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41 Unswerving Inexactitude

Writer's picture: Dave GobleDave Goble

Updated: Mar 28, 2024

There’s a phrase you'd probably prefer didn't appear in your school report. It was something the English teacher of the subject on whom this post is focussed evidently tried to tolerate in his pupil. The full quote appears later. In the meantime thank you to friend John Royle who brought to my attention Alan Turing’s brief time in the area. He lived in Ivy House at No. 78 Hampton High Street for about two years, immediately after WWII, during which he worked at the National Physical Laboratory a few miles down the road in Teddington.


Ivy House



Widely considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing was born in Maida Vale in London in 1912. He died aged just 41 in 1954 at his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire.

Sitting uncomfortably / triumphantly against his English teacher's comments, Turing was generally regarded as an exceptional mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. Highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, he provided a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine - a model of a general-purpose computer.

Phew. Maths didn't come easily to me at school; just writing that leaves me slightly drained.

Before getting to his work and career, and more, a bit about the man.

He was inclined to dress casually / shabbily, (at least that’s one thing we have in common), and he rarely wore a tie. His appearance, combined with youthful looks, often had him mistaken for an undergraduate, even in his 30s. He also shared the left-leaning views of many of his Kings College compatriots, who included economists John Maynard Keynes and Arthur Cecil Pigou. Though Turing joined the Anti-War Movement in 1933, he never got deeply involved in politics. But watching Hitler’s rise to power in the late 1930s alarmed him, and it spurred his interest in cryptography, which would later help his country in the war.

At school Turing grades were poor, and he frustrated his teachers. Science was considered a second-class pursuit in English public schools in the 1920s, and Turing’s passion for it embarrassed his mother, who had hoped he would study the classics - the most acceptable pursuit for gentlemen. His English teacher delivered this brutal assessment:


“I can forgive his writing, though it is the worst I have ever seen, and I try to view tolerantly his unswerving inexactitude and slipshod, dirty, work, inconsistent though such inexactitude is in a utilitarian; but I cannot forgive the stupidity of his attitude towards sane discussion on the New Testament.”


Wow. Imagine your Mum and Dad reading that in your school report!

Turing was a good runner, (perhaps a talent he honed in response to his school report), and thought nothing of running to work and / or between offices, e.g. the ten miles from the NPL in Teddington to the electronics building on Dollis Hill. In 1948, at 2 hours and 46 minutes, his best marathon time was just eleven minutes shy of the Olympic winning time that year.

To his work, which despite everything, he turned out to be rather good at.


During WWII Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain’s code-breaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here he devised techniques for accelerating the breaking of German ciphers, including an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.


The Enigma machine

Used extensively by Nazi Germany during WWII by the German military


Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. It’s estimated that Ultra intelligence shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.


After the war Turing worked at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington where he designed the Automatic Computing Engine, one of the first designs for a stored-program computer.


The NPL


In 1948, Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Machine Laboratory at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he helped develop an innovative series of stored-program electronic computers known as the Manchester computers. They were developed over the next thirty years until around 1977.


In 1952, on the advice of a friend, Turing started seeing Jungian psychologist Franz Greenbaum in Manchester. Memories shared by Greenbaum’s two daughters, Maria and Barbara, about his regular visits give some insight into the man outside his work. Maria recalls, when aged eight:


“I just saw Alan as a very warm and friendly person who always took an interest in what I was doing. He would come for dinner and often I'd be sitting on the floor playing the board-game solitaire. He would sit down on the carpet next to me and we would talk. I became quite attached to him."


She still treasures a letter Turing sent her in the summer of 1953, less than a year before his death, in which he sets out how to tackle the board game.


“To this day I can't really fathom out what he's telling me. But to an eight-year-old, getting a letter like that from a grown-up was special."


Back to 1952. Turing was prosecuted for gross indecency with his lover in Manchester by way of homosexual acts - a criminal offence in the UK in a period of particular intolerance. As alternative to prison, Turing accepted chemical castration treatment by way of a course of the hormone oestrogen to suppress his libido. Biographer Andrew Hodges said:


“He dealt with it with as much humour and defiance as you could muster.”


“To his close friends, it was obvious it was traumatic. But in no way did he just succumb and decline. He really fought back … by insisting on continuing work as if nothing had happened.”


Turing died in 1954, 16 days before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined his death as suicide, though evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning.


Despite his many accomplishments, because much of his work was covered by the Official Secrets Act, and because of his homosexuality, he was not fully recognised in his home country during his lifetime.


In 2009, following an internet campaign, then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for "the appalling way he was treated”. And in 2013 Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous pardon … it only took nigh on sixty years.


The Alan Turing law is now an informal term for a 2017 law in the UK that retroactively pardoned men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts.


The man himself


Red arrow: Turing’s home, Ivy House

Blue arrow: His workplace from 1945-47, The National Physical Laboratory

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