COPElAND | 187
After a few months the army sent several recent university graduates to Hanslope and Turing
made two firm friendships. Robin Gandy shared Turing’s Nissen hut, working on improve-
ments to equipment used in intercepting German messages.^24 At first Gandy thought Turing a
bit austere, but later was ‘enchanted to find how human he could be, discussing mutual friends,
arranging a dinner-party, being a little vain of his clothes and his appearance’.^25 The second new
friendship sprouted when Don Bayley came to Hanslope in March 1944 to assist with Delilah.^26
The three of them would take long walks together in the Buckinghamshire countryside.
One day Turing entered his name for the mile race in the regimental sports. Some of the
soldiers thought it must be a leg-pull, but when the race was run Turing ‘came in a very easy
first’, the C.O. remembered.^27 It was the beginning of Turing’s career as an Olympic standard
runner. Soon after the war ended he began to train seriously and was to be seen ‘with hair fly-
ing’, his Cambridge friend Arthur Pigou said, as he flashed past on a ‘10, 15 or 17 miles solitary
“scamper” ’.^28
Victory
Turing’s invention was never used in earnest, for Germany fell in May 1945, not long after
Delilah was completed. As Russian troops poured into Berlin, members of the Nazi elite barri-
caded the windows of the Reich Chancellery with heavy crates of never-to-be awarded Iron
Cross medals.^29 Turing celebrated victory quietly, ambling through the countryside with Bayley
and Gandy.^30 ‘Well, the war’s over now’, Bayley said to Turing as they rested in a clearing in the
woods, ‘it’s peacetime so you can tell us all’. ‘Don’t be so bloody silly’, Turing replied. ‘That was
the end of that conversation’, Bayley recollected 67 years later.