Blue Plaque Trail:

Alan Turing

For our last feature in this series we’ve yet again chosen someone whose link with our town has not yet been recognised with a blue plaque. Alan Turing was a quiet and modest man of great integrity, a true visionary and pioneer; his work during WW2 saved countless lives and he is considered by many to be the father of computer science. His fascinating story is one of quiet heroism and a tragic end.

Christened Alan Mathison Turing, he was the second son of Julius Mathison Turing, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and Ethel Sara Turing, daughter of the Chief Engineer of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway. He was born while they stayed in London in 1912, as the sun was setting on the British Empire. His staunchly middle-class colonialist family was insulated from the rapid changes happening in England at this time, but it was Alan’s fate to become first one of modern society’s unsung heroes and then be sacrificed as one of its victims.

After Alan’s birth his father returned to India and was eventually followed by his wife. Alan and his older brother John were left in the care of friends of the family, a retired army couple, Colonel and Mrs Ward, who lived in Baston Lodge – a large house in St Leonards-on-Sea just across the road from the house of the author Rider Haggard. His parents visited when they could, and eventually his mother returned to live with Alan in furnished lodgings in another house in St Leonards, from where she would take little Alan on bracing walks along the seafront and on the pier, dressed in a sailor suit. She also dragged him to her strict Anglican church each Sunday. He was a precocious child, cheerful but naughty and wilful, in some ways extremely clever but in others frustratingly slow. Even at this early age he showed two of the traits that would later mark him out and shape his life: a fascination with numbers and the artless honesty for which he would one day pay a heavy price.

At the age of ten Alan was sent to Hazlehurst School near Tunbridge Wells, later followed by Sherbourne School. He was by no means a star pupil, finding his lessons a frustrating distraction and preferring to pursue his own interests to the neglect of his prescribed studies, but his natural mathematical ability won him a scholarship to Kings College Cambridge and in 1934 he gained a distinction in mathematics. The following year he was awarded a Fellowship at Kings before travelling to America to study at Princetown for two years. While at Princetown he published a groundbreaking scientific paper entitled ‘On Computable Numbers’ in which he provided a solution to one of the fundamental questions of mathematics and set out the concept of a ‘universal machine’ which, by following a simple set of instructions, could perform any logic operation. Although it attracted little attention at the time, this paper and the work that followed it laid the groundwork for the development of the computer age.

Turing returned to Cambridge in 1938 and when war broke out he was recruited to the British Government’s now well-known (but then secret) Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. 1938 also saw the British premier of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ – a film with which Turing became fascinated, in particular the scene in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into poison, later persuading Snow White to eat it resulting in her ‘sleeping death’.

In the early part of the war Britain was suffering greatly from German U-boat attacks and the Government was desperate to break the extremely complex cipher that was used in German naval communications, the infamous ‘Enigma Code’. A Polish team was able to produce a mechanical device known as ‘The Bomba’ that was partly successful in breaking the code, but the Germans responded by greatly increasing the Enigma’s complexity. Through his brilliance, ingenuity and perseverance, Turing was able to develop the Polish machine into a much more powerful and sophisticated device capable of deciphering the Enigma messages.

At Bletchley Park Turing’s reputation was as an eccentric man, shabby and socially awkward, but likeable and disarmingly honest, an innocent and unpretentious man, something of a loner who enjoyed cross-country running, cycling and the company of only a few close friends. Although he never made a secret of his homosexuality, the authorities remained curiously ignorant of it or they would never have allowed him near the top-secret work at Bletchley. Yet we must all be thankful that they did: deciphering the Enigma code helped turn the war decisively in the Allies’ favour and without Turing’s contribution the war would probably have lasted several years longer than it did.

After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory and then Manchester University, using his unique experience with machinery and electronics to try to realise his concept of a ‘universal machine’ – an electronic brain, the first computer. Of several competing projects worldwide, Turing’s was the most ambitious and also most closely resembled the programmable computers of today. Although political and funding problems, and his own unwillingness to play the system, saw his efforts partly frustrated, he was nevertheless instrumental in producing one of the world’s first programmable computers, the Manchester Mk.1.

Turing then turned his interest to more abstract and philosophical matters, leaving behind possibilities of technology in his day. He was a great advocate of artificial intelligence, believing that an electronic machine would one day be as capable of thought as a human mind. He was to publish several visionary papers on this subject before, in 1952, his life was to take a sorry turn.

A casual liaison with a young man was to bring about his downfall. After a brief affair the man tried to blackmail Turing and then helped a friend burgle his house in Cheshire. Turing reported the matter to the police, who were far more interested in his relationship with the suspect than they were in the burglary. Homosexuality was still a criminal offence in Britain at this time and, artless and honest as ever, when questioned Turing openly admitted his relationship with the man.

Whilst the criminal was ignored, Turing was tried and convicted for ‘gross indecency’. In lieu of a prison sentence he agreed to accept a one-year course of chemical treatment to ‘cure him’ of his homosexuality. Humiliated, considered a security risk and unable to work on sensitive projects, and with the hormone injections ruining his once-fit runner’s body, the bewildered Turing could never understand why he was so persecuted.

Although he continued to work with enthusiasm for what little remained of his life, one morning in 1954 his cleaner entered his room to find him lifeless in his bed. Beside him was an apple that had been dipped in cyanide with a bite taken from it, and the coroner’s verdict was suicide.

In 1998, on the anniversary of what would have been Turing’s 86th birthday, a blue plaque was unveiled at his birthplace in London; the oration, read by his biographer Andrew Hodges, included a message from Rt. Hon. Chris Smith MP, then Minister of State for Culture Media and Sport: ‘Alan Turing did more for his country and for the future of science than almost anyone. He was dishonourably persecuted during his life; let us today wipe that national shame clean by honouring him properly’.

With so many blue plaques commemorating the great and good of the Victorian era around Hastings, it seems a shame that we’ve not similarly honoured one of the greatest and most quietly influential men of the 20th Century who spent the early part of his life here. Although his contribution to the world is recently becoming more widely recognised, I doubt that many local people know of his association with our town. Perhaps one day a plaque will appear on one of the two St Leonards houses that he lived in during his childhood years by the sea.

To find out more about Alan Turing, his works and his life, visit www.turing.org.uk or read the excellent biography ‘Alan Turing: the Enigma’ by Andrew Hodges.