32 | 3 mEETING A GENIUS
team that Churchill was able to describe our work as ‘my secret weapon’. Turing could never
have said—as Derek Jacobi, the actor who so dramatically played the role of Turing did in Hugh
Whitemore’s play Breaking the Code—‘I broke the German code’. Neither Turing’s modesty nor
his honesty would have permitted such grandiosity. Turing’s role was decisive, but he was not
alone in playing that role.
When I presented myself at the gates of Bletchley Park in January 1942 I was greeted by a
somewhat strange individual whose first question was ‘Do you play chess?’—the questioner
was none other than Turing. Fortunately I was able to answer ‘Yes’, and much of my first day
of war service was spent in helping Turing to solve a chess problem that was intriguing him. I
established an easy and informal relationship with him from virtually that first day at Bletchley
Park, and was fortunate to maintain that relationship thereafter.
I left Bletchley Park in the summer of 1945, shortly after the end of the European war, and
after a year at the Post Office Engineering Research Station I was demobilized and went back to
Oxford University to work on my doctorate. In 1948 I took up my first academic appointment,
at Manchester University, where the head of department was Max Newman, the great topolo-
gist who had played a decisive role as head of a key section at Bletchley Park (see Chapter 14).
Max had done me the honour of appointing me as an assistant lecturer; he had also brought
off the tremendous coup of luring Alan Turing away from the National Physical Laboratory to
Manchester—with special responsibility for designing a computer to be built by Ferranti (see
Chapters 20 and 23). Turing’s collaboration with Newman was crowned with success. I can
recall vividly the hours that Turing spent explaining to me how the computer functioned and
how to use it. I left Manchester for Cambridge in 1952, but I remained in touch with Turing
until his death.
warm, friendly human being
Alan Turing was a warm, friendly human being. He was obviously a genius, but he was an
approachable and friendly genius. He was always willing to take time and trouble to explain his
ideas, but he was no narrow specialist, so that his versatile thought ranged over a vast area of the
exact sciences; indeed, at the time of his death his dominant interest was in morphogenesis. He
had a very lively imagination and a strong sense of humour—he was a fundamentally serious
person, but never unduly austere.
We did not know during the war that Turing was a homosexual. This is not because Turing
took elaborate steps to conceal his predilections. He was, characteristically, wholly honest about
this and not ashamed, although he was never ostentatious about his preference. After the war,
the law against the expression of male homosexuality was upheld with rigorous fervour in
Britain, and in January 1952 Turing, then a Reader at Manchester University and a Fellow of
the Royal Society, was arrested and charged with committing ‘an act of gross indecency’ with
his friend Arnold Murray. Of course, he didn’t deny the charge, but he did not agree that he had
done anything wrong. He was bound over on condition that he submit to hormonal treatment
designed to diminish his libido; the only obvious effect was that he developed breasts. Even in
the straightened circumstances in which he found himself following his trial and conviction, he
retained his enormous zest for life and for the free exchange of ideas.
As a by-product of his plea of guilty, he was no longer permitted to work as a consultant to
GCHQ in Cheltenham where the codebreakers worked, nor to visit the United States. It is a