This Side of the Pond

A mystery recently solved sets up a peculiar connection between your part of the world and mine. To be specific, between a school just down the road from where I grew up and a town in Colorado.

The former is Sherborne School in Dorset, an all-boys private boarding establishment that has been in constant operation for 1300 years. In all that time, as you might imagine, it has boasted some illustrious alumni; in more recent days, it has educated students including Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey fame, actor Jeremy Irons and Chris Martin from Coldplay.

But one graduate of Sherborne School stands out for me, and that’s Alan Turing.

It is he who features in this week’s mystery, for it is his belongings that went missing.

You may already know of Alan Turing even if you don’t recognize the name. Perhaps you’ve heard, for example, of the Turing Test?

This is the methodology still used today to test whether an artificial intelligence is actually self-aware. It’s based on Turing’s “imitation game”, which he developed all the way back in 1950.

You’ll note that, in the 1950s, some people didn’t even have electricity yet, let alone a computer with the power to mimic a human brain.

Turing was a computer scientist before we had computers (his Turing machine is believed by many to be the forerunner to the modern pc), and he was also a logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. It’s no exaggeration to say he was one of the finest minds my homeland has ever produced.

It’s his abilities as a cryptanalyst you’ll most likely be aware of. His most famous contribution to science was the cracking of the Enigma Code during World War II.

Turing led the team that Winston Churchill described as “the goose that laid the golden eggs”. Every morning, he had a special box delivered containing decrypted messages from the Nazis.

It was Turing and his team at Bletchley Park who made that possible.

Turing was already working for the British Secret Intelligence Services’ Code and Cypher School when war broke out, and took up a full-time role with the team at Bletchley Park who were trying to decipher German military codes.

These codes had been created using the Enigma machine, which used a different cipher every day. Though the Polish had worked out how to decrypt the messages, figuring out the ciphers was a bigger problem.

Thanks to Turing’s inventions, the code-breakers were finally able to crack the patterns and read the signals. This had an unimaginable impact on the war effort; for instance, it allowed Allied convoys to be directed away from U-boat “wolf packs”.

But despite his brilliance and the many lives he saved, Turing’s story had a tragic ending. He was a homosexual, and that was still illegal.

Turing was convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952. He avoided a prison sentence by accepting chemical castration.

Two years later, he took his own life.

He never saw the impact of his legacy. The world at large knew nothing of his wartime work until the 1990s, because it was kept secret for decades as a matter of national security.

Today, he is celebrated for his genius, and for his contributions to helping the Allies win the war. In 2019, the British public voted him the greatest person of the 20th century. He now appears on the £50 note, with the Bank of England commenting that he embodies the spirit of the nation when it was unveiled.

Much of his work remains safe within the National Archives, but little remains of Turing himself. Bletchley Park and his college at Cambridge University both host some personal artifacts; Sherborne School was, until 1984, one of the only other places to have that honor.

The school once owned the letter sent to Turing from King George VI presenting him with his knighthood, as well as his PhD certificate from Princeton University, photographs and school reports.

But on that fateful day in 1984, a woman called Julia Mathison Turing told the school that she was conducting a study on Alan. During a tour of the school, she took the items, leaving a note inside the wooden box that read, “Please forgive me for taking these materials into my possession. They will be well taken care of while under the care of my hands and shall one day all be returned to this spot.”

She wasn’t wrong, but it wasn’t because she returned them. In 2018, she contacted the University of Colorado, Boulder to say that Alan was her father and offer historical items from display.

You may have noticed during my brief description of his life that the likelihood of Turing being her father was remote. And that was indeed the case – Julia, it turned out, had developed an obsession with the famous mathematician and changed her last name from Schwinghamer.

Federal agents searched her home in Conifer, Colorado, and found the diploma behind a dresser, photographs and reports throughout the house and a space behind a removable portion of the bathroom wall containing his Order of the British Empire medal.

When not-Turing appeared in court in 2020, she is reported to have said, “I am giving up my collection to be handed over to England because I do not want to keep anything from England against their will out of selfishness.” A little rich, I feel.

Turing’s belongings were welcomed back to his school just over a week ago, with a repatriation ceremony about which the current headmaster commented, “Few people have had a greater positive impact upon the world than Alan Turing.”

One suspects – or at least hopes – that they will in future be kept behind a lock with a code that even Turing himself couldn’t crack.