The police feature in two valuable letters written by Alan Turing himself to his friend Norman Routledge, and now also in the archive. The first, undated, must be from early 1952:
My dear Norman,
I don’t think I really do know much about jobs, except the one I had during the war, and that certainly did not involve any travelling. I think they do take on conscripts. It certainly involved a good deal of hard thinking, but whether you’d be interested I don’t know. Philip Hall was in the same racket and on the whole, I should say, he didn’t care for it. However I am not at present in a state in which I am able to concentrate well, for reasons explained in next paragraph.
I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered to be quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offences with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven’t the time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.
Glad you enjoyed broadcast. J(efferson) certanly was rather disappointing though. I’m rather afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future:
Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think
Yours in distress,
Alan
The allusion to the traditional syllogism about Socrates, who drank the hemlock, is an extraordinary piece of black humour. (It also stands as a superb example of how Turing himself fused the elements of his life.) The opening of the letter is perhaps equally remarkable in its absurdly off-hand description of six years of crucial wartime work, and in its inexplicable statement that the work had not involved any travelling. The second is dated February 22, and must be from 1953:
My dear Norman
Thanks for your letter. I should have answered it earlier. I have a delightful story to tell you of my adventurous life when next we meet. I’ve had another round with the gendarmes, and it’s positively round II to Turing.
Half the police of N. England (by one report) were out searching for a supposed boyfriend of mine. It was all a mare’s nest. Perfect virtue and chastity had governed all our proceedings. But the poor sweeties never knew this.
A very light kiss beneath a foreign flag under the influence of drink, was all that had ever occurred. Everything is now cosy again except that the poor boy has had rather a raw deal I think. I’ll tell you all when we meet in March at Teddington.
Being on probation my shining virtue was terrific, and had to be. If I had so much as parked my bicycle on the wrong side of the road there might have been 12 years for me. Of course the police are going to be a bit more nosy, so virtue must continue to shine. I might try to get a job in France. But I’ve also been having psychoanalysis for a few months now, and it seems to be working a bit. It’s quite fun, and I think I’ve got a good man. 80% of the time we are working out the significance of my dreams. No time to write about logic now!
Ever, Alan
The style is a reminder that whilst Turing’s plain-speaking English might be compared with that of Orwell or Shaw, it also had a strong element of P. G. Wodehouse. Both letters perhaps indicate a state of denial about the seriousness with which those in charge of the nosy ‘sweeties’ would contemplate his Euro-adventures.
Alan Turing used logarithms of betting odds as the key to the work he had done for the ‘racket’ of cryptography, and his sustained fascination with probability is illustrated by that reference to a one-in-ten chance of being caught. In his 1953 stoic humour there is a link with innocent Anti-War undergraduate days of twenty years earlier, when he analysed Alfred Beuttell’s Monte Carlo gambling system. While the tectonic forces of geopolitics ground away, Alan Turing dodged his way through as a nimble, insouciant, individual. The lucky streak did not last for ever.
Stephen Hawking: My Brief History or The Theory of Everything
Our third child, Tim, was also born in 1979 after a trip to Corsica, where I was lecturing at a summer school. Thereafter Jane became more depressed. She was worried I was going to die soon and wanted someone who would give her and the children support and marry her when I was gone. She found Jonathan Jones, a musician and organist at the local church, and gave him a room in our apartment. I would have objected, but I too was expecting an early death and felt I needed someone to support the children after I was gone…
However, I became more and more unhappy about the increasingly close relationship between Jane and Jonathan. In the end I could stand the situation no longer, and in 1990 I moved out to a flat with one of my nurses, Elaine Mason. We found the flat rather small for us and Elaine’s two sons, who were with us for part of the week, so we decided to move. A bad storm in 1987 had torn off the roof of Newnham College, one of two women-only undergraduate colleges. (The men-only colleges had all by this time admitted women. My college, Caius, which had a number of conservative fellows, was one of the last, and it was finally persuaded by the students’ exam results that it wouldn’t get good men applying unless it admitted women as well.) Because Newnham was a poor college, it had had to sell four plots of land to pay for the roof repair after the storm. We bought one of the plots and built a wheelchair-friendly house. Elaine and I got married in 1995. Nine months later Jane married Jonathan Jones.
My marriage to Elaine was passionate and tempestuous. We had our ups and downs, but Elaine’s being a nurse saved my life on several occasions. After the tracheotomy, I had a plastic tube in my trachea, which prevented food and saliva from getting into my lungs and was retained by an inflated cuff.
Over the years the pressure in the cuff damaged my trachea and made me cough and choke. I was coughing on a flight back from Crete, where I had been at a conference, when David Howard, a surgeon who happened to be on the same plane, approached happened to be on the same plane, approached Elaine and said he could help me. He suggested a laryngectomy, which would completely separate my windpipe from my throat and remove the need for a tube with a cuff. The doctors at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge said it was too risky, but Elaine insisted, and David Howard carried out the operation in a London hospital.
That operation saved my life: another two weeks and the cuff would have worn a hole between my windpipe and my throat, filling my lungs with blood. A few years later I had another health crisis because my oxygen levels were falling dangerously low in deep sleep. I was rushed to the hospital, where I remained for four months. I was eventually discharged with a ventilator, which I used at night. My doctor told Elaine that I was coming home to die. (I have since changed my doctor.) Two years ago I began using the ventilator twenty-four hours a day. I find it gives me energy.
Excerpted with permission from Alan Turing: The Enigma, by Andrew Hodges, Vintage Books, and from My Brief History by Stephen Hawking, Transworld Publishers.