Alan Turing: The Enigma

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

Beginning my studies the first step pleas'd me so much, The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion, The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love, The first step I say awed me and pleas'd me so much, I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther, But stop and loiter all the time to sing it in ecstatic songs.

A son of the British Empire, Alan Turing's social origins lay just on the borderline between the landed gentry and the commercial classes. As merchants, soldiers and clergymen, his ancestors had been gentlemen, but not of the settled kind. Many of them had made their way through the expansion of British interests throughout the world.

The Turings could be traced back to Turins of Foveran, Aberdeenshire, in the fourteenth century. There was a baronetcy in the family, created in about 1638 for a John Turing, who left Scotland for England. Audentes Fortuna Juvat (Fortune Helps the Daring) was the motto of the Turings, but however brave, they were never very lucky. Sir John Turing backed the losing side in the English civil war, while Foveran was sacked by the Covenanters. Denied compensation after the Restoration, the Turings languished in obscurity during the eighteenth century, as the family history, the Lay of the Turings, was to describe:

    Walter, and James and John have known,
    Not the vain honours of a crown,
    But calm and peaceful life –
    Life, brightened by the hallowing store
    Derived from pure religion's lore!
    And thus their quiet days passed by;
    And Foveran's honours dormant lie,
    Tilt good Sir Robert pleads his claim
    To give once more the line to fame:
    Banff's castled towers ring loud and high
    To kindly hospitality
    And thronging friends around his board
    Rejoice in TURING'S line restored!

Sir Robert Turing brought back a fortune from India in 1792 and revived the title. But he, and all the senior branches of the family, died off without male heirs, and by 1911 there were but three small clusters of Turings in the world. The baronetcy was held by the 84-year-old eighth baronet, who had been British Consul in Rotterdam. Then there was his brother, and his descendants, who formed a Dutch branch of Turings. The junior branch consisted of the descendants of their cousin, John Robert Turing, who was Alan's grandfather.

John Robert Turing took a degree in mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1848, and was placed eleventh in rank, but abandoned mathematics for ordination and a Cambridge curacy. In 1861 he married nineteen year old Fanny Boyd and left Cambridge for a living in Nottinghamshire, where he fathered ten children. Two died in infancy and the surviving four girls and four boys were brought up in a regime of respectable poverty on a clerical stipend. Soon after the birth of his youngest son, John Robert suffered a stroke and resigned his living. He died in 1883.

As his widow was an invalid, the care of the family fell upon the eldest sister Jean, who ruled with a rod of iron. The family had moved to Bedford to take advantage of its grammar school, where the two elder boys were educated. Jean started her own school, and two of the other sisters went out as schoolteachers, and generally sacrificed themselves for the sake of advancing the boys. The eldest son, Arthur, was another Turing whom fortune did not help: he was commissioned in the Indian Army, but was ambushed and killed on the North-West Frontier in 1899. The third son Harvey emigrated to Canada, and took up engineering, though he was to return for the First World War and then turn to genteel journalism, becoming editor of the Salmon and Trout Magazine and fishing editor of The Field. The fourth son Alick became a solicitor. Of the daughters only Jean was to marry: her husband was Sir Herbert Trustram Eve, a Bedford estate agent who became the foremost rating surveyor of his day. The formidable Lady Eve, Alan's Aunt Jean, became a moving spirit of the London County Council Parks Committee. Of the three unmarried aunts, kindly Sybil became a Deaconess and took the Gospel to the obstinate subjects of the Raj. And true to this Victorian story, Alan's grandmother Fanny Turing succumbed to consumption in 1902.

Julius Mathison Turing, Alan's father, was the second son, born on 9 November 1873. Devoid of his father's mathematical ability, he was an able student of literature and history, and won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from where he graduated with a BA in 1894. He never forgot his early life of enforced economy, and typically never paid the 'farcical' three guineas to convert the BA into an MA. But he never spoke of the miseries of his childhood, too proud to moan of what he had left behind and risen above, for his life as a young man was a model of success. He entered for the Indian Civil Service, which had been thrown open to entry by competitive examination in the great-liberal reform of 1853, and which enjoyed a reputation surpassing even that of the Foreign Office. He was placed seventh out of 154 in the open examination of August 1895. His studies of the various branches of Indian law, the Tamil language and the history of British India then won him seventh place again in the Final ICS examination of 1896.

He was posted to the administration of the Presidency of Madras, which included most of southern India, reporting for duty on 7 December 1896, the senior in rank of seven new recruits to that province. British India had changed since Sir Robert left it in 1792. Fortune no longer helped the daring; fortune awaited the civil servant who could endure the climate for forty years. And while (as a contemporary writer put it) the district officer was 'glad of every opportunity to cultivate intercourse with the natives,' the Victorian reforms had ensured that 'the doubtful alliances which in old days assisted our countrymen to learn the languages' were 'no longer tolerated by morality and society.' The Empire had become respectable.

With the help of a £100 loan from a family friend he bought his pony and saddlery, and was sent off into the interior. For ten years he served in the districts of Bellary, Kurnool and Vizigapatam as Assistant Collector and Magistrate. There he rode from village to village, reporting upon agriculture, sanitation, irrigation, vaccination, auditing accounts, and overseeing the native magistracy. He added the Telugu language to his repertoire, and became Head Assistant Collector in 1906. In April 1907 he made a first return to England. It was the traditional point for the rising man, after a decade of lonely labour, to seek a wife. It was on the voyage home that he met Ethel Stoney.

Alan's mother was also the product of generations of empire-builders, being descended from a Yorkshireman, Thomas Stoney (1675–1726) who as a young man acquired lands in England's oldest colony after the 1688 revolution, and who became one of the Protestant landowners of Catholic Ireland. His estates in Tipperary passed down to his great-great-grandson Thomas George Stoney (1808–1886), who had five sons, the eldest inheriting the lands and the rest dispersing to various parts of the expanding empire. The third son was a hydraulic engineer, who designed sluices for the Thames, the Manchester Ship Canal and the Nile; the fifth emigrated to New Zealand, and the fourth, Edward Waller Stoney (1844–1931), Alan's maternal grandfather, went to India as an engineer. There he amassed a considerable fortune, becoming chief engineer of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway, responsible for the construction of the Tangabudra bridge, and the invention of Stoney's Patent Silent Punkah-Wheel.

A hard-headed, grumpy man, Edward Stoney married Sarah Crawford from another Anglo-Irish family, and they had two sons and two daughters. Of these, Richard followed his father as an engineer in India, Edward Crawford was a Major in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and Evelyn married an Anglo-Irish Major Kirwan of the Indian Army. Alan's mother, Ethel Sara Stoney, was born at Podanur, Madras, on 18 November 188l.

Although the Stoney family did not lack for funds, her early life was as grim as that of Julius Turing. All four Stoney children were sent back to Ireland to be educated. It was a pattern familiar to British India, whose children's loveless lives were part of the price of the Empire. They were landed upon their uncle William Crawford, a bank manager of County Clare, with two children of his own by a first marriage and four by a second. It was not a place for affection or attention. The Crawfords moved to Dublin in 1891, where Ethel dutifully went to school each day on the horsebus, crushed by a regimen that permitted her a mean threepence for lunch. At seventeen, she was transferred to Cheltenham Ladies College, 'to get rid of her brogue,' and there she endured the legendary Miss Beale and Miss Buss, and the indignity of being the Irish product of the railway and the bank among the offspring of the English gentry. There remained a flickering dream of culture and freedom in Ethel Stoney's heart and for six months she was sent, at her own request, to study music and art at the Sorbonne. The brief experiment was vitiated by the discovery that French snobbery and Grundyism could equal that of the British Isles. So when in 1900 she returned with her elder sister Evie to her parents' grand bungalow in Coonoor, it was to an India which represented an end to petty privation, but left her knowing that there was a world of knowledge from which she had been forever excluded.

For seven years, Ethel and Evie led the life of young ladies of Coonoor – driving out in carriages to leave visiting cards, painting in water-colours, appearing in amateur theatricals and attending formal dinners and balls in the lavish and stifling manner of the day. Once her father took the family on holiday to Kashmir, where Ethel fell in love with a missionary doctor, and he with her. But the match was forbidden, for the missionary had no money. Duty triumphed over love, and she remained in the marriage market. And thus the scene was set, in the spring of 1907, for the meeting of Julius Turing and Ethel Stoney on board the homebound ship.

They had taken the Pacific route, and the romance was under way before they reached Japan. Here Julius took her out to dinner and wickedly instructed the Japanese waiter to 'bring beer and keep on bringing beer until I tell you to stop.' Though an abstemious man, he knew when to live it up. He made a formal proposal to Edward Stoney for Ethel's hand, and this time, he being a proud, impressive young man in the 'heaven-born' ICS, it was successful. The beer story, however, did not impress his future father-in-law, who lectured Ethel upon the prospect of life with a reckless drunkard. Together they crossed the Pacific and the United States, where they spent some time in the Yellowstone National Park, shocked by the familiarity of the young American guide. The wedding took place on 1 October 1907 in Dublin. (There remained a certain edge to the relationship between Mr Turing and the commercial Mr Stoney, with an argument over who was to pay for the wedding carpet rankling for years.) In January 1908 they returned to India, and their first child John was born on 1 September at the Stoney bungalow at Coonoor. Mr Turing's postings then took them on long travels around Madras: to Parvatipuram, Vizigapatam, Anantapur, Bezwada, Chicacole, Kurnool and Chatrapur, where they arrived in March 1911.

It was at Chatrapur, in the autumn of 1911, that their second son, the future Alan Turing, was conceived. At this obscure imperial station, a port on the eastern coast, the first cells divided, broke their symmetry, and separated head from heart. But he was not to be born in British India. His father arranged his second period of leave in 1912, and the Turings sailed en famille for England.

This passage from India was a journey into a world of crisis. Strikes, suffragettes, and near civil war in Ireland had changed political Britain. The National Insurance Act, the Official Secrets Act, and what Churchill called 'the gigantic fleets and armies which impress and oppress the civilisation of our time,' all marked the death of Victorian certainties and the extended role of the state. The substance of Christian doctrine had long evaporated, and the authority of science held greater sway. Yet even science was feeling a new uncertainty. And new technology, enormously expanding the means of expression and communication, had opened up what Whitman had eulogised as the Years of the Modern, in which no one knew what might happen next – whether a 'divine general war' or a 'tremendous issuing forth against the idea of caste'.

But this conception of the modern world was not shared by the Turings, who were no dreamers of the World-City. Well insulated from the twentieth century, and unfamiliar even with modern Britain, they were content to make the best of what the nineteenth had offered them. Their second son, launched into an age of conflicts with which he would become helplessly entangled, was likewise to be sheltered for twenty years from the consequences of the world crisis.

He was born on 23 June 1912 in a nursing home in Paddington, and was baptised Alan Mathison Turing on 7 July. His father extended his leave until March 1913, the family spending the winter in Italy. He then returned to take up a new posting, but Mrs Turing stayed on with the two boys, Alan a babe in arms and John now four, until September 1913. Then she too departed. Mr Turing had decided that his sons were to stay in England, so as not to risk their delicate health in the heat of Madras. So Alan never saw the kind Indian servants, nor the bright colours of the East. It was in the bracing sea winds of the English Channel that his childhood was to be spent, in an exile from exile.

Mr Turing had farmed out his sons with a retired Army couple, Colonel and Mrs Ward. They lived at St Leonards-on-Sea, the seaside town adjoining Hastings, in a large house called Baston Lodge just above the sea front. Across the road was the house of Sir Rider Haggard, the author of King Solomon's Mines, and once, when Alan was older and dawdling along the gutter in his usual way, he found a diamond and sapphire ring belonging to Lady Haggard, who rewarded him with two shillings.

The Wards were not the sort of people who dropped diamond rings in the street. Colonel Ward, ultimately kindly, was remote and gruff as God the Father. Mrs Ward believed in bringing up boys to be real men. Yet there was a twinkle in her eye and both boys became fond of 'Grannie'. In between lay Nanny Thompson, who ruled the nursery which was the boys' proper place, and the governess of the schoolroom. There were other children in the house, for the Wards had no fewer than four daughters of their own, as well as another boy boarder. Later they also took in the Turing boys' cousins, the three children of Major Kirwan. Alan was very fond of the Wards' second daughter Hazel, but hated the youngest Joan, who was intermediate in age between him and John.

Both Turing boys disappointed Mrs Ward, for they scorned fighting and toy weapons, even model Dreadnoughts. Indeed, Mrs Ward wrote to Mrs Turing complaining that John was a bookworm, and Mrs Turing loyally wrote to John chiding him. Walks on the windswept promenade, picnics on the stony beach, games at children's parties, and tea before a roaring fire in the nursery were the most that the Ward environment had to offer in the way of stimulation.

This was not home, but it had to do. The parents came to England as often as they could, but even when they did, that was not home either. When Mrs Turing returned in spring 1915, she took the boys into furnished and serviced rooms in St Leonards – gloomy places decorated by samplers embroidered with the more sacrificial kind of hymn. By this time Alan could talk, and proved himself the kind of little boy who could attract the attention of strangers with precocious, rather penetratingly high-pitched comments, but also a naughty and wilful one, in whom winning ways could rapidly give way to tantrums when he was thwarted. Experiment, as with planting his broken toy sailors in the ground, hoping they would grow afresh, was easily confused with naughtiness. Alan was slow to learn that indistinct line that separated initiative from disobedience and resisted the duties. of his childhood. Late, untidy and cheeky, he had constant battles with his mother, Nanny and Mrs Ward.

Mrs Turing returned to India in the autumn of 1915, saying to Alan, 'You'll be a good boy, won't you?', to which Alan replied 'Yes, but sometimes I shall forget!' But this separation was only for six months, for in March 1916 Sahib and Memsahib together braved the V-boats, wearing lifebelts all the way from Suez to Southampton. Mr Turing took his family for a holiday in the Western Highlands, where they stayed in an hotel at Kimelfort, and John was introduced to trout fishing. At the end of his leave, in August 1916, they decided not to risk travelling together again, but instead to separate for the next three-year period. Alan's father returned to India, and his mother resumed a double exile at St Leonards.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Alan Turing: The Enigmaby ANDREW HODGES Copyright © 1983 by Andrew Hodges. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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