Blue Plaque Trail:

Alan Turing

For our last feature in this series we’ve yet again chosen someone whose link with our town has not yet been recognised with a blue plaque. Alan Turing was a quiet and modest man of great integrity, a true visionary and pioneer; his work during WW2 saved countless lives and he is considered by many to be the father of computer science. His fascinating story is one of quiet heroism and a tragic end.

Christened Alan Mathison Turing, he was the second son of Julius Mathison Turing, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and Ethel Sara Turing, daughter of the Chief Engineer of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway. He was born while they stayed in London in 1912, as the sun was setting on the British Empire. His staunchly middle-class colonialist family was insulated from the rapid changes happening in England at this time, but it was Alan’s fate to become first one of modern society’s unsung heroes and then be sacrificed as one of its victims.

After Alan’s birth his father returned to India and was eventually followed by his wife. Alan and his older brother John were left in the care of friends of the family, a retired army couple, Colonel and Mrs Ward, who lived in Baston Lodge – a large house in St Leonards-on-Sea just across the road from the house of the author Rider Haggard. His parents visited when they could, and eventually his mother returned to live with Alan in furnished lodgings in another house in St Leonards, from where she would take little Alan on bracing walks along the seafront and on the pier, dressed in a sailor suit. She also dragged him to her strict Anglican church each Sunday. He was a precocious child, cheerful but naughty and wilful, in some ways extremely clever but in others frustratingly slow. Even at this early age he showed two of the traits that would later mark him out and shape his life: a fascination with numbers and the artless honesty for which he would one day pay a heavy price.

At the age of ten Alan was sent to Hazlehurst School near Tunbridge Wells, later followed by Sherbourne School. He was by no means a star pupil, finding his lessons a frustrating distraction and preferring to pursue his own interests to the neglect of his prescribed studies, but his natural mathematical ability won him a scholarship to Kings College Cambridge and in 1934 he gained a distinction in mathematics. The following year he was awarded a Fellowship at Kings before travelling to America to study at Princetown for two years. While at Princetown he published a groundbreaking scientific paper entitled ‘On Computable Numbers’ in which he provided a solution to one of the fundamental questions of mathematics and set out the concept of a ‘universal machine’ which, by following a simple set of instructions, could perform any logic operation. Although it attracted little attention at the time, this paper and the work that followed it laid the groundwork for the development of the computer age.

Turing returned to Cambridge in 1938 and when war broke out he was recruited to the British Government’s now well-known (but then secret) Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. 1938 also saw the British premier of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ – a film with which Turing became fascinated, in particular the scene in which the Wicked Queen dips an apple into poison, later persuading Snow White to eat it resulting in her ‘sleeping death’.

In the early part of the war Britain was suffering greatly from German U-boat attacks and the Government was desperate to break the extremely complex cipher that was used in German naval communications, the infamous ‘Enigma Code’. A Polish team was able to produce a mechanical device known as ‘The Bomba&rsquo