You see, though I am sure 'The Imitation Game', now showing at The PictureDrome (at £2.50 why go out of town), is very
exciting I am not at all sure that it will illuminate, well .... Alan Turing, or, indeed, Enigma, or all the rest of it.
My perspective is a personal one. My first job, as a lowly clerical officer, was at Oakley Park, Cheltenham at GCHQ, the successor to Bletchley Park where Turing and a cast of at least 10,000 turned the course of history.
C block GCHQ as it was in 1963
I worked in H Division, Director the legendary code-breaker and chess champion, Hugh Alexander, who I recall steaming down the hill at close of work on an old iron-frame bicycle, possibly brakeless, and never letting up as he swerved into to the rush hour traffic at the bottom of the hill around 5.30pm. There were plusher buildings down the hill, we were all in what I guess was some form of ?utility accommodation at the top, single story, corridor in centre spine, offices to right and left.
What were we all doing? Well, it involved 'communications research' .... Do you know how much it has
vexed me to hear all this later
detail. I mean, why don't they just give it to the National Trust and have open days and the WI running a cake stall? Anyway, that is what we told everyone. And, you know, it put an absolute stopper on the most feared bores at parties, those who wanted to talk about
work. Given that blessing, I can tell you we had the
best parties, my mate Reg had a basement flat, and I always got invited because I had the best box of 1960s singles of all of us. (This developed into 6000 classical LPs which still take up a lot of wall space at home.)
Where were we? Ah, so I had Q clearance, above Top Secret, and I sat looking for 'things'. This involved scanning (yawn) lots of paper tape on large rolls. (More yawn). Look, much of it is and was and will be
boring but today we have better machines to help us (which must bring us back, but not just yet, to Alan Turing). I sat unwinding these rolls slowly and then having to rewind them. The GCHQ boffins (in another part of town) had devised a devilish
ex-machina which was supposed to rewind at light speed, only the warp coils were never balanced and the valuable tapes got shredded so we never used them. One day, having upgraded my record deck, I brought into work my Decca Deram deck, 4 speed, and lo and behold, this worked so well, read at 16, rewind at a smooth 78, yep impulse speed Mr Sulu ..... to the point that my boss, his boss, Hugh Alexander, just popped in to have a look. "Well, that's novel" said HA "I think I'll mention this over the way and see if we can get some in". (It never happened and can you imagine Health and Safety today allowing such a domestic item to be imported into the workplace.)
But we are talking 1963-1968, I was 18+, just out of having muffed A-levels at Cheltenham Grammar School where I had been since 16, having gained 8 Oxford Board O-Levels at the co-ed Charlton Kings Secondary Modern, unusual in those days for such schools - its modern incarnation, The Balcarrass School, now hovers in the upper reaches of the state school system. I loathed the Grammar School, single sex, ersatz public school, with a low expectation of what a mere elementary schoolboy could do even though I had outgunned most of them at O-level. I recall perhaps my first independent political thought when I found out that the Grammar School oiks got a lot more per capita spending on their education than we did. That helped explain some things. I am sure we made up for it through the dedication and time of an amazing team of teachers at CKSM.
Anyway, that and a heady mix of sex, booze, rock'n'roll and Beethoven (and not at all in that order) led me to somehow find my way not to Uni but GCHQ. Did I apply? You know, I can't remember, but there I was, in due course, getting my pass - known then as a religious icon due to the picture quality - "Jesus Christ, is that you!?"
My parents were non-plussed to find that 'positive vetting' took the enquiries back to when I was nine, living in a village on the Essex Blackwater Estuary .... now, though this is another story, both Mum and Dad (my English Dad that is) had been associated with Polish intel operations in WW2 (another story, another day, and also very personal) but I wonder if the spooks found out about me, 9, and that girl, 14, who was daughter to an Essex County Cricketer ... if not, I'm saying nothing, Doctor or was it Nurse.
Shaun Wylie
I recently read that GCHQ is abandoning its current graduate recruitment and instead looking for the oddball, the 'sideways' thinkers, those who come at things
another way. Well, nothing new, that's what they did in WW2, those were the sort of bods who ran the various Huts at Bletchley. Some remained from that time to 1963, chiefly memorable to me was Shaun Wylie, top mathematician, Anyway, one of the
saner bods and he used to pop into my office, and would say, "Jan, thank God, can I hide, you're the only sane bugger round here". A mate of mine at 6th Form, his Dad, Septimus Wall, was
eccentric. Very. Another Bletchley Park mathematician. Brilliant mind, bit of a barmpot, as they say up north.
Bletchley Park
We got to see Bletchley Park as part of induction and a real Enigma machine as part of this. Enigma was widely used by the Germans, at all levels. The railways for example - I do wonder whether we knew of the transportation of the Jews and Romanies etc to the death camps, because we had the means to find out and the Germans always
documented everything in such detail .... Some parts of the German war effort were really good at using Enigma properly, and this made it so hard to break. It's when operators got careless that we got our chances.
Enigma
Developed from a commercial machine, it started with three wheels and ended up with five so any talk of a once-and-for-all break of Enigma is fantasy. In fact, we know the Poles broke Enigma in the early 1930s mathematically. When Poland fell, bods scooted to France and then, in 1940, here. One gathers quite a few of their people died at the hands of the Gestapo to take their knowledge to the grave. But it's almost certain we also had broken a version of Enigma.
Well, you can have a machine sitting there on your desk, the Germans can be transmitting, but you need settings for the day and other crucial data. Or it's of no use. Enter the bad operator, thank you, mein herr, very much. Laziness, lax security, was the biggest failing. So, as the war progressed, a tit-for-tat contest was joined in deep earnest. We break, they'd upgrade or get cautious.
Turing was a brilliant mind, one of the most outstanding of our times. His work at Bletchley Park included development of mathematical techniques and devices, such as the Bombe. Don't ask me, I never saw one.
It's estimated that we well may have been reading 60% or more of top German traffic. The intel was named 'Ultra'. Never say we Brits can't keep a secret, and I am sure that is what Churchill meant when he referred to one great secret surrounded by many lies. To have such penetration into the minds, almost, of the enemy, was unparalleled in warfare, in such detail. Sometimes, surely, lives were expended/sacrificed to keep the enemy from realising we had such insight, probably many. 'Need to know', a principle we adhered to in the 1960s GCHQ as then.
The crucial battle of the Atlantic, it was that knowledge that prevented us from being strangled. We used intel to inform Stalin of Hitler's treachery. I always will wonder why he didn't seem to take it at face value, he had enough agents in the upper reaches of British society ....
But it's not Enigma that we perhaps should most thank Turing for. Yes, he and his cast of 10,000 did all that, and it was crucial, history-changing. But we also remember him as 'the father of the computer'. He had set down basic mathematical principles re such programmable, computational machines, and the need to use that knowledge and insight came in the shape of a new generation of German cipher machines. These were so different and so much faster than the Enigma.
There, the operator had to feed in the message, letter by letter, hey press-to the key, then via lots of wiring and the wheels, up lit another letter, which someone else wrote down, and grouped in fives. This was then given to the wireless operator, who then sent it out morse code, for our guys to intercept,
guten tag to all our British listeners.
Tunny was a tad more complex. Firstly, 12 wheels ....
and ... it was connected to a teleprinter keyboard, the output was fed into this by punched tape. So it went out at speed, fully and nastily 12-wheel encoded. It was that challenge that caused a Post Office engineer, Tommy Flowers and his team to construct
Colossus, the world's first true electronic computer.
Tunny - the extent and the means by which we broke this machine can be seen re what we were able to tell Stalin before the pivotal and game-changing Battle of Kursk.
Colossus: Breaking the German ‘Tunny’ Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated History B. Jack Copeland:
rebuilt Tunny
I saw a version of this well-named giant, Colossus, with the computing power of a demented bee, or less, in a vast hall, valves the size of very large vases, stretching rack upon rack. This is what did the job', the Nazis couldn't have dreamt the effete British could have sussed their technical
mastery (
Vorsprung durch Technik indeed), to have been so compromised.
Colossus, early version
I got to see the new generation of IBM 360s at GCHQ, a fraction of the size of Colossus but still as big as several fridge freezers, which would have a minute fraction of the power of a modern smart-phone, and actually programmed it, using FortranIV, to 'solve a problem' which had been sitting being ignored for more than a decade and whose underlying message turned out to tell us from which direction the sun rises ... I kid you not.
IBM360, new in 1964
Hah, I get this call from a very distressed and irate F Division bod (where said 360s and Collossus conhabited) "please come over now". The print room, my new program, IBM 360 and printer. Great they said, but have you grasped
nesting? Cuckoo? Have a look in here .....
streams of interleved paper. Your result, , hundreds of blank pages except
FOR ONE CHARACTER PER PAGE strewn (and it was) all over the floor .... oooooh-er missus.
So, ask me to construct a better version of the very traditional one-time use system I sort of uncovered, then maybe I might be able to oblige .... Lesson, if you can er- sort out how it works, you can sort out make it better. Suffice it to say, this had no remote connection with the main work I was involved in, unlucky for some. Play Fair say I.
Discuss: Totalitarianism v Democracy, trains running on time against 'Please mind the gap between the timetable and reality'. Or, we could have a Joint Intelligence Committee of all relevant agencies(we have one to this day) against a bevvy of viciously competing cut-throat agencies all brown-nosing to their uber-gruppen nasti-bozzes at whatever level.
Also Discuss: the NSA who were with us at all levels, let's be fair. So, apparently, one day, senior bods from 'over thePond' waltz into a meeting to announce a major breakthrough with their
battery of IBM 360s, volumes-thick of triumphant paperwork. What do you limeys think of that?
Ah says one of our absent-minded boffs, you know I meant to mention I have some mathematical calculations I made a few weeks ago, here's the actual formulae etc, do have a read. Almost on the back of the proverbial fag packet. Several hundred plus to GCH, but there was never a hint of any unseemly rivalry, after all, we were British. Eh?
Let it be said, I loved some of the yanks, who loved being here. My favourite was Bud, an anglophile, a lean, wiry, nut-brown guy who had a Ford - Popular that is - of which he was inordinately proud. One day, rounding the roundabout below H Block and off home, the driver's door just fell off. He gets out, as I pass, and says in an inimitable drawl, "Hey, Jan, guess my door's fallen off". I nodded, he got back in and drove home, stuffing door in back.
Suffice it to say, in my very humble opinion (and it has to be that against giant intellect), what I saw at GCHQ owed everything to Turing and Flowers - but oh so much much more all of humanity owes to them. The longer I live, the more it seems apparent. (By the way, aficianados of Isaac Asimov's 1950s Foundation Trilogy had them at some unimaginable era aeons of centuries in our future sporting little devices, all the rage. Funny to think that what Turing and Flowers enabled has allowed us to short-cut those thousands of years into less than 80 years.....)
Was Turing like Cumberbatch's portrayal? Not much I'd guess. Or like Derek Jacobi's? Nah. We get the picture of someone so
British and so
unlike anything else. Stubborn, brilliant, wanting to be who and what he was. And the lousy British State thanked him to the point of him taking his life, all due to a rotten, nasty, narrow-minded piece of garbage masquerading as law. Yes, he was arrested some years after the war for having sex with another man (and, mark you, no interest in the fact of a relationship between two human beings). Condemned to
chemical castration. It made him grow breasts. Justified as helping reduce his libido....
The result of Turing's work was dedicated to fighting this .....
Like any resistance fighter, Alan Turing took poison, shame on his oppressors.
Cyanide on an apple. What is this, bloody Snow White? And no dashing prince allowed to revive him.
So the world was robbed. I am chair of a youth project where kids of 13-25 are saying
who they are. How far, thank God, we have come, even if there's much more to do.
What else would he have gone on to achieve, morons, what else did you in all your prejudice-as-pretence-of-the-Rule-of-Law, deny not only to us but all humanity?
I recall in around 1966(?) a guy, Ray at GCHQ, - as we then said,
in all good humour, 'bent as a nine bob note', or as I later coined "more camp than Baden Powell's Biggest Jamboree". Suddenly, one day, no Ray, g-o-n-e- .... rumour - and that's all we got - caught "cottaging" in local public loo.
Next .... Transferred to the Ministry of Transport in darkest
Yorkshire ... Like the Maoists might send you to Outer Mongolia or the Soviets to Siberia to run a power station or to a gulag ...
The Legacy. We cannot yet truly evaluate - what we can say is Turing did
as much if not more than anyone, Churchill included, to safeguard those freedoms, based on that Rule of Law, we take for granted at our peril.
So, Turing now has a Royal Pardon
posthumous. All other unworthy gays who didn't do what he did, don't part your cheeks and expect one. Because, that would be a disgusting cop-out. He has been pardoned for his crime of having sex with a guy because of his service to the State. Sieg Heil. . So all the others so convicted, they remain unpardoned, even in death. Not worthy, forgotten.
Can I venture it is the State and all that it represents that committed wrong, not just against the genius who was Alan Turing but also every other man (it was only men) so convicted.
For me there are two objectives:
- Exonerate not only Alan Turing but all like him who were so convicted for same-sex relations with another male capable of giving consent - retrospective, yes, who gives a damn, it's consistent with the natural law and indeed The Rule of Law. That means, it was never a crime because we now are honest enough to admit it ought never to have been so. Pardon means 'we'll let you off even though you did naughties'. Exoneration means it was never a crime,
- A statue of Turing to stand alongside that of Churchill in Parliament Square.
GCHQ today
.jpg)
.jpg)
