Alan Turing: The Enigma (18 page)

But if he was twenty, and preparing to confront the work of European mathematicians, he was still a boy away from home, away from Sherborne. The summer holidays were spent much as those of the previous year:

Daddy and I have just been to Germany, for just over a fortnight. We spent most of the time walking in the Schwarzwald, though Daddy of course was not up to much more than 10 miles a day. My knowledge of the language wasn’t altogether of the kind that [was] most wanted. I have learnt nearly all my German by reading half a German mathematical book.
^†
I got home somehow or other…

Yours affectionately, Alan M. Turing

Alan had another holiday camping with John in Ireland, where he amazed his family by turning up at Cork in a pig-boat. Then for the first two weeks of September he joined O’Hanlon for a second and last time on Sark. Alan was ‘a lively companion even to the extent of mixed bathing at midnight,’ wrote
¹⁴
O’Hanlon, who had struck a modern note by allowing two girls on the party. Alan had taken some fruit-flies with him, as he was
studying genetics in a rather haphazard way. Back at Guildford the
Drosophilae
escaped and infested the Turing home for weeks, not at all to Mrs Turing’s pleasure. O’Hanlon was sufficiently detached from the ‘nation in miniature’ to write
¹⁵
of Alan as ‘human and lovable’, saying:

^†
Not the von Neumann book, however, which he only received in October 1932.

I look back on holidays in Cornwall and Sark among the great enjoyments of my life: in all his companionship and whimsical humour, and the diffident shake of the head and rather high pitched voice as he propounded some question or objection or revealed that he had proved Euclid’s postulates or was studying decadent flies – you never knew what was coming.

The all-encompassing system still allowed some moments of freedom. And Sherborne had also left Alan with one friendship that lasted – with Victor. Alan’s younger friend had been obliged to leave school at the same time, his father suffering from financial loss at what was the worst of the Depression. He had failed his School Certificate (telling Alan that it was because of too much time spent on chess and codes) but quickly caught up by passing it at a London crammers, and began what Alan called ‘his grim life as a chartered accountant’. At Christmas 1932 Alan stayed with the Beuttells for two weeks and worked in Alfred Beuttell’s office near Victoria. The visit was overshadowed by the fact that Victor’s mother had died on 5 November. The deep shadow was a link, for both boys were having to deal with the fact of early death. The link was close enough to break Alan’s usual reserve as to his beliefs – just as Mrs Morcom had broken it – and rather grudgingly to discuss his ideas about religion and survival. Victor believed very strongly, not only in the essential Christian ideas, but in extra-sensory perception and in reincarnation. To him, Alan appeared as one who wanted so much to believe, but whose scientific mind made him an unwilling agnostic, and who was under great tension as a result. Victor saw himself as a ‘crusader’, trying to keep Alan on the straight and narrow, and they had fierce arguments, the more so as Alan did not like being challenged by a boy of seventeen. They talked about who had rolled the stone away, and how the five thousand had really been fed. What was myth and what was fact? They argued about the after-life, and the pre-life too. Victor would say to Alan, ‘Look, no one has ever been able to
teach
you any mathematics – perhaps you have remembered it from a previous life.’ But, as Victor saw it, Alan could not believe in such a thing ‘without a mathematical formula’.

Victor’s father, meanwhile, had thrown himself into research and work to overcome his bereavement. Alan’s work in his office was concerned with calculations required for his commission as lighting consultant to the Freemasons’ new headquarters in Great Queen Street. Alfred Beuttell was a pioneer in the scientific measurement of illumination, and the development of a lighting code
¹⁶
based on ‘first principles’ as part of the ‘reduction of the physiology of vision to a scientific and mathematical basis’. His work for the Masons involved elaborate calculations to estimate the illumination at the
floor level, in terms of the candle power of lights installed and the reflecting properties of the walls. Alan, who was not allowed into the Masonic building, had to work from imagination to check Mr Beuttell’s figures.

Alan became friendly with Mr Beuttell, who told him about his success in Monte Carlo as a young man, when he had managed to live for a month on his winnings. He showed Alan his gambling system, which Alan took back to Cambridge and studied. On 2 February 1933 he wrote back with the result of his analysis, which was that the system yielded an expected gain of exactly zero, and that accordingly Mr Beuttell’s winnings had been entirely due to luck and not to skill. He also sent a formula he had worked out for the illumination of the floor of a hemispheric room lit from its centre – not, admittedly, an immediately useful result, but a very neat one.

Standing up to Mr Beuttell’s ideas about his gambling system took some courage, as he was a forceful man, whose heart of gold was buried deep, with strong opinions on many subjects. An eclectic Christian tending to Theosophy, he was a great believer in the unseen world, and told Alan that his invention of the Linolite electric lamp had been sent to him from beyond. This Alan found too much to swallow. But he also had ideas about the brain, which he had formed since the early 1900s, according to which it worked on electric principles, with differences of potential determining moods. An electric brain! – there lay a more scientific idea. They had long discussions on these lines.

Alan and Victor also went down to Sherborne together for the house supper, and after Christmas Alan wrote to Blamey, saying:

I still haven’t quite decided what I am going to do when I grow up. My ambition is to become a don at King’s. I am afraid it may be more ambition than profession though. I mean it is not very likely I shall ever become one.

Glad you had a good beano for your coming of age. Personally when my time comes I shall retire into a corner of England far from home and sulk. In other words I don’t want to come of age (Happiest days of my life at school etc.)

Sherborne was part of him; and, essentially loyal to his past, he did not make the mistake of trying to cast it out. Although, indeed, the official speeches about training, leadership and the future of the Empire had left him almost untouched, there were aspects of the distinctive English public school culture in which he genuinely shared. Its dowdy, Spartan amateurism, in which possessions and consumption played a small role, were his. So was its combination of conventionality and weird eccentricity; so too, to some degree, was its anti-intellectualism. For Alan Turing did not think of himself as placed in a superior category by virtue of his brains, and only insisted upon playing what happened to be his own special part. And if the public school was founded upon deprivation and suppression, this was of a kind which gave its products the privilege of knowing that their thoughts and actions were considered significant. In setting out to
do something
in life, Alan exhibited in a pure form the sense of moral mission that headmasterly sermons sought so laboriously to inculcate.

But he could not stay with one foot in the nineteenth century; Cambridge had introduced him to the twentieth. There had been a moment in 1932 when after a college Feast, Alan wandered quite drunk into David Champernowne’s rooms, only to be told to ‘get a grip on himself’. ‘I must get a grip on myself, I must get a grip on myself,’ Alan repeated in a very droll fashion, so that Champ always liked to think that this had marked a turning point. Be this as it may, it was indeed the year 1933 which brought Alan closer to the problems of the modern world, and in which he began to interact with it.

On 12 February 1933, Alan marked the third anniversary of Christopher’s death:

Dear Mrs Morcom,

I expect you will be thinking of Chris when this reaches you. I shall too, and this letter is just to tell you that I shall [be] thinking of Chris and of you tomorrow. I am sure that he is as happy now as he was when he was here.

Your affectionate Alan.

Others were to remember that week for another reason: on 9 February the Oxford Union resolved that under no circumstances would it fight for King and Country. There were parallel sentiments at Cambridge, not necessarily of complete pacifism, but of a kind which rejected any war fought for that slogan. Patriotism was not enough, after the First World War; there might legitimately be a defence of ‘collective security’ but not a ‘national war’. Newspapers and politicians reacted as though the Enlightenment had never happened, but enlightened scepticism was particularly alive at King’s, and Alan began to find that it was more than a rather grand and frightening house in a giant public school.

King’s enjoyed special privileges within the university system, and was distinguished by its opulence, thanks to a fortune amassed by John Maynard Keynes. But it also prized a
moral
autonomy that had been at its most pure and intense in the early 1900s, as Keynes described:
¹⁷

… We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience, and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists. The consequences of being found out had, of course, to be considered for what they were worth. But we recognised no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey.…

E.M. Forster had more gently, but more widely, portrayed an insistence on
the priority of individual relationships over every kind of institution. In 1927 Lowes Dickinson, the King s historian and first advocate of a ‘League of Nations’, wrote
¹⁸
in his autobiography:

I have seen nothing lovelier than Cambridge at this time of year. But Cambridge is a lovely backwater. The main stream is Jix
^*
and Churchill and Communists and Fascists and hideous hot alleys in towns, and politics, and that terrible thing called the ‘Empire’, for which everyone seems to be willing to sacrifice all life, all beauty, all that is worthwhile, and has it any worth at all? It’s a mere power engine.

They spoke of
mere
power, that was the point. Even Keynes, involved in state affairs and devoted to economics, did so in the belief that with such tawdry problems solved, people could start to think about something important. It was an attitude very different from the cult of duty, which made a virtue out of playing the expected part in the power structure. King’s College was very different from Sherborne School.

It was also part of the King’s attitude to life that it regarded games, parties and gossip to be natural pleasures, and assumed that clever people would still enjoy ordinary things. Although King’s had only gradually moved away from its original role as a sister foundation to Eton, there were among its dons those who made a positive effort to encourage candidates who did not come from public schools and tried to make them feel at home. There was great emphasis on the mixing between dons and undergraduates in what was a small college, with less than sixty students in each year. No other college was like this, and so Alan Turing gradually woke up to the fact that by chance he had arrived in a unique environment, which was as much his element as any institution could be. It corroborated what he always knew, which was that his duty was to think for himself. The match was not perfect, for a number of reasons, but it was still a great stroke of fortune. At Trinity he would have been a lonelier figure; Trinity also inherited the moral autonomy, but without the personal intimacy that King’s encouraged.

The year 1933 only brought to the surface ideas which in King’s had a long history. Alan shared in the climate of dissent:

26/5/33

Dear Mother,

Thank you for socks etc.… Am thinking of going to Russia some time in vac but have not yet quite made up my mind.

I have joined an organisation called the ‘Anti-War Council’. Politically rather communist. Its programme is principally to organize strikes amongst munitions and chemical workers when government intends to go to war. It gets up a guarantee fund to support the workers who strike.

… There has been a very good play on here by Bernard Shaw called ‘Back to Methuselah’.

Yours, Alan

For a short
time, Anti-War Councils sprung up across Britain and united pacifists, communists and internationalists against a ‘national’ war. Selective strikes had, in fact, prevented the British government from intervening on the Polish side against the Soviet Union in 1920. But for Alan the real point lay not in political commitments, but in the resolve to question authority. Since 1917 Britain had been deluged by propaganda to the effect that Bolshevik Russia was the kingdom of the devil, but in 1933 anyone could see that something had gone completely wrong with the western trading and business system. With two million people unemployed, there was no precedent for what was above all a
baffling
situation, in which no one knew what should be done. Soviet Russia, after its second revolution of 1929, offered the solution of state planning and control, and there was great interest among intellectual circles in how it was working. It was the testing-ground of the Modern. Alan probably enjoyed riling his mother with a nonchalant ‘rather communist’: the point lay not in this or that label, but in the fact that his generation were going to think for themselves, take a wider view of the world than their parents had done, and not be frightened by bogey words.