Alan Turing: The Enigma (46 page)

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’ wartime 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 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 was
²⁸
‘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 democracy 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 as
²⁹
‘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