Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [8]
‘Turing,’ commented Stuart Milner-Barry, ‘was a strange and ultimately a tragic figure.’ That is one view. Certainly his life was short, and it ended extremely unhappily. But in a number of other senses, Alan Turing was an inspirational figure. ‘Alan Turing was unique,’ recalled Peter Hilton. ‘What you realise when you get to know a genius well is that there is all the difference between a very intelligent person and a genius. With very intelligent people, you talk to them, they come out with an idea, and you say to yourself, if not to them, I could have had that idea. You never had that feeling with Turing at all. He constantly surprised you with the originality of his thinking. It was marvellous.’5
The popular misconception is that of a brooding, asocial homosexual, trapped in a hostile time, unable to find happiness. The story is not so simple as that. Thanks to biographies, an official apology from the government and the Prime Minister, and even a play by Hugh Whitemore, the name of Alan Turing has become, above all others, synonymous with the breaking of the Enigma codes.
Like Dilly Knox, Turing had attended Cambridge, though by the 1930s the university’s former Edwardian atmosphere of homoerotic decadence was being gradually usurped by the apparent urgency of politics. Some accounts of Turing make mention of his high-pitched voice, his hesitating stammer, a laugh that would try the patience of even the closest of friends, and a habit of concluding any social interaction by sidling out of the room, eyes lowered, murmuring something about thanks.
In other words, the portrait we appear to be presented with is one of a classic borderline-Asperger’s boffin. His eccentricities have been well rehearsed: among them was his bicycle, with a chain that was poised to fall off after so many rotations, which meant that Turing had to calculate exactly the moment at which to start moving the pedals backwards to avert this. And he had the habit of cycling around the countryside while wearing a full gas mask.
Yet perhaps there was a logical advantage in having a bicycle that no one else would know how to use without the thing falling to bits? And the simple fact was that Turing suffered badly from hay fever. The gas mask was a practical, if drastic, solution to the difficulty.
Moreover, unlike the usual shambling professor, Turing was remarkably physically fit. Though he had no time for organised field games, he was extremely keen on running, and took part in a great many races. Around the time he joined Bletchley Park, he had built up sufficient endurance to run marathons. It has been suggested that he channelled a great deal of sexual frustration into these distance runs; but the real satisfaction may have derived from a sport in which he had complete control, and which relied as much on concentration and mental focus as it did on physical power.
As Sarah Baring recalls: ‘We just knew him as “The Prof”. He seemed terribly shy.’ Certainly, while at Bletchley, Turing certainly was not greatly interested in social interaction. Yet he was a more radical, open, honest soul than the accounts suggest.
Turing became a Fellow of King’s College before, in the late 1930s, heading for the United States, to Princeton. Building bridges between the two disciplines of mathematics and applied physics, he threw himself into the construction of a ‘Turing machine’, a machine that could carry out logical binary calculations. Having seen a tide-predicting machine some years back in Liverpool, it occurred to him that the principle of this device could be applied to his own machine, greatly speeding its function.