20 | 2 THE mAN wITH THE TERRIBlE TROUSERS
would probably have become a scientist of distinction.) So Alan was deposited in England with
foster parents in St Leonards-on-Sea, and at nine years of age was sent off to a prep school called
Hazelhurst, near Frant in Sussex.
School seems to have been a reasonably good experience for him—at least in his first term.
There was the incident of the geography test. At that time my father, being four years older than
Alan, was in the top form while Alan was in the bottom one. The whole school was made to
do a geography test. Turing 1 (my father) got 59 marks and Turing 2 (Alan) got 77; my father
considered this a thoroughly bad show.
At King’s College, Cambridge, there is an archive that contains many things of interest relat-
ing to Alan Turing, including his letters home from Hazelhurst.^1 Curiously, these start ‘Dear
Mother and Daddy’, which might give amateur psychologists something to chew on. A typical
letter is this one, from 8 June 1924, when Alan was nearly 12:
figure 2.1 Alan Turing at Sherborne
School in 1930.
Reproduced with permission from Beryl Turing.