COMPUTER SAYS NO!
Forget the mythology, codebreaker Alan Turing was NOT a tortured, anti-social genius hounded to his death over his sexuality. The truth behind this brilliant man and his legacy is far more complex, says his nephew
THE NEW £50 note coming in June features mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing in a photograph taken three years before his death. In it, the brilliant scientist has carefully brushed hair and is wearing a tie. According to his nephew and biographer, Dermot Turing – who has just written a second book about his illustrious uncle – such neatness was a rarity and only experienced on formal occasions.
Similarly, the image of the computer printed on the bank note also bears little relationship to the reality of Turing’s life. It shows a Pilot ACE computer – “a machine disavowed by Alan,” says Dermot – but one that looks somewhat more “photogenic” than the actual computers Turing worked on.
He suggests that these distortions are symbolic of the mythology that has sprung up around his illustrious late uncle, who committed suicide in 1954.
“I decided to write the book because it seemed to me that the iconography and fluff that has developed around him has got a little distorted,” Dermot, a lawyer, explains.
“It has come away from the idea of edgy, futuristic, ground-breaking ideas in science, and led him to become a fire-side nostalgia figure. That’s not fitting. That’s what I wanted to write about.”
The misleading view of Turing was further compounded by his depiction as an alienated anti-hero in the 2014 Oscar-winning movie, The Imitation Game.The film starred Benedict Cumberbatch as the man who helped to change the course of a war by devising a device that could find settings for Germany’s Enigma machines and thereby crack intercepted coded messages – only to suffer the indignities of arrest and chemical castration due to his homosexuality.
It wasn’t until 2013, the year before the film came out, that Turing received a royal pardon over his conviction for gross indecency for having a relationship with a man. Before 1967, gay men could be sentenced to up to two years in prison under gross indecency laws. “The standard narrative of Alan Turing’s career – simplistically summed up as ‘heroic codebreaker who was persecuted for being homosexual and killed himself as a result’ – is largely wrong,” says Dermot, 60, a trustee of Bletchley Park who spent his career in the legal profession after graduating from King’s College, Cambridge.
“Alan Turing was not really a codebreaker – he spent little time on it, and few of the many achievements of Bletchley Park can be ascribed to Alan. He was no victim and his death was unrelated to the hormone treatment imposed upon him following his trial.”
Turing’s governmentmandated hormone therapy ended a full year before his death – something that was not made clear to the filmgoer.
Dermot, born seven years after his uncle’s death, the son of Turing’s older brother John, is concerned that the excessive, “almost prurient” attention given to Turing’s trial and subsequent treatment has allowed his uncle to become defined by it. With access to family papers, he has been able to get closer to the true facts than anyone else.
“He was no war ‘hero’, even if his crucial part in the design of the Bombe machine – a success story resulting from teamwork – enabled vital intelligence to be generated in volumes unimaginable before World War Two.”
Alan Turing, he insists, was in fact “far more” than just a codebreaker and Dermot finds it “disgraceful” his astonishing achievements in other areas have been overshadowed by the modern view of him.
He enjoyed the Cumberbatch film, which he describes as “cracking”, but tells me it is important to remember that Alan Turing’s character has been dramatised. “The script’s portrayal of him as socially dysfunctional is unfair.
“His career was not shaped by the attack on Enigma, and the standard narrative of Alan’s suicide being attributable to the cruelty of the state is blown out of all proportion,” says Dermot. “Unfortunately, these things are now fixed in the public mind as being what define Alan Turing’s character, work and life.”
This frustrates him, so in the explores his uncle’s real legacy.
“Alan Turing had many friends, an acid sense of humour, an irritating stammer, and an intolerance of what my grandfather called book he ‘humbug’ and these days we would call bull **** . He is viewed as the ‘icon’ of Bletchley Park, but Alan would be the first to admit that the codebreakers were a large team; he felt that being one of a handful of senior personnel given an OBE for the work done there was a piece of nonsense,” he explains.
UNIMPRESSED by the accolade, Turing kept the medal in his toolbox. “It’s true his inventiveness helped get to the solution of the Enigma machine very quickly and elegantly, but by 1945 there were 9,000 people working at Bletchley Park.”
Turing also explains that rather than battling for years to break the code, as suggested in the movie, Turing’s Bombe machine was up and running in just six weeks. “We would have lost the war, had it taken longer,” he says.
In the early 1970s, the role of the Allied code-breaking centre was still a tightly kept secret. Few people had any experience of a computer and the significance of Alan Turing’s invention was limited to a small group of
specialists. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s, when the astonishing fact of Bletchley Park’s successes became widely known, that the possibility Alan Turing had been involved in some way became known – nearly two decades after his death.
“Growing up I was aware there was someone in our family who was a fellow of the Royal Society and who was rumoured to be the inventor of the computer. But computers were just these awesome huge things that government agencies had.”
Dermot first became aware of Bletchley Park in 1977, at the age of 16, as his family crowded around the television set to watch The Secret War, the groundbreaking BBC documentary series that revealed the crucial role that science and intelligence had played behind the lines. “I remember watching our little TV with my parents because we wanted to find out what Alan did in the war,” he tells me.
For Dermot’s family, this news – which they had previously been unaware of due to the Official Secrets Act – was revelatory.
“My father rediscovered pride in his younger brother,” he says. “It was quite a transformation. Until then, Alan was known mainly for the court case. During my childhood in the 1960s, the circumstances of his death were still raw and not for exposure.”
At prep school,Turing and his elder brother developed boy scout-style self-sufficiency – an attribute which underpinned the scientist’s original approach to any problem. “They were also encouraged to do carpentry and made their own wonky cupboards. I saw that behaviour in my father, and I can see the same characteristic in Alan. There are a number of instances of him making his own machinery.” One of the more intriguing of these inventions is the home-made metal detector Turing invented.
“Alan thought that if the Germans invaded in 1940, as everyone thought they might, that anything held in a bank would become worthless overnight. He converted all his savings into ingots and buried them in a field. He made a careful sketch map as to where they had gone. He returned after the war with his map and home-made metal detector but the ingots were not to be found.”
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HIS story was shared with Dermot by Donald Michie, who joined Bletchley Park mid-way through the war and went on to become a professor of Artificial Intelligence, a discipline Turing founded.
“My father was very contemptuous of the entire ingots debacle, in that superior way of an older brother,” says Dermot. “But it tells much about Alan Turing. His approach to all problems was to start from the blank canvas. The home-made metal detector was absolutely in character.”
Although the entire plan sounds fanciful, to
Dermot “it seems quite rational given the very real threat at the time”.
He believes people want to believe that victory in the war was achieved by brains not bombs, as well as the heroics of a single misunderstood man. But this, he says, is a “Ladybird book” version of history that does a disservice to Turing.
“His legacy is not just about codebreaking, information security, or even his ground-laying work in Artificial Intelligence and computer science, biology or mathematics.
“I suggest that Alan Turing’s legacy is an agenda. To use his own words, ‘We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.’
“Without this understanding, we are at risk of idolising a version of Alan Turing that never really existed.”
●●Reflections of Alan Turing: A Relative Story by Dermot Turing (The History Press, £12.99) is out now. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via www. expressbookshop.co.uk