and gracefully asked him to ‘help’ her look through Christopher’s papers and
sort them. So on the Wednesday, Alan went to her studio in London, and then after a visit to the British Museum joined her on the Bromsgrove train. For two days he saw the laboratory, the uncompleted telescope, the goats (they had replaced the guilty cow) and everything Christopher had told him about. He had to go home on Friday, 25 April, but surprised Mrs Morcom by coming up to London the next day, presenting her with a parcel of Christopher’s letters. On the Monday he wrote:

28/4/30

Dear Mrs Morcom,

I am only just writing to thank you for having me on your trip and to tell you how much I enjoyed it. I really don’t think I have had such a jolly time before, except that wonderful week at Cambridge with Chris. I must thank you too for all the little things belonging to Chris that you have let me have. It means a great deal to me to have them.…

Yours affectionately, Alan

I was so glad you let me come on to the Clockhouse. I was very much impressed with the house and everything connected with it, and was very pleased to be able to help putting Chris’ things in order.

Mrs Turing had also written:

27/4/30

Dear Mrs Morcom,

Alan got home last night looking so well and happy – He loved his time with you but specially precious to him was the visit to the Clockhouse: he went off to Town today to see someone but he said he would tell me of that part another day – and I knew he meant that it was an experience quite apart. We’ve had no real talk yet but I am sure it has helped him to exchange memories with you and he is treasuring with the tenderness of a woman the pencils and the beautiful star map and other souvenirs you gave him.…

I hope you won’t think it an impertinence – but after our talk and your telling me how true to his name Chris was – and I believe is – in helping the weak – I thought how beautiful it would be to have a panel in his memory of S. Christopher in the School Chapel – a panel of your doing, and what an inspiration it would be for the boys who are so reminded that there are the followers of S. Christopher today and that genius and humble service can go hand in hand as in Chris.…

Mrs Morcom had already put into effect a similar idea. She had commissioned a stained-glass window of St Christopher – not however for Sherborne, but for their parish church at Catshill. Nor was it the ‘humble service’ of Mrs Turing that it was to express, but the life that went on. Back at school, Alan wrote to Mrs Morcom:

3/5/30

… I am hoping to do as well as Chris in the Higher Certificate this term. I often think about how like I am to Chris in a few ways through which we became real
friends, and wonder if I am left to do something that he has been called away from.

Mrs Morcom had also called upon Alan to help choose books for the school prizes that Christopher was posthumously to receive:

I think Chris would almost certainly have got
The Nature of the Physical World
(Eddington) and
The Universe around us
(Jeans) for the Digby prize and possibly one of
The Internal Constitution of the Stars
(Eddington),
Astronomy and Cosmogony
(Jeans). I think you would like
The Nature of the Physical World
.

The Morcom family endowed a new prize at Sherborne, a science prize to be awarded for work which included an element of originality. Alan had plodded on with the iodate experiment, and now he undertook to write it up for the prize. Christopher it was, even from the grave, who induced him to communicate and to compete. He wrote to his mother:

18 May 1930

… I have just written to a Mellor the author of a Chemistry book to see if he can give me a reference about the experiment I was doing in the summer last year. Rupert said he would look it up in Zurich if I could get him a reference. It’s annoying I couldn’t get hold of anything before.

Alan was also interested in perspective drawing:

This week’s efforts in drawing are not on any better paper … I don’t think much really of Miss Gillet’s efforts. I remember she did once or twice say something in a vague sort of way about parallel lines being drawn concurrent, but she usually had the slogan ‘vertical lines remain vertical’ on the tip of her tongue. I wonder how she managed drawing things below her. I have not been doing much by way of drawing bluebells and things like that but mostly perspective.

Mrs Turing wrote to Mrs Morcom:

May 21 1930

… Alan has taken up drawing which I was anxious for him to do long ago: I think this is quite likely an inspiration from you. He is quite devoted to you and I think he was just wishing for an excuse to pay you a call when he went up to Town the day after saying ‘Goodbye’ to you! You were all most awfully good to him, and in many ways opened up a new world to him.… Whenever we were alone he wanted to talk just of Chris and you and Col. Morcom and Rupert.

Alan hoped this summer to gain an improved mark in the Higher Certificate. His name was put down for Pembroke College, Cambridge, which awarded a number of scholarships on Higher Certificate marks alone, although he half-hoped to fail, so that he would have a chance of trying for Trinity. He did fail for he found the mathematics paper much more difficult than in the previous year, and his marks showed no improvement. But Eperson reported:

… I think he has succeeded in improving his style of written work, which is more convincing and less sketchy than last year…

and Gervis:

He is doing much better work than this time last year partly because he knows more but chiefly because he is getting a more mature style.

Andrews was presented with Alan’s submission for the new Morcom science prize, and later said:
²

I first realised what an unusual brain Alan had when he presented me with a paper on the reaction between iodic acid and sulphur dioxide. I had used the experiment as a ‘pretty’ demonstration – but he had worked out the mathematics of it in a way that astonished me …

The iodates won him the prize. ‘Mrs Morcom is extraordinarily nice and the whole family is extremely interesting,’ Alan wrote to Blamey, ‘They have founded a prize in Chris’ memory which I very appropriately won this year.’ He also wrote:

I have started learning German. It is possible that I may be made to go to Germany sometime during next year but I don’t much want to. I am afraid I would much rather stay and hibernate in Sherborne. The worst of it is that most of the people left in Group III nauseate me rather. The only respectable person in it since February has been Mermagen and he doesn’t do Physics seriously or Chemistry at all.

The master who taught him German wrote: ‘He does
not seem to have any aptitude for languages.’ It was not what he wanted to think about in his hibernation.

One Sunday that summer, the boys of Westcott House arrived back from their afternoon walks to find Alan, who was by now accorded a certain awed respect, engaged upon an experiment. He had set up a long pendulum in the stairwell, and was checking that, as the day went on, the plane of its motion would remain fixed while the Earth rotated beneath it. It was only the elementary Foucault pendulum experiment, such as he might have seen in the Science Museum in London. But it caused great astonishment at Sherborne, and made an impression second only to his arrival by bicycle in 1926. Alan also told Peter Hogg that it had to do with the theory of relativity, which ultimately it did: one problem that concerned Einstein was how the pendulum kept its place fixed relative to the distant stars. How did the pendulum know about the stars? Why should there be an absolute standard of rotation, and why should it agree with the disposition of the heavens?

But if the stars still exerted their attraction, Alan also had to work out his thoughts about Christopher. Mrs Morcom had asked him in April to write his recollections of her son for an anthology. Alan found this task very hard to fulfil:

My impressions of Chris that I have been writing for you seem to have become more a description of our friendship than anything else so I thought I would write
it as such for you and write something less to do with me that you could print with the others.