We have this idea that Alan Turing was hung out to dry by the British Establishment and that his conviction and treatment led directly to his suicide two years later. The lectures have been reconstructed verbatim, including interjections from Turing and other students, from students' notes. The section was led initially by Alan Turing. On the morning of 8 June 1954, Turing was found dead in bed by his housekeeper. In typical Churchill fashion he would then surprise his chiefs of staff with things which they probably didn’t know. At first he wanted to see every single decrypted message but rapidly the volume of stuff grew so much for that to be practical, so they just gave him the juicy bits. Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician. The treatment he received was not the idea of the Establishment as such but the result of the rather bizarre way that homosexuality was regarded as a disease in 1950s Britain, and Alan was handed over by the court to the medics and psychiatrists. In 1952, Alan Turing was forced to endure chemical castration by the same government after being prosecuted for homosexual acts. There was a small code-breaking organization between the wars called the Government Code & Cypher School, which was part of MI6, and they moved in just before the war began. During the Second World War, Turing worked at the famous Bletchley Park where he cracked the Enigma code use by Nazis to transmit secret communications. The Death of a General: George S. Patton, Jr. Chuck Yeager: WWII Fighter Ace and Record Breaking Test Pilot. He was succeeded in November 1942 by his deputy, Hugh Alexander. Home of the Government Code and Cipher School (GC & CS) – the forerunner of today’s GCHQ – operations at Bletchley are said to have shortened the Second World War by as many as two or three years. In June 1940, Clarke was recruited by her former academic supervisor, Gordon Welchman, to the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). Alan Turing helped the British government pioneer the technology to decrypt Nazi Germany’s secret communications during World War II. Your 60-second guide to Bletchley Park, Christopher Grey, professor of organisational behaviour at Warwick University, says: “What had been created was no less than an intelligence ‘factory’ which sucked in thousands of people working in conditions of complete secrecy. Ah, well, this is all about secrecy. He is also a regular speaker at historical and other events. It’s difficult to be sure, because it was the 1940s, and in those days, roles were theoretically segregated by gender, and there were no women’s grades for codebreakers and analysts—so they had to be called ‘clerical’ or ‘translator’ or whatever, regardless of what they were actually doing. That’s something which interests me, because it symbolizes what happened to a lot of women who discovered something about their abilities and personalities during the war years, but after the war the men took back the significant roles and many successful women found themselves sent back to the kitchen. Everything you ever wanted to know about... a more integrated signals intelligence entity, Bletchley Park: Britain’s wartime intelligence factory, working in conditions of complete secrecy, Enigma before Bletchley: the German spies who betrayed Hitler. I can’t explain that otherwise than that the police were out to get him in some sense. We sat down with Sir John Dermot Turing, Alan Turing’s nephew and author of a new book on Bletchley Park, to discusses his uncle’s role pivotal role in computer science and his persecution for being gay in the 1950s. So, we have a traditional picture of Bletchley being staffed by tweedy professors who smoked pipes and teenage Wrens doing mind-numbingly boring jobs, but actually it turns out to be more complicated than that. In the early days the total complement was a couple of hundred or so, but the success of the codebreaking effort was so great that the number of people grew enormously, to a peak of around 10,000 in 1944. e Hut 8 was a section in the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park (the British World War II codebreaking station, located in Buckinghamshire) tasked with solving German naval (Kriegsmarine) Enigma messages. A Christmas classic, Miracle on 34th Street, provides a surprisingly realistic perspective on WWII refugees. Ada Lovelace: a visionary of computing. There weren’t many women on his list, but one of the interesting things is that that changed during the course of the war. Everyone employed at Bletchley Park was told that they must never reveal anything of their work. I asked him some questions about the book, Bletchley, and his war-winning, world-famous uncle. He is a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. And then there was the time when there was an inter-service athletics meeting and this civilian apparently called ‘Professor Turing’ asked to participate (he wasn’t a professor but that was his nickname). But actually the myth can get in the way of reality at this point. But visitors to Bletchley Park want to know a bit more than the technicalities of code-breaking, Enigma machines and so forth—it’s people stories that chime best. After that, Alan Turing was only rarely at Bletchley Park, because he was working on his own speech encipherment device. To start with, his ex-colleagues from Bletchley Park came to speak for his defense at the trial, and their testimony explained—without giving away any secrets—how significant Alan’s wartime contribution had been, and I think it was their intervention which stopped Alan going to prison or getting a formal criminal record (which would have cost him his job.). 504-528-1944, Institute for the Study of War and Democracy, Coordinating the Destruction of an Entire People: The Wannsee Conference, Otto Ohlendorf, Einsatzgruppe D, and the ‘Holocaust by Bullets’, The Capture and Execution of William Joyce, Coming To America: The War Brides Act of 1945. The Museum had the pleasure of hosting Dermot Turing at our 2017 Winston S. Churchill Symposium. He pleaded guilty. Alan Turing - the Bletchley Park codebreaker - would have been 100 years old on 23 June had he lived to the present day. No, thank you for the opportunity. A brief biography, based on that formerly displayed in the ‘Hall of Fame’ in Bletchley Park mansion. This essentially founded modern computer science. It is sometimes said that the operation at Bletchley shortened the Second World War by two or three years, “and it is certainly easy to see how reading so many of the operational and strategic signals of the enemy was invaluable to the Allies”, says Christopher Grey. Please enter your number below. His thesis was ‘Systems of logic based on ordinals’. Instead of imprisonment he opted for hormone ‘treatment’ – oestrogen injections that made him put on weight and enlarged his breasts. Tell us about Bletchley as an organization. Tell us about the people—countless people—who played important parts to making Bletchley Park a success. In fact it’s more complicated than that. You know, the media called it the ‘artificial brain,’ it was all over the papers and the BBC and there was a hoo-hah about whether ‘machines can think,’ and Alan Turing was at the center of all that. Read more: Bletchley Park: Britain’s wartime intelligence factory Bletchley Park was the home of code breakers in England during the war. For him, I think the codebreaking was a bit of an interlude in his career as a mathematician and computer scientist, and he would have been eager to deny that his own role at Bletchley was unduly significant. What were their backgrounds, their lives during the war? But nevertheless Alan Turing was in a small way something of a minor celebrity because of his post-war work building the earliest British computers. One of those was a huge thing for enciphering phone-calls, so that Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill could speak freely without the Germans listening in. As a family member, what insights have you gleaned, either from family papers or lore over the years? Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire) that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War.The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Sir Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name. My father (Alan’s older brother) used to talk about Alan cycling to work in the summer wearing his gas-mask because it warded off hay-fever, and of course that scared the pants off the people who saw him, who thought there must be a raid on. Alan Turing died before Dermot was born but his legend looms large in the family and Dermot has written a book, debunking some of the myths that have grown up about this intriguing man, and giving a unique family perspective on his remarkable work and the tragic end to his life. At the Park, Alan Turing was asked to find a way to break Enigma messages. A lot of these were from the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens)—you have a similar story in the US where the American bombe machines in Washington were tended by WAVES. The evolution of British code-breaking The head of GC&CS, Alastair Denniston, referred to them as ‘men of the professor type,’ which is rather a quaint expression, but it gives a good flavor of it. In his lifetime of course nobody knew, and nobody was allowed to know, about what had happened at Bletchley Park. The coroner’s verdict found that he had taken his own life; there were reports that a partly eaten apple by his bed contained traces of cyanide. Of course, there were some leaks and some spies, and the extent to which the secrecy surrounding Bletchley was not completely watertight is interesting. By entering your details, you are agreeing to HistoryExtra terms and conditions and privacy policy. So then he was sent over to America to advise on the development in Dayton, Ohio, of the US Navy’s bombe machine, and to inspect various secret encryption devices being built at Bell Labs in New York. Born in London in 1912, he studied at both Cambridge and Princeton universities. Clarke's f… In … In 1952, Alan Turing was forced to endure chemical castration by the same government after being prosecuted for homosexual acts. Thanks for having me! Turing’s article ‘The chemical basis of morphogenesis’, published in 1952, anticipated the field now known as artificial life. So of course all the super-fit army and navy men had a good laugh thinking about this professor chap who would be left well behind them all. 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