Turing found crosswords an enigma

AS one of Britain’s greatest codebreakers you might have thought that he could solve anything.

So it may well come as a surprise to find that there was one sort of puzzle that always stumped Alan Turing – the cryptic crossword.

Best-selling author Sinclair McKay has revealed that the Bletchley Park genius was in fact ‘exceedingly bad’ at them.

The revelation is particularly surprising as the only way to join Bletchley’s elite World War II team was to solve a cryptic crossword in under 12 minutes.

In fact, Mr McKay said that were it not for the mathematician being headhunted, he would have failed to get in.

He said: ‘One curious fact about Alan Turing is that he was exceedingly bad at cryptic crosswords.

‘Bletchley Park set a cryptic crossword competition to see if they could wheel in a few more recruits.

‘Had Alan Turing sat that test he would have never have got to Bletchley Park. But, he obviously triumphed at Bletchley.’

Fortunately, Turing, who helped to crack the Nazis’ Enigma machine, had impressed thanks to his 1937 paper On Computable Numbers, and was signed up secretly.

The author also revealed how the complex codebreaking machines were put to another, rather less high-brow function.

He said: These futuristic contraptions had another unauthorised use. They gave off quite a bit of heat and when no one was looking, the operators found a use for them by drying underwear.’