Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges Page A

ICS, predicting that the 1919 reforms, introducing Indian representation into provincial government, spelt the beginning of the end. John had spiritedly thought of going into publishing instead, and his father’s pet idea was that he should go to South America to make money out of guano, but in the end it was Mrs Turing’s safer suggestion that he should be a solicitor which won. Mr Turing was obliged to pay £450 for his son to be articled and to support him for five years.
    But Alan could not see the point of the schooling so dearly won for him. Even in French, once a favourite, the master wrote ‘His lack of interest is very depressing except when something amuses him.’ He developed a particularly annoying way of ignoring the teaching during the term and then coming top in the examination. Greek, however, which he was supposed to learn for the first time at Sherborne, he ignored completely. He was placed at the bottom of the bottom set for three terms, after which the point was conceded and he was grudgingly allowed to abandon it. ‘Having secured one privileged exemption,’ O’Hanlon wrote, ‘he is mistaken in acting as though idleness and indifference will procure release from uncongenial subjects.’
    In mathematics and science the masters wrote more approving reports, but there was always something to complain about. In the summer of 1927, Alan showed to his mathematics teacher, a certain Randolph, some work he had done for himself. He had found the infinite series for the ‘inverse tangent function’, starting from the trigonometrical formula for tan1/2x. * Randolph was appropriately amazed, and told Alan’s form master that he was ‘a genius’. But the news sank like a stone in the Sherborne pond. It .merely saved Alan from a demotion, and even Randolph reported unfavourably:
     
Not very good. He spends a good deal of time apparently in investigations in advanced mathematics to the neglect of elementary work. A sound groundwork is essential in any subject. His work is dirty.
    The headmaster issued a warning:
     
I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at a Public School, he must aim at becoming educated . If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist , he is wasting his time at a Public School.
    The hint of expulsion thudded on to the breakfast table, endangering all that Mr and Mrs Turing had worked and prayed for respectively. But Alan discovered a way to beat the system that Nowell Smith called ‘the essential glory and function of the English Public School’. He spent the second half of the term isolated in the sanatorium with mumps. Emerging to perform as well as usual in the examinations, he won a prize. The headmaster commented:
     
He owes his place and prize entirely to mathematics and science, but he shewed improvement on the literary side. If he goes on as he is doing now, he should do very well.
    In the summer holiday the Turings stayed again at a boarding house in Wales, this time at Ffestiniog. Alan and his mother strode up the peaks. Back at the boarding house was a Mr Neild who took great interest in Alan and gave him a book on mountain climbing in which he wrote a long inscription treating Alan’s climbs as symbolic of his eventually attaining intellectual heights. One person, for a brief moment, had taken him seriously.
    The human body, Natural Wonders explained, was a ‘Living Apothecary Shop’. It was Brewster’s way of describing the effects of the recently discovered hormones, whereby the ‘different parts of the body’ could ‘signal to one another’ with ‘chemical messages’ rather than through the nervous system. It was during 1927, when he became fifteen, that Alan gained his height, and presumably the more interesting and exciting changes took place at the same time.
    It was also time for the puberty rite of the Church of England. Alan was confirmed on 7 November 1927. Like the Officers Training Corps, confirmation was one of those duties for