SIR JOHN DERmOT TURING | 25
My grandmother died in 1976, at the age of 93, but at that time there was little public under-
standing of what Alan Turing had really done, either at Bletchley or in his wider contribution
to computer science: how cruel it seems for her not to have been allowed an insight into Alan’s
work in unravelling the secrets of the Enigma. Sure, the rule of secrecy had been thrown out
in 1974, when Group Captain Winterbotham wrote an exposé called The Ultra Secret,^3 but
Winterbotham’s book does not contain a single mention of Alan Turing. In the exhibition at
Bletchley Park there is a copy of a letter written to my grandmother just before she died, which
tells her briefly that Alan’s contribution to the codebreaking effort was highly significant—but
there is no detail. In 1977 the BBC made a television series, The Secret War, and at home we
crowded round a small black-and-white set to find out more. They showed a photograph—
fortunately, head and shoulders only—of Alan, but they really didn’t explain what he had done
or how. It took several more years, and the publication of Andrew Hodges’ superb biography
(Hodges 1983), for Alan’s role to be better understood.
manchester, 1952
At Cambridge Alan could lead his life in a way that suited him—and, to a large degree, the
years at Bletchley were also reasonably liberal. But after Bletchley, social convention caught up
with him. After the war, Alan joined one of the efforts in Britain to build a universal comput-
ing machine. Living in Britain in the austerity years was not easy, and working outside the
academic system at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) added frustration and anti-climax
into the mix.
Alan’s time at the NPL was destined to be limited. One of the factors behind his parting
company with them was that he had written a rather visionary paper on what uses a computer
could be put to, which had been dismissed by the NPL’s director, Sir Charles Darwin (grandson
of the Charles Darwin), as a schoolboy’s essay not suitable for publication.
When Max Newman rescued him with the offer of a post in Manchester it must have seemed
a release, an opportunity to return to a more relaxed way of living and thinking. The develop-
ment of a computing laboratory at Manchester provided Alan with an opportunity to use the
machines in a thoroughly modern way: as a tool to try out ideas, not as advanced calculators for
crunching through long arithmetical problems. The point for Alan was that actually building
the thing and doing arithmetic on it were much less exciting than the wider opportunities that
having a computer could open up.
The progress at Manchester caught the spirit of the times. This was the era of atomic bombs,
space rockets, jet-engines, and televisions—all really exciting stuff, especially to schoolboys. As
one may imagine, there was much public interest in the idea of an artificial brain. On 11 June 1949
The Times ran an article headed: ‘The Mechanical Brain. Answer found to 300-year-old sum’:
Experiments which have been in progress in this country and the United States since the end
of the war to produce an efficient mechanical ‘brain’ have been successfully completed at
Manchester University, where a workable ‘brain’ has been evolved . . . The Manchester ‘mechani-
cal mind’ was built by Professor F. C. Williams, of the Department of Electro-Technics, and is
now in the hands of two university mathematicians, Professor M. H. A. Newman and Mr A. W.
[sic.] Turing. It has just completed, in a matter of weeks, a problem, the nature of which is not
disclosed, which was started in the seventeenth century . . .