Helen Fry
Reflections of Alan Turing by his Nephew
Dr Helen Fry and Dermot Turing - Reflections of Alan Turing by his Nephew
- Hello, everyone, and welcome. Today, we’re joined by Helen Fry and Dermot Turing. Dermot Turing is the award-winning author of “X, Y, & Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken,” and has written numerous other books relating to his famous uncle, Alan Turing, “Codebreaking in Computer History.” He is also a regular speaker at historical and other events. He began writing in 2014 after a career in law. Dermot worked for the government legal service and then the international law firm, Clifford Chance, where he was a partner until 2014. His specialism was financial sector regulation, financial market infrastructure, and bank failures. As well as writing and speaking, Dermot is a trustee of the Turing Trust and a visiting fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. Today, Dermot and Helen are going to be talking about his books, “Reflections of Alan Turing, A Relative Story.” So with that, I will hand over to the two of you.
Thank you, Lauren. Welcome, Dermot. It’s wonderful to be interviewing your willing conversation today. Sir Dermot Turing, nephew of the famous Alan Turing, who’s just become legendary, hasn’t he? And we think we all know the story of Alan Turing, the codebreaking, and his contribution to computer science, his pioneering scientist. But we’re going to draw a bit further on his background, aren’t we? And look at the discoveries which you’ve made in your writing about his life and to talk about that. And you’ve uncovered a fresh legacy. And just to mention at this point, there will be opportunities to ask Dermot questions. You can put your questions in the chat, in the Q&A, as we go along, and we’ll have a session towards the end. So our knowledge of Alan Turing then has been obscured, you say, don’t you? By, well, decades of misinterpretation and misunderstanding. So in this discussion, then, we’re going to unpick a bit of that to look at that sort of superficial level. And we’re going to disclose, or you, hopefully, are going to disclose the real story. So this is about the real Alan Turing. So can I dive in with a very straight, well, blunt question, really? Was Alan Turing much of a code breaker?
Well, that’s a pretty forthright question, Helen. I’m glad you asked it, because I suspect that most of the people who are participating this afternoon will probably have in their minds a picture of Alan Turing as, if I sum it up sort of a bit superficially, they would probably say, well, that’s the guy that was the famous British code breaker who was hounded to his death on account of his sexuality. And I have to say that I find that all a little bit uncomfortable, not because I think that it’s so much wrong, it’s that it’s a bit one-dimensional and also that it’s a bit sepia tinted, nostalgic, and perhaps a little bit sickly sweet. So you may say, well, that doesn’t sound at all like what you just said, so I need to explain myself. All right, so let’s begin. Alan Turing was recruited as a code breaker, if we have to start with that, in 1939, beginning of the year, and he left Bletchley Park because there wasn’t really any kind of code breaking that he was any good at left to do by I would say the autumn of 1942. So we have him essentially as a full-time code breaker between the outbreak of war in September, 1939 and the autumn of 1942. So maximum period of three years. That wasn’t therefore his primary occupation. He was a professional academic mathematician and his career, particularly in his lifetime, was defined by mathematics. He was a pioneer. He discovered all sorts of extraordinary things in mathematics. His most famous paper being the one that’s called “On Computable Numbers,” which had so many applications that it includes essentially a blueprint for a digital computing machine at a time when nobody had actually thought of computers at all as being things other than human beings that operated calculating machines.
So that’s what he was famous for in his lifetime, and that led on to a post-war career in as a pioneering computer scientist, one of the early inventors of computing machinery who was responsible for the design of Britain’s only, this is how people thought in 1945, Britain’s only post-war computing machine. We only needed one because there were only so many mathematical calculations that they were going to need to be done because, of course, computing machines were calculating missile trajectories. That’s how people thought in 1945. The idea that computers could be as versatile and as interesting as they are today was really not appreciated by anybody much, except possibly Alan Turing, who wrote a paper about what the applications could be, and then he was pilloried for being sort of too fantastical in his thinking. So when I was a kid growing up, Alan Turing wasn’t known as a codebreaker because what happened at Bletchley Park was still a state secret. He was known as a mathematician. He was known as the computer scientist who, if you were being a bit arrogant about it, you might say he’s the guy that invented the computer. There was another aspect of his life, and he probably spent more time on this than on anything else, certainly a lot more than on the time than he spent on codebreaking, which was what he spent the last five years of his life researching, which was the study of shape and form in living things. I’m delighted you’ve got a prayer plant behind you, Helen, because the blobs on the prayer plant are a good illustration of the kind of thing that Alan Turing was trying to model, trying to explain why those dark green blobs are where they are and why they are the shapes they are. And he was creating mathematical equations to explain how a developing organism could grow things like that. And it’s the most fascinating part of his life. And for some reason, nobody seems to know, nobody much has heard of it unless you happen to be a specialist in developmental biology.
Well, perhaps we’ll come back to that aspect of his life a bit later on ‘cause it is fascinating that he’s remembered, isn’t he, for co-breaking and not probably for his more groundbreaking scientific mathematical work.
Which is all very odd. So somehow we’ve allowed our collective imagination to be captured by what happened at Bletchley Park, the cracking of the Enigma machine, of which Alan Turing was, yes, he had an important role to play and he wasn’t the only person involved. And if he hadn’t had a good leg up from the information given to the Bletchley Park team by the Polish co-breakers who’d been working on the problem for 10 years already, I think perhaps the success that Bletchley Park had on the Enigma problem would have been diminished and possibly delayed. And what the consequences for World War II might’ve been really difficult to think about. But I think it’s sort of got a bit overblown. What we’ve done is we’ve conflated Bletchley Park, the Enigma story and Alan Turing and sort of packaged them up as a single unit. And I think that that’s unfair to the others who worked on Enigma. It’s unfair to the non-Enigma problems that Bletchley Park worked on. And it’s unfair to Alan Turing because kind of he wouldn’t particularly have said that that was his greatest achievement, I don’t think.
Well, that’s interesting. And for those who aren’t so au fait with the workings of the Enigma machine, can you just sort of give us a little bit of background before we move on to other aspects of his life? Because as you say, it has been completely, well, conflated. We’ve got this, well, the legacy of what Bletchley Park, achieved all it’s almost 10,000 personnel. We’ve got a good appreciation of that. But if we wind back a little bit, why was Enigma so important? So really very basic actually, who invented it and why? Why was it important to code, to secure cyphers in the '20s and '30s? Because of course it doesn’t just appear from nowhere in the late 1930s or even in the early '30s, does it?
Okay, well, there’s lots of questions there. So the Enigma machine was invented just after World War I by a guy called Arthur Scherbius in Germany. And his imagination, his invention was that what you need to do is basically to change the way that the alphabet is in ciphered. Every time you press a key on a thing like a typewriter, so that if A gets in ciphered as, I don’t know, some random letter, let’s say it’s K, next time you press the letter A, then it will come out as something other than K. And so to change the cypher, what he had in his imagination was three or more, you could have as many as you like, rotors, which would obviously rotate as you press the typewriter keys. And that would change the pathway of an electrical current running through the machine. And the electrical current would lead to a light bulb. So there was a panel of light bulbs under little windows which showed the letters of the alphabet. So you press your A, and then when it gets in ciphered, the light bulb under K would light up. Next time you press the A, then the light bulb on some other letter, P, Q, whatever it is, would light up and so forth. And as the rotors go round, then the cypher changes every time. So the machine was very clever. The inherent security though, was not so much in the clever design of the machine, 'cause everybody assumes that your cypher machine will be stolen, captured on the battlefield, whatever after a bit. So the security came in the number of ways the machine could be set up. And that was to do with which rotors you put into the machine and in what order, the way that you twiddle the rotors around at the beginning of encipherment. There were little rings on the outsides of the rotors so you could change the orientation of the appearance of the rotor relative to the wiring inside it. So that was quite clever.
And then there was this thing on the front called a plug board where you could switch one letter that you typed in into another so that the current entering the bank of rotors would be entering at a place determined by the plug board. So there were lots and lots of different settings that were needed. If you added them all up, you ended up with 150 million, million, million, which is an extremely large number of different ways you could set the machine up every day. And the reason it was important was that the Germans had decided that they were going to use the Enigma machine in one or other of its variants for all of the armed forces and for a whole load of other purposes besides, like for example, the spy agents they were sending out to various countries around the world and some diplomats were using it. And so it was in very extensive use in a variety of different ways. So it was very, very significant for understanding German secret communications to be able to get on top of this machine. And I think the reason we celebrate the triumph over Enigma is because it was a very clever idea that something which had, there is no way that you would be able to figure out which of the 150 million, million, million different setups by some sort of brute force analysis. What you would have to do is to use some kind of clever technique. And so what they did was they used a code breakers technique called the probable word.
You guess at what the content of the messages. And so if the message is saying something like to the commanding general, no idea what the German for that is, but if you can imagine what the German for to the commanding general is, then you would look to see whether you could find a rotor and plyboard combination, which would convert the plain text German into the observed intercepts that you had picked out of the airwaves. So you test each of the letters in the guess that probable word against the intercept. And if all of the letters, if there is a setting in which all of the letters would encipher in the way that you’d observed, you may well have found that the setting. So they invented a machine to do that for them based on Polish technology, but souped up with the help of Alan Turing’s insights and that of another mathematician called Gordon Welshman working at Bletchley Park. And anybody who’s seen the movie, “The Imitation Game” movie, then they will know that that machine was called The Bomb. No, it wasn’t called Christopher. It was called The Bomb. And it was basically designed at Bletchley Park and many copies, hundreds of copies of this machine were made so that they could get on top of the Enigma problem. So, you know, mechanising code breaking, it was very, very clever.
And to do it so swiftly.
I’m not trying to get away from the idea that that was an amazing achievement.
Yeah, and to do it so swiftly under those conditions of wartime. But we mentioned earlier, didn’t we, the help of the Poles. And, you know, in the last three or four, five years, there’s been an increasing recognition, and particularly in the last couple of years, of the role of the Poles in this. Could you just say a little bit about that? Because some people may not have picked up on this. Where do the Poles fit in?
Well, the Poles, of course, being trapped in a vice between Germany to the North East and Germany to the West, were deeply scared of the Germans for the whole interwar period. And so for them, it was a matter of life and death to be able to understand the way, what the Germans were saying to each other. So they started working on the Enigma problem in the mid 1920s, as soon as the Germans started sending Enigma messages to each other. And by a feat of quite astonishing pure mathematics, a Polish mathematician called Marian Rejewski managed to figure out what the wiring in the German military Enigma machine was. I still find that to be an astonishing piece of work. He had never seen a military Enigma machine, and so he had to imagine it all in his head. He converted that into a set of equations, which he was able to solve. And so by the early 1930s, but just about the time that Hitler came to power, the Poles had managed to reverse engineer the German military Enigma machine and started to make replicas of it in their own engineering workshops. Then of course they had the problem, but so, okay, they had essentially replica Enigma machines, but they still had the settings problem to work on, to solve, 'cause, you know, but the great thing was that in the early 1930s, the Germans weren’t changing the settings more than every three months.
By the time World War II started, they were doing it every day. So when they had three months worth of material to work on, that enabled them to start thinking about ways of getting on top of it. And so they were the pioneers in mechanising the solution and were able to find the settings, exploiting a piece of bad technique that the Germans were using to formulate the preambles of their messages, and I won’t go into the technicalities of it, but it did mean that the Poles were able to read Enigma in real time right up to the end of 1938. And just at the point where it became really rather critical for them to be able to continue to read it, they got locked out, which was a disaster. It was a disaster for them, but it was not a disaster for the British because to help them out in their difficulties, they reached hands out to the French and the British code-breaking agencies and said, “We’ve got a problem, can you help us?” And so they shared all their know-how just in the nick of time, on the eve of the outbreak of war in July, 1939, they handed over all their know-how to Bletchley Park. And that’s why I say that Alan Turing had a very serious leg up in terms of his ability to master the problem himself. So yes, I’m not saying we wouldn’t have done it without the Poles, but I am saying that our route to goal was a lot faster and more problem-free because of the help they gave Bletchley Park in those early days.
Yeah, and of course, Bletchley Park was originally purchased in the summer of 1938, wasn’t it? The so-called shooting party that turns up, that of course wasn’t actually a shooting party. And then of course, weeks before the outbreak of war, the intelligence services are really gearing up and they’re starting to open some of their secret sites like Bletchley Park, like you see when the Poles handed over the material. So this is ramping up and then of course outbreak of war, everything kicks off. Can I just wind back ever so slightly and ask you about Turing’s early life? 'Cause we don’t really seem to know very much in the public domain about his early life. I mean, was he… I mean, we think of him as an absolute genius, but was he bright at school? I mean, could we have, you know, if we’d been his science teacher, could we have looked at him, well, that’s a genius, you know, he’s going to go on and do great things. Can you give us a sense of that young Turing?
Yeah, I think he was sort of… Okay, so again, if you’ve seen the movie, then you’ll get a sense that I think is completely and utterly false. So, you know, it implies that he had no friends and so forth and that isn’t true. I mean, he certainly… I mean, we’ve all had experiences at school and we know that kids are different. He wasn’t particularly sporty, but he wasn’t completely terrible at these kinds of things. It wasn’t true that he had no friends. In terms of his academic attainments at school, if you’d asked his Latin teacher whether he was a genius, you would have been laughed out of the room. It was put in the remedial Latin class. You had to get something called school certificate Latin. If you didn’t pass your school certificate, you weren’t allowed to go to university. And Alan Turing obstinately kept failing his school certificate Latin. So he was put in the class of the stupid kids in order to be able to sort of get him over the line on that. So, but it succeeded in the end. If you ask his mathematics teacher, then he would say, yes, he’s one of the brightest kids I’ve ever taught. And so that was, you know, it’s very interesting. And if you ask his housemaster, particularly at the time when he was 13 and had just started his secondary school, there would have been a sort of like a kind of avuncular, but really rather disappointed kind of set of comments, which are things like he’s covered from head to foot in ink and he’s always late, and he’s always trying to do some kind of stupid experiment on the windowsill of his dormitory, which means that one day I’m fearful the house would burn down because he’s doing something crazy, or, you know, he’s growing fruit flies in jam jars because he wants to sort of study genetics or something.
But, I mean, the other thing is that I think, if anybody knows what a Foucault’s pendulum is, it’s a sort of great big thing that you hang from the ceiling, and it swings around, and as it goes rocks backwards and forwards, the path that the pendulum follows will actually move around in a circle very slowly in accordance with the rotation of the earth. And so Foucault’s pendulum, there’s various that I’ve seen. I think there’s one in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry there. And there’s one in Paris. And there’s probably several others that I don’t know about. But he set up a Foucault’s pendulum in his boarding house at school. And it was great because there were three stories, you could get a really long drop. And so he set this thing up one day when all the kids were out playing rugby. And they could have come back and sort of just mocked him for doing this, but they were quite awestruck by this. So I mean, I think that he had a sort of, there was sort of already a kind of pride in having Alan Turing around, even when he was like 18 years old, which I think was very, very, very interesting. So the Foucault’s pendulum thing, you don’t get that sense from watching the movie at all. You get the sense that this is some isolated kid who’s being bullied. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s what I like about the fact we’re able to begin to uncover the real Alan Turing. I mean, how do we know anything about his early life, particularly his time at Bletchley Park? I mean, does the family have archives? Were you able to work? 'Cause you’ve written extensively on your uncle. Memoirs, letters, did he leave anything behind? There are the notebooks, aren’t there? And we’re going to come shortly to the latter part of his life that becomes difficult with the trial and et cetera. I’m going to ask you about that in a moment.
Well, yes, so there is a collection of letters. So like most British kids at boarding school in the early part of the 20th century, he will have been made to write a weekly letter home. And so many of those letters survived. My grandmother donated the surviving collection of letters to the archives at King’s College, Cambridge. So we have letters from Alan Turing, aged from about eight right through to adulthood. We have to be slightly wary of that because my grandmother was selective in what she put in. She did not put in the whole lot that she had. So she put in the ones that she thought would make her son look good. And I mean, I suppose that’s a sort of natural reaction of a mother, particularly after their son has died. But so we have to be slightly careful about how we interpret what we see, but it is good. I mean, we’ve got, you know, I mean, it does mean that we’ve got a pretty good insight into him from those. And we’ve also got school reports and we’ve got recollections of people who he was at school with and at university with. So we’ve got a fairly good portrait, I think, from those surviving records and personal accounts, sort of really. We were lucky that he died. I mean, I’m sorry, this is going to sound all wrong, but one of the upsides, I guess, of him dying so early was that people were asked about their recollections of Alan Turing while they were still young enough to have good and vivid recollections. And so that got recorded in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s. Whereas if we’d all come at it in the sort of time after Alan Turing became famous, then most of those witnesses would have died and therefore been unable to share their reminiscences with us. So we’re quite lucky in that we’ve got a pretty good comprehensive, I would say, a set of recollections of what Alan Turing was like, what it was like to work with him, what he was like to be around. And again, I would say to you that you get a very different picture than you do from “The Imitation Game”. People thought he was fun to be with.
Yeah, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? 'Cause I’m going to ask you, we’ll come to his trial and towards the end of his life now shortly, but can I be cheeky and ask you, what is your view of “The Imitation Game” of film? Which of course was so successful, wasn’t it?
Well, look, first of all, I would say that it’s a great movie. And so if anybody hasn’t seen it, then by all means, get a hold of it on Netflix or wherever it’s available and have a good look at it. It’s a very enjoyable movie. And you just have to remember that you’re at the movies. You’re not watching a documentary. So treat it with a, not just a pinch of salt. I mean, I would say a bucket load of salt. What it does well, I think is probably a couple of things. First of all, it brings what’s actually quite a technical story about World War II to a wider audience and sort of opens their imaginations up to something that perhaps hadn’t thought about before. And that’s been very good news for Bletchley Park Trust. So the number of visitors who actually go to Bletchley Park to find out what really happened, that’s been given a serious boost by that movie. So all those things are good. And I think that thematically it’s actually quite, it’s got some good points there about sort of how we revere or don’t revere mathematicians, people on the autism spectrum, what we think about the ability to use intelligence without giving away the source. We look at things like the willingness or lack of it of the armed forces and the intelligence community to sort of move with the times. We look at gay rights and all these are good themes that are explored in interesting ways in the movie. So for all those reasons, I think it’s good stuff. Just don’t treat it as being the authentic life story of Alan Turing.
Don’t base your A-level answers on it or write a book based on it, that’s right.
Indeed, indeed.
So if we come to the part towards the end of his life then with the trial, because I think we’re still shocked, aren’t we, by Alan’s trial. Can you just explain for those who might not have looked in any detail, can you explain what happened? What was this trial? When was it and what was the result?
Okay, so back in 1952, it was still a criminal offence in the UK for men to have homosexual relationships, even in a private place, that was a criminal offence. Now, over the, and it had been since 1885 when it was put onto the criminal statute books. Now, the interesting thing, if you look back over history is that there are periods where people say, well, yes, but it’s just one of those things, one of those old fashioned things that’s on the statute books and sort of, we don’t care about it and the police don’t take any action. And then there are purges from time to time and the 1950s was one of those reactionary eras in which two things came together in a sort of slightly unfortunate way and very unfortunate for Alan Turing. One is that there was a Home Secretary in the UK who was very conservatively minded and thought that gay people were disgusting and should be, he couldn’t work out whether they had a mental condition or whether they were fundamentally evil or just unable to control their perverted urges. But whichever of these explanations it was, he knew that the practise needed to be stamped out and therefore instructed the police to basically chase down every single instance of homosexual behaviour they could get their hands on.
So lots of high profile gay men were being prosecuted. So that was going on. And at the same time, the international intelligence community was rocked by the defection of Donald McLean and Guy Burgess to the Soviet Union. And Guy Burgess has been notorious as a sort of very camp gay kind of person and to discover that not only were these disgusting people being allowed to do these abnormal and abhorrent practises, but that they were also security risks at the same time, meant that they were doubling down on this in the early 1950s. So that’s the background. What happened to Alan Turing specifically was that he had met a sort of slightly, I would say, disadvantaged, possibly even disreputable young man outside the cinema and they began a relationship. And one of this young man’s acquaintances found out that Alan Turing lived in a quite nice house and he had some quite nice stuff. And so this acquaintance then burgled Alan Turing’s house and Alan Turing went to report the burglary to the police. Okay, and then the police wanted to know how Alan Turing knew so much about the possible perpetrator of the offence. You know, how was that possible? And so started ignoring the burglary and probing into Alan Turing’s personal life because it sort of had illegality written all over it. So the upshot of it all was that Alan Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency as was the young man, his partner. And I have not yet, I’ve done quite a lot of extensive research into the trials of gay men in the early 1950s and I have not found a single instance where anybody pleaded not guilty. So in accordance with, no doubt with the legal advice he was given, Alan Turing pleaded guilty to the charge and then the judge was faced with a choice of either giving him a prison sentence which would have meant that he would have not only had to go to prison but he would have got a criminal record, he would have then lost his job at Manchester University and so basically his life would have fallen apart completely.
Or he was given the opportunity of being treated as a mental case under the Criminal Justice Act and treated as if his sexuality was a sort of species of mental aberration. And if you have a mental aberration then you should go for therapy. And so he was sent off for therapy at Manchester Royal Infirmary. That could have gone quite well because Alan was given a good psychotherapist and he got on famously with this guy and so they had a good relationship. But he was in a minority of cases who were sent off for mental treatment in that he was also given a course of hormone treatment which was designed, well, there are a number of interpretations here but I think that the likelihood is that they were trying to suppress his libido by giving him effectively synthetic female hormones. Which I mean, I think these days we would regard as being really quite inhumane and having absolutely nothing to do with mental treatment at all. And I think it’s fair to say that he was finding this difficult to cope with, to begin with. But let me take the story through for the last two years of his life. So this is 1952. The advantage of the mental treatment was that he kept his job at Manchester University and didn’t get a criminal record which was very important. And by 1953, the treatment was over. He had the hormone implant removed and he was now free from essentially police supervision. And then was able to sort of go back and live his life again. So I have to say, I think it’s actually quite hard to link what was the end of his life in 1954. So a whole year later to what had happened before. If he’d taken his life in the year immediately after the prosecution, the trial, then I think it would be fairly inescapable that there would be a cause and effect going on there.
But there was this whole year’s gap where he was actually sort of back to normal pretty much. So I think we have to look elsewhere for the proximate cause of his suicide. And I’m going to disappoint everybody listening to this because I haven’t got a clear answer to it. There’s very little in the correspondence that survives that gives us a clue on this. There’s no immediate evidence that sort of suggests that he was depressed or was about to take his own life. And I think this is actually why a lot of people are not comfortable with the idea that it was a suicide at all, because there are so many of the sort of little incidental bits and pieces clues that suggested that he was not planning to take his own life. But I have to say, I think the evidence from the coroner’s report and so forth was that, yes, it was a suicide. And I think if you look back at Alan Turing’s whole life, and I know a lot of people are going to find this a bit of a struggle, but there are people who are not comfortable with the idea that the time of their going is not under their own control. And Alan Turing was one of those people who wanted to take control of the manner and timing of his leaving the planet. And there is plenty of evidence that he was one of those people. And that means that he was going to go when he decided and on his terms. That, I think, makes it difficult to escape the fact that it was a suicide. What we’re still looking for, though, is why he chose that time. And I can’t answer that question. My guess is that it’s boyfriend trouble, but who knows, who knows?
I’m going to ask you a couple more questions and then allow time for our audience to, well, look in the chat and allow time. Because this is followed up, isn’t it, decades later, not so long ago, with this royal pardon. Can you tell us, I mean, what’s all that about? Why has this happened and the timing of that? And what happened to him was appalling, as you know, his treatment, that’s clear. But the royal pardon, is that setting the, what’s that about setting the record straight? How do you look at that?
Well, yes, that’s, I mean, I have to say, I think it’s quite controversial. So I guess, again, perhaps I will sort of back up, back up slightly. So it’s a royal pardon, but people who are not based in the UK might imagine that that’s something that the late queen did out of her own sort of generosity. That’s not the way that it works. Royal pardons are handed down on the instructions of the government. So the late queen will have been told by the UK government that she had to do this thing. So that’s the reason it was done. So the question then is, why did the UK government at the time decide that they wanted to pardon Alan Turing? We have to go back a little bit. So this is all about rather crude politics as much as anything else, because the previous UK government, which had a different political colour, had issued Alan Turing with an apology saying, “We are terribly sorry. "You are the guy that broke the codes during World War II. "We think it was appalling and shameful "that you should have been treated the way that you were, "and we’re very sorry about that.” So he had an official government apology long after his death. But then the next government comes in and wants to, I’m sorry, this is going to sound very cynical, but I stand ready to be contradicted on this. I think they’ve jumped on the Alan Turing bandwagon and said, “Well, if the other guys have given him an apology, "we can do one better. We can actually give him a royal pardon.” So all right, so they issued the royal pardon, got the Queen to issue the royal pardon.
Then it gets even more of a struggle, because clearly Alan Turing’s not the only gay man to have been prosecuted under the piece of legislation that he was. In fact, it turns out there were 50,000 other people who were prosecuted under this particular legislation. So why have they singled out Alan Turing? Just 'cause he happens to be a famous guy, somebody that you’ve heard of. That’s kind of not fair. So I was asked to support the campaign for Alan Turing getting a royal pardon, and I would not do so, because I thought that it was just completely wrong to single one person out. Either you give it to everybody or you don’t. So there’s a sequel to this, which is that another government comes in after the one that gave Alan Turing the royal pardon, and then says, “Ah, we’ve heard about these 50,000 other people, so we ought to give them a pardon.” So they passed a new piece of legislation, which was supposedly going to give all the other 50,000 a royal pardon. And it doesn’t work that way, because the way that it’s drafted is that the pardons are automatically granted to the people who were prosecuted, provided that, like Alan Turing, they have had the good grace to die.
So if you’re still alive and you were prosecuted, then you don’t get your royal pardon automatically. You have to apply to the Home Office in the UK, and you have to prove various things, which I think are probably impossible for most of these people to prove, because it’s very old, and the court records may not exist, and so forth. So we’re now in this really completely embarrassing, and I would say inexcusable position, where dead people are treated better than live people, and live people who perhaps deserving of pardons have to go through this awful business of having to relive the experience they had in making an application to the Home Office. And I should say that under a Freedom of Information Act request, I made that not everybody is successful in their request to the Home Office. There’s a really rather small proportion of people that actually succeed in this process. So frankly, I’m afraid that the whole story of royal pardons is one that is a very tarnished and grubby one. It’s not the good news story that I think everyone hoped it would be.
That’s shocking, isn’t it? I’m sure most, I mean, I wasn’t aware of all of what you’ve been discussing, and I’m sure neither of many other people. It’s just absolutely shocking. While I ask one final question before we are going to open up, start posting, there are a couple of questions in our Q&A. So we ask our audience to start posting questions, comments for Sir Dermot Turing. And extraordinarily, one step further, your uncle is now on the 50-pound note. Not that I’ve ever had one in my own purse, I have to say. Don’t carry a wadge of those around. Never had a 50-pound note. But I mean, how extraordinary is that?
He’s not a drug dealer.
So he’s involved explicitly with this. I know, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? He couldn’t make it up. But I mean, who could possibly have predicted that he’s going to, you know, what do you make of that?
Well, I think it’s very interesting. I mean, we are having a conversation about Alan Turing because he’s famous. So we’re, you know, we’re not having a conversation about my father, who isn’t famous. So the question is, why has Alan Turing captured the public imagination to the extent to which he is now regarded by the people who nominate figures to be put on Bank of England’s pound notes as being a scientist of such huge importance? And so my guess is probably as good as anybody’s here, but I would start by saying that, as we discussed at the beginning of our discussion, there’s this whole iconic status that Bletchley Park and the success against the Enigma machine has had. And that has worked very powerfully on, particularly on the British imagination. It makes British people proud to be British. And Alan Turing is at the centre of that story. And so I think that’s part of it. But I don’t think it’s the whole thing. I think that it is also the fact that he was treated the way that he was on account of his sexuality and his life had this tragic end. And I think that that turns what is a story of World War II, slightly geeky heroism, which is powerful and attractive, but it then turns it into some sort of Shakespearean melodrama, which I think means that it works very, very powerfully. People want to know. I mean, you have asked me, people want to know about the codebreaker. They want to know about the end of his life. They don’t want to know about morphogenesis and why that plant behind you has got the blobs in the funny places. They don’t want to know about the design of World War II era computing machinery. And so I think we have to acknowledge that it’s those forces, those factors that probably leads to him having statues all over the place, dramatic productions, musicals, artworks, 50 pound notes, they’re all over the place. So yeah, I mean-
It’s a whole industry.
It is. And can I just make one final comment? I’m sure that we will get to the Q&A in two seconds. So just wanted to do one thing. One of the odd byproducts of all this and Alan Turing’s fame is the fake quotes industry. So if you open up Amazon when we’re all done and you can type in Alan Turing quotes, you can buy little things that you can hang up on your office or your classroom or wherever. You can buy inspirational quotes that apparently were uttered by Alan Turing at some point during his lifetime. I urge you to spend your money with caution because many of those quotes were never uttered by Alan Turing in his lifetime. They don’t appear in any of his published works and were made up by somebody who’s trying to just get you to part with your money. So yes, being famous has all sorts of odd side effects.
Oh, it’s unbelievable. I’m going to start asking some of the questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - So the movie, just to repeat, the movie that someone’s asked that you’re referring to is called “The Imitation Game” and I’m pretty sure it is still available on Netflix or on other channels. It will be available in America, across the world. I want to ask you, this is coming from Joanne. Is it true that when Alan Turing died, there was an apple with a bite taken out on his bedside table? This in turn was the inspiration for Steve Jobs and his apple products.
A - So yes and then no. So I mean, I do cover this in my book, which you’re no doubt going to mention in a minute, Helen. But so yes, it’s true that the apple was beside his bed and that was to take the taste of the cyanide away. And no, it’s not true that the Apple Computer Corporation used that as their inspiration 'cause the guy who designed their logo had never heard of Alan Turing when he designed it 'cause it was many years before Alan Turing became famous. And the reason that the apple logo has a bite taken out of it is because they, well, this is what I’ve been told anyway. So I may be as guilty of fake news as anybody else here, but I’ve been told that without the bite taken out of the side of the apple on the apple logo, it might have been mistaken for a cherry. And so they needed the bite for scale. So there we are.
Q - Oh, I love it. That’s great, isn’t it? Okay, so a question from Nancy, considering what he did during the war for Britain, did Bletchley Park not intervene on his behalf and if not, why? Well, I suppose if we could, 'cause Bletchley Park becomes effectively GCHQ, doesn’t it? So we could also, a bit like NSA, yeah.
A - Well, I think the answer is yes, but they did. So again, the part of the mythology of Alan Turing is he was hung out to dry by the state. I mean, I suppose it depends what you think an estate is. So certainly he was the victim of this home office policy on cracking down on gay men. But GCHQ were doing what they could to support him. So they brought a very senior person who’d been Alan Turing’s number two at Bletchley Park in Hut 8, who is now a senior figure at GCHQ, out of the shadows to speak at his trial in Alan Turing’s defence. Obviously they couldn’t reveal exactly what he’d done during World War II, but they explained to the judge how his role had been very significant. So I think actually it’s unfair to GCHQ, certainly. And it’s probably unfair to the British state to say that he was hung out to dry. But no, I’m pleased. I mean, GCHQ are sort of quite proud of the fact that they can point to the fact that they did actually intercede in the trial.
Q - And another question. When were the Royal Pardons first made? So when are we talking about? It wasn’t that long ago, was it, the Royal Pardon? It was what, within the last five to six years? We can probably, we’ll Google it. We’ll give them some homework.
A - Yes, it will have been in the early 2010s. And I’m sorry, I haven’t got the exact date at my fingertips. But between 2010 and 2014, but I can’t remember exactly which of those years. Sorry, but the principle of pardons has been around sort of forever. I mean, it’s been part of the British constitution for a very, very long time. All sorts of people get pardoned for all sorts of reasons.
We’ve got a wonderful message. We’ve got lots of wonderful messages, actually. Janet Cohen, she’s writing from Ottawa. And she says, “Alan Turing was a remarkable man and the world was better for him. Her late mother served as a wren at Bletchley Park. She was sworn to secrecy. So sadly, her five children didn’t know the nature of her service. It was the best time of her life. And thankfully, we have many wonderful pictures of her time in London. Thank you for bringing this important story to us and wishing you good health.” That’s lovely. Thank you, Janet.
Well, thank you, Janet, for that. Can I just say that if you’re not aware of it, then the Bletchley Park Trust runs a, let’s call it a service, where what they try to do is to collect as much information about people who served at Bletchley Park. And they have a register of all the people who were there. So if your mother doesn’t appear on that list of veterans at Bletchley Park, do get in touch with the Bletchley Park Trust. They’d be very interested to hear from you. And if you’ve got anything at all relating to her service, they’d be very fascinated to know about it.
Q - Okay, so we’ve got time for a couple very quick ones, a comment, very quick question, and then a final question. This is Cheryl says, “We think of Alan Turing every time we look at our phones. So who cares what the truth is? And I know so many people think the same. So do you care about the truth?” You clearly do 'cause you’ve been uncovering the truth, but I love that. That’s a wonderful comment.
A - Yes, I suspect that I think of Alan Turing every time my printer fails on my computer and think what a terrible thing it is to be called Turing 'cause people expect you to be able to fix these technology problems and I’m clueless. I’m sure that Alan would have been pretty clueless too.
Q - Well, I’m going to think of him every time I look at my plant because of course that was an aspect I’d kind of forgotten about his legacy. One other question as we’re coming towards the end of our session. Yeah, so I don’t know that you’re old enough Dermot, but someone has asked, “Do you have memories of your uncle?” You never met him, did you?
A - No, so he died in 1954 and I’m afraid I’m-
Much younger.
You may think that I look exceedingly craggy and old, but I’m afraid I wasn’t born then, so.
Q - So can I finish with a final question? It’s been absolutely fascinating. Well, first of all, if people want to read more about your book, what you’ve done, your unique research and unique angle on this, incredible, what should they read? You’ve got two or three, what would you recommend?
A - Well, okay, what we’ve been doing today, I think it’s been sort of myth debunking. And if people want a bit more on that, then there’s this book called “Reflections of Alan Turing”, which I wrote and that really, it’s a post “Imitation Game,” really a sort of a rethink of Alan Turing’s life. It’s not a long diatribe against the movie. That’s not what it’s intended to be, but it does look at some of these things like 50 pound notes and apples and the trial and all those kinds of things. I’ve also written a more sort of straight down the line kind of biography of Alan Turing, which is called “Alan Turing Decoded”. So I think if people, it depends what people want. So if they want to see the life story, then it’s Alan Turing Decoded. If they want to sort of look a little bit behind the headlines and sort of find out a bit more about the myths and sort of 50 pound notes and stuff, then it’s “Reflections of Alan Turing”.
Q - Thank you. The final question to finish with today. What do you think personally, what do you think is Alan Turing’s enduring legacy?
A - This is a good question and thank you for asking. I would very much like people to think like Alan Turing and move away from thinking about the past and having a sort of fuzzy, nostalgic, feel-good view about World War II, which really we shouldn’t have feel-good thoughts about World War II. What we should be doing is, if you were putting yourself into Alan Turing’s shoes, is to look ahead into the future because that’s what he did all the time. He was always inventing things and trying to imagine a new world. So let’s look forward. And I think what we would be regarding as his legacy as being to think about technology, to think about its role in the world that we’re about to embark upon, think about computing machines and whether things like AI will be problematic for us. Let’s continue that debate. And I think he would also want us to honour our kids and make sure that kids grow up infused by the idea of science and mathematics and technology and to embrace that. So if you’ve got girls at school who are wondering whether to go into technology type specialisms and careers, by all means, encourage them 'cause he would have been very enthusiastic about that. His research students were women. So I think we should think of that part of his legacy. So look forward, not back. And let’s think about technology.
Sir Dermot Turing, thank you so much for what’s been a really inspirational session. And thank you for joining us on Lockdown University.
Thank you for having me.