SIR JOHN DERmOT TURING | 21
Dear Mother and Daddy. I have started writing with my fountain pen again, please tell me if you
think my writing is worse with it . . . I do not know whether I told you last week but once when
I said how much I hated tapioca pudding and you said that all Turings hate tapioca pudding and
mint-sauce and something else I had never tried mint-sauce but a few days ago we had it and I
found out very much that your statement was true.
Alan’s fountain pen was, of course, his own invention, and mint sauce is something of an
aberration in the British culinary canon. The school reports groaned, inevitably, about Alan’s
terrible handwriting and untidiness. A famous drawing done by my grandmother, where
Alan is studying daisies rather than watching the ball during a hockey game, dates from these
Hazelhurst years (see Fig. 1.3).
When my father left Hazelhurst he was sent to Marlborough College, where he had a thor-
oughly miserable time. He concluded that Alan would wither in that environment and managed
to persuade my grandparents to send Alan to Sherborne School, where things were a bit more
liberal and Alan could indulge his passion for science. While at Sherborne, Alan won a handful
of school prizes. As one might expect for the times, these were leather-bound classics with the
school coat of arms nicely embossed on the front. They are now on display at the museum at
Bletchley Park and are in mint condition: it is clear that Alan never touched them. From cor-
respondence between Alan and the Morcom family, it seems that Alan wanted to receive for his
prizes a collection of books on scientific subjects, but the school rules (even at Sherborne) were
not liberal enough to allow that.
In 1931, after Sherborne, Alan went up to King’s College, Cambridge, as an undergraduate.
In an academic environment such as King’s, or even Bletchley Park, he could get away with
a lackadaisical approach to dress and social niceties. But while he was at King’s Alan was not
just buried away thinking about mathematics. His letters home show a vibrant interest in the
anti-war movement: it was not possible to be cut off from politics in the early 1930s. The cap-
tain’s book of the King’s College boat club shows that by the time of his graduation Alan had
become a reliable rower, and he helped the second eight to victory by stepping in to replace
the number five man who became injured, perhaps in unedifying circumstances, mid-way
through the May bumps races; the victory oar that Alan helped to win for his club is also on
display at Bletchley. But there are few photographs—indeed, there are hardly any photographs
of Alan as an adult.
At King’s the photographs, like most of those from school, are the formally posed ones:
graduation (Figs 2.2 and 2.3) and the boat club. In the family album is one of him at my father’s
wedding, and someone has clearly had a thorough go at him for this: his hair is shiny and well
brushed and his trousers have something almost unique for him—a sharp crease. I suspect
that my grandmother may have had a hand in that. Apart from the graduation shots, the other
full-length pictures suggest that Alan disdained pointless workaday things such as having clean
and nicely pressed trousers (Fig. 2.4).
Bletchley Park, 1939
Alastair Denniston was the head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) in
- His plan was to have an emergency list of ‘men of the professor type’ to be called upon
to re-create the successes of Room 40 which had broken German codes during the First World