SIR JOHN DERmOT TURING | 23
his own role. It is well known that the Bletchley Park employees were sworn to secrecy about
their work, even after the war had ended, so Alan was never in a position to tell his parents or
my father what he had actually done. My grandmother’s biography of Alan, Alan M. Turing
(S. Turing 1959), refers to Alan’s war years as ‘work in the Foreign Office’: she says that at first
even his whereabouts were kept secret, although later Alan was able to say that he was working
at Bletchley Park. But (as she wrote in 1959) ‘no hint was ever given of the nature of his secret
work, nor has it ever been revealed’.
The image of Alan as an eccentric man of the professor type grew out of his having to work at
Bletchley with a large number of non-academic mortals and service personnel, who may have
found it surprising that someone could be so highly regarded while so young, and with such a
casual approach to dress and other social mores. One of his biographers, Andrew Hodges, has
noted that there were stories going the rounds about Alan’s trousers being held up with string
figure 2.3 Guildford in 1934: the lady in the hat may be wondering why the photographer is snapping a man with
trousers like that.
Reproduced with permission from Beryl Turing.