I need a hero, apparently

Turing has long been an obvious intellectual hero of mine, but I until recently I was never convinced by the claims to moral heroism personified by Benedict Cumberbatch or typified by this recent coverage in The Guardian of a new book by Simon Goldhill:

Turing gained a “political strength and a political clarity” from his time at King’s. “He was somebody who was capable of standing up for himself as a gay man. He thought it was important not to lie, not to conceal, but to say: ‘This is who I am. I think you should be able to deal with this.’ He got that confidence from King’s. Guardian 8 Mar 2025

But the evidence has changed and I have changed my mind: this post explains why. To do that I’m publishing some important (to me) and previously unknown (to me) material which was found (not by me) after the main source that Goldhill relied on was published. [Update March 2026: I have realised that the impetus for the this remarkable decoding came from Demot Turing and is documented in his excellent Alan Turing: a relative story which I should have read properly before].

The paragraph above was written by the journalist Donna Ferguson and the quotes are from Simon Goldhill, a veteran Fellow at King’s, in an interview about his new book, Queer Cambridge. Goldhill’s book is almost entirely not about Turing. The part that is cites Andrew Hodges 1983 biography as its major source, naturally and appropriately enough. Hodges’ book is a brilliant combination of careful evidence gathering, based on oral history interviews with everyone relevant still living in the 1970s, combined with a passionate desire to tell a story of injustice. Andrew was also a meticulous scholar, and the facts of Turing’s intellectual and academic life are scrupulously sourced where possible. As for Turing’s inner life, there are a handful of revealing letters, but the portrait comes most alive when Hodges draws on the oral memories of Turing’s friends and loved ones, notably Robin Gandy. For understandable reasons, Hodges left most of these glimpses unsourced to any particular informant; a reader can generally infer who must have told him what, but the full interviews themselves are not available. So the key Goldhill claim of ethical heroism relied on primary sources we can’t now access, filtered through witnesses and a historian with a definite if admirable agenda.

And there has long been room for other perspectives on Turing. To the faint extent he was explicitly political at all it was indeed on the progressive rather than the reactionary side of contemporary Cambridge thought, but the ‘confidence from King’s’ he acquired corresponded to his class status and gender, and came with attitudes which now read as snobbish and misogynistic. And specifically, Goldhill’s claim of ‘political strength and political clarity’, I think can only really rest on Turing’s  Wilmslow police statement of Feburary 1952, apparently not given under duress, in which he acknowledged carrying out an illegal sexual act. I have long thought this was not heroism but hubris. Turing wrote that he thought the possibility of attracting the attention of the police for his acitvity was about 1 in 10, but what he did not write was what he thought the consequences would be. Policing in the rural towns of Cheshire was different to that in the entertainment districts of the commercial and  industrial city of Manchester and different again to that of the High Tables of Cambridge, and it seems to me likely that Turing badly misjudged those differences. I speculate that he did not understand that if he had simply refused to make a statement, it is unlikely the police could have or would wanted to have done much more.  But, while I still think that’s part of the picture, a new piece of evidence has emerged which very strongly supports Turing as a conscious speaker of the full truth.

AMT A/17 King’s College Cambridge. (c) The estate of CHO’D Alexander

It has been literally hiding in plain sight. After Turing’s death, his mother Sara received a number of letters of condolence, which she later made use of in her biography of her son. One of these letters was from Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, who had been at King’s three years before Turing, and got to know him well when they both worked at Bletchley Park. The letter is a moving and authentic one, written by a man who knew his friend well, telling Sara of her son’s ‘power to win the affection of everyone who really knew him’ and Alexander’s admiration of his  ‘profound originality and insight but for his simplicity and honesty’. Sara Turing donated the first page of the letter to King’s, along with (presumably) most of the other material she had used in the preparation of the biography, some time before her death in 1976. It has been there, available to scholars ever since. But as the image shows, Mrs Turing painstakingly redacted the address and one of the paragraphs.

And this is where an astonishing thing happened a few years ago. The imaging unit of the University Library in Cambridge has been developing multispectral imaging and CT scanning to image manuscripts: they recently showed off their ‘modern magic’ by unlocking Merlin's medieval secrets. Back in 2020. decades after Andrew Hodges had interviewed his witnesses and wrote his book and read the redacted latter, and thanks to the prompting of Dermot Turing, the UL team tried this new technology on the Alexander letter. And it worked: here is the text they found under Sara Turing’s redaction:

he would be asked if he admitted that what he was done was really wrong. Rightly or wrongly he himself did not think he had done wrong and that being so he himself would rather have been imprisoned than admit to it ; and it wasn’t obstinacy,  he just would not have lied in order to escape. (King’s College Cambridge AMT A/17)

There’s a sadness in his mother’s need to censor this material in order to do what was right in her mind by her son, but that is another story. The revealed image was shown in an exhibition at King’s, but perhaps because of the pandemic this amazing recovery seems not to have attracted any PR flacks or made its way into the world wide web of Turing narratives beyond Dermot’s excellent book. So it seems worth posting here: it is why, despite some initial scepticism I do in the end accept that Simon Goldhill got the big call right. On the ‘political clarity’ of Turing’s personality that is; I’m still wary of the value claim that attributes Turing’s character to King’s culture.

Neither I nor (I think) Simon Goldhill had anything to do with deciphering the Alexander letter and I’m grateful for the cooperation of the Modern Archivists at King’s for explaining it. I’m especially grateful to Andrew Hodges not just for telling me about the decipherment in the first place, but for positively engaging with a previous and badly wrong version of this post. Both the image of the redacted first page of the letter and the quotations from it are copyright by the estate of CHO’D Aexander and are reproduced by permission. A paper copy of it is held at King’s A/17l. I have taken the ‘he would be asked’… quote after ignoring some words I can’t make out; it might be these would be revealed with a more technical. I don’t know any technical details of the imaging itself or who carried it out and I would love to hear from anyone who does.

Some other myths

While we’re here, some factual comments on Queer Cambridge in an attempt to keep other myths vaguely anchored to historical evidence. Alan Turing was never ‘living with’ Arnold Murray, the 19 year old he was co-charged with for gross indecency. The only positive evidence we have is Murray’s account thirty years later to Andrew Hodges that Murray had been picked up by Turing on Manchester’s Oxford Road in November 1951 and stayed overnight at Turing’s house in Wilmslow a few times between then and their arrest in February 1952. Turing’s long-term relationships were entirely within his own upper-middle class.

It also seems worthwhile to me to try and be clear about what it means to say that the justice system ‘offered the choice’ to Turing between prison and chemical castration. Here there’s no new evidence: most of what follows is direct from Hodges. There was certainly a question to be asked about whether a man guilty of a crime should be punished or treated, but there was no clear idea in court as to what would be appropriate treatment. This vacuum was partly being filled by oestrogen therapy, being publicised in the UK at the time for

the ease with which it can be administered to a consenting patient we believe that it should be adopted whenever possible in male cases of abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urge. (Golla and Sessions Hodge, ‘Hormone Treatment of the Sexual Offender’, The Lancet, 11 June 1949, via Hodges).

Beyond the Lancet paper, I don’t know of any other archive material that tells us what the medical and legal professions thought of hormone treatment if at all. But if the judge was aware of this emerging option, he chose not to stipulate it. The choice the judge offered was between prison and probation, with a condition of that probation being simply if inexactly that he ‘submitted’ to the care of a ‘registered medical practioner’ at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. (Dermot Turing’s Prof is one useful additional source here). Yet between the 1949 paper and the 1952 hospital appointment, Golla’s published insistence on ‘consent’, without which he would have drawn considerable criticism from his own profession, had in the hands of the MRI ‘practitioner’ become ‘obligation’: a couple of weeks later, Turing wrote to a Cambridge friend

I am both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on, but one is supposed to return to normal when it is over. I hope they’re right. The psychiatrists seemed to think it useless to try and do any psychotherapy. (Turing to Hall 17 Apr 1952 quoted in Hodges)

For the first nine months, Turing was prescribed and took oestrogen pills. Then came a resonant switch: for the final three months the oestrogen was delivered from a subcutaneous implant. We know this, because when the probation year was up Turing very promptly had it removed. (This evidence rests primarily on the memory of, probably, Robin Gandy). No doubt there was an objective, phamacological rationale for the switch, but it might also be seen as an internalisation of coercion by those who know Foucault.

This is not a review of the whole Queer Cambridge. The title is absurd and excluding, like calling a monograph on EM Forster novels Queer Literature. But there’s much to like in the warmth with which Simon Goldhill  retells, and re-creates, King’s creation myth of an intellectually or aesthetically rigorous but socially tolerant society. I learned a lot, mostly not very interesting to those not interested in King’s self-mythologising but fascinating to those like me who are. I would have been more comfortable enjoying the book if Goldhill had extended the tolerance and empathy he celebrates to the victims of the snobbishness and misogyny he cannot ignore but notes only in passing. Perhaps it was indeed impossible to look for testimonies from the series of male sex workers who have apparently trooped into the Gibbs building over the decades. But negative  evidence of the culture Goldhill’s subjects bequeathed has been there to hear at his own High Table over the years. In my experience , for example, it doesn’t take much prompting of women with experience of that academic culture to yield other, less glowing perspectives of how those values impacted on them.

Prepare Problems for the Brain to Solve: What did Beatrice Worsley want?

[Updated May and June 2025 with more material, some found and generously shared with me by Mark Priestley]

Bernardo Gonçalves has a nice new paper out on the Turing Test, partly making use of a couple of letters to Beatrice Worsley in the Smithsonian archive. I don’t have much to add to Bernardo’s paper, but this source does help me illustrate that Turing had a major blind-spot: he didn’t generally take women seriously as mathematicians. Worsley is notable as the only female mathematical thinker for whom there’s any evidence of any intellectual traffic with Turing. (According to Hollywood, Joan Clarke achieved the same respect, but there’s little evidence for that beyond the desire to see Turing as a sympathetic figure.) In this of course he was hardly alone in this among his professional male peers: see this contemporary US report about how his mentor Max Newman was a superb manager at Bletchley Park save for the fact he didn’t make good use of female talent.

In 1950, Turing was committed to the idea of using the new electronic computers to do thinking with using mathematical logic. That - rather than building a fast calculator - was why Max Newman had succumbed to Patrick Blackett’s enticement move to coal-black Manchester, over the objections of his wife Lyn, and why Max had in turn recruited Turing there in 1948. But Newman never did any active research on the computer and Turing was left, intellectually, entirely on his own. As the engineers took control, the project of doing research in mathematical logic on the new electronic computers was running into the ground while mathematical resources went, instead, into numerical calculations.

There were two young, enthusiastic and First-class mathematically trained women Turing could have used to build a research group around. Audrey Bates and Cicely Popplewell shared Turing’s office, and indeed Audrey Bates’s first job was to implement a version of ‘lambda-calculus’ - the tool of choice of mathematical logicians on the Manchester computer. Right from the beginning though, Popplewell’s role was as a systems programmer, and as soon as her MSc was finished, Bates too moved into a similar role. It can hardly have helped her lack of engagement with Turing’s intellectual program that Turing barely thought she and Popplewell had a right to exist, as one of the two once told Andrew Hodges.

But the archive does show one young woman that Turing was prepared to engage with. In the autumn of 1950, Beatrice Worsley, a Canadian who had started a PhD the previous year in Cambridge, where the rival EDSAC electronic computer of Maurice Wilkes, was already operational, came to Manchester for a few months and she and Turing later exchanged several letters, his perhaps a little patronising, over the mathemtical logic projects.

So how did Worsley establish this right to exist? Perhaps she came to Manchester because she was interested in Turing. It is not impossible that Worsley was one of the few people around who were interested in Turing’s main preoccupation in applied mathematics at the time, the generation of biological form. Whilst in Cambridge she took and (tellingly) preserved some intriguing notes on a talk she later labelled as a ‘physiology colloquium - Univ of Cambridge 1949’ that discussed a number of issues that were occupying Turing at the time. There are references to information theory, and to the Rashevsky house journal from Chicago, the Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics, and one diagram headed ‘flow diagram for a thinking mechanism’. (The five relevant sheets are displayed in the gallery nearby: these papers are in the National Museum of American History Worsley papers Box 1 Folder 1).

It’s unclear who the speaker was; I’d say not Turing, but the notes have a Ratio-y Club feel. Perhaps Woodger or McCulloch, but I can’t find any trace of them in Cambridge at the time. It’s possible that the 1949 date, which was added later by Worsley, is a misremembering, which widens the possibilities. (One other name that I wonder about is Anthony Oettinger but I don’t know enough about him).

Whilst in the archive I also saw this comment by Wilkes which is an interesting gloss on Women at the console. ]

…the reason for requiring automatic sequence operations is … to get, in effect, an operator who will work for 168 hours a week without tiring, and can be trusted to do as she is told without making mistakes. Maurice Wilkes’ 1947 justification to the Universit of Cambridge for building the EDSAC electronic computer: Cambridge University Library UA/COMP 1/2.

Worsley’s time in the UK was in part difficult, but there’s no conclusive explanation of why. The most substantial (indeed the only) biographical article on Worsley says that

Worsley started writing her dissertation at Cambridge, but in 1951 for some unknown reason she returned to Canada with the text unfinished. She arranged to complete the work with the supervision of Byron A. Griffith, a professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto and a member of the Computation Centre. Worsley wrapped up the writing quickly and was rehired as a staff mathematician at was rehired as a staff mathematician at the Centre in July 1951. Hartree approved the dissertation in Cambridge, and Worsley’s doctorate was awarded in 1952 after Hartree made a visit to Toronto. (Cambell, 2003)

The Cambridge files show (UA/BOGS/1953/Worsley) that just as Worsley was finishing an MSc on ‘Computing Machines’ at MIT, in May 1947, she applied to work on the ‘design and contruction of new machines and investigations into their mathematical capabilities’. Wilkes replied to say, not unwisely that ‘it would have to be clear that during the first two years most of the work would be of a practical nature in getting the machine to work. And in due course Worsley arrived in October 1948 as a graduate student at Newnham College. She lived in Whitstead, a hostel exclusively for Newnham’s foreign graduate students, round the corner in Barton Road, in what seems to have been a small and mainly supportive small community, at least according to the majority of memories in a small booklet still in Newnham, Memories of Whitstead. Intriguingly, Worsley is remembered in those pages as a keen photographer at the time: it would be fascinating if any of her photographs have survived anywhere. (The same volume also includes a slightly later, but all-too-imaginable word portrait of Ted Hughes persistently happening to come round to use the hot bath in the all-women hostel and wandering from there to Sylvia Plath’s room in a state of some steamily masculine undress).

There is no hint of any particular problem in the Cambridge files. By the end of the academic year, in Junr 1949, Worsley was one the one trusted to write-up an account of using the EDSAC for the proceedings of a Cambridge conference. At around the same time she was, as was normal practice, retrospectively registered for the PhD; it was a little over a year later, on 19 Sep 1950, that she wrote to the University saying that both Wilkes and she felt that ‘the third year at work with another machine to the EDSAC would be very beneficial for my thesis and my future career’ (COMP 6/1). It is plausible that these words can be taken at face value; perhaps it was simply Wilkes sticking to his original plan and both of them recognising that Newman and Turing, rather than Wilkes were the people to work with for ‘investigations into mathematical capabilities’ of computers. It was unlikely to have been a fleeing from Cambridge misogyny; there is evidence that Hartree, the professor in Cambridge, was much more sympathetic to female graduate students than there was any sign of in Manchester.

A letter of December 1950 from Worsley to Turing, now in the University of Manchester (in the Special Collections TUR/Add 13 and 91), does indeed says that she intended to return to Canada because of medical advice to ‘take a prolonged change from academic work’. That might be why, in September 1952, she was listed as on the local program committee of the Toronto ACM meeting but did not make any other mark on the Proceedings. But the correspondence with Turing continued and confirms that by 1952 she was actively thinking again. It included practical career matters and applied mathematical issues, but also, notably, Worsley’s ambition to find the simplest program which would ‘provide the functions necessary for the calculation of a computable number consistent with your theory’. This seems to have been intended to end up as a chapter in her Cambridge PhD thesis, which she was eventually awarded at a distance, without an oral exam, in January 1953. The BOGS files reveal that this was a borderline decision: Hartree voted for it, but the external examiner JH Wilkinson voted against and it was only the casting vote of Wilkes himself, plus Worsley taking a written exam at a distance, that finally swung the day.

Beatrice Worsley in the Toronto Star, 1952, helping to 'prepare problems for Brain to Solve'. (The star puzzle was a newspaper circulation gimmick, not a cosmological model). 

Worsley’s inner life remains pretty opaque beyond an enquiring mathematical brain. As far as the world knew, she never had any romantic partners, and all we know about her family life is that she barely spoke to her sister-in-law. One of the few glimpses was noted in Scott Campbell’s 2003 biography: at Worsley’s death in 1971 she left her decent sized estate not to her living siblings but to the University of Cambridge she had left in a hurry twenty years earlier. (Worsley died of a heart attack at the age of 50 so this one might speculate this Will was one made much earlier.) Moreover this was specifically to found a ‘Helge Lundgren’ studentship. In 2003 Campbell didn’t know who Lundgren was so by implication the sister-in-law either wasn’t telling or didn’t know, but it seems likely to me that this was in memory or honour to the Helge Lundgren who was a prominent Danish canal engineer. A romantic speculation might link that to the flight from Cambridge, but is very unlikely. The likeliest time for any personal connection with Lundgren was after the Cambridge years, as the the major application for the Toronto computer, Ferut, was simulation of the hydraulic behaviour of the St Lawrence Seaway, Beyond that, there’s not much.

Bernardo uses Turing’s letters to Worsley of 1951, now in Washington, to good effect in explaining Turing’s opinion of his Test, but to see an early reception of these ideas it is the letters in Manchester (which run through 1952) that show how Worsley responded with her own ideas:

In connection with your paper on computing machinery and intelligence I'm still trying to think of some property of the human mind which could not be duplicated by The Imitation Game. I feel intuitively that if there is one it must be in the direction of spontaneity. McCulloch and Pitts in an article in the Bulletin of Mathematical Physics postulate a brain mechanism in which the threshold of excitement of the neuron can be determined by the neuron itself.

It’s not a ground-breaking response but it is an engaged one, and as such rather unusual among mathematicians of the time.

Thanks to Jonathan Dawes for investigating the SSEB proceedings and identifying the 1949 meeting. For the Ratio Club, I have taken my view from Husbands and Hollands 2008 article. At more length I have only just read Andrew Pickering’s superb book, both readable and indigestible, The cybernetic brain: sketches of another future. The day this was first posted, Colin Williams, who I had a great drink with in the pub once in Oxford, has shared with me for the first time his completed PhD on British cybernetics, which claims to be ‘archivally rich and methodologically innovative’, and changing ‘our understanding of post-war British history so that’s something to look forward to reading properly. One superficial response: I don’t think I’d agree with Colin’s claim that Pickering’s book was merely in the service of sociological intervention; it is packed with vivid and well sourced history.

[Update Dec 2025 with the Toronto and Cambridge proceedings. The 1949 Cambridge meeting was the Conference on High Speed Automatic Calculating-Machines, 22-25 June 1949; the proceedings don’t seem to have made it into any UK libraries as a book but there are copies in several manuscript collections including NAHC/EDS in Manchester and, thanks to Simon Lavington, in the Science Museum LAV. (I recall reading it once in the Gates building in Cambridge but can’t locate that again). Intriguingly one other attendee was a Miss R. B. Bonham-Carter, who is is easily found in a group photograph showing her a member of the Cambridge EDSAC team, but is otherwise invisible to Google.]

Must have been alluring

An interesting little fragment from the Keynes archive on King’s view of itself and of Turing, in 1939. The context is a debate between two King’s dons discussing the problem of what to do with the College’s young Research Fellows as they came towards the end of their Fellowships. The business model of the College rested on earning undergraduate tutorial fees, and there was no significant equivalent of modern external PhD funding. A surplus from the College’s endowment, which was incorrectly believed - then and now - to have come from Keynes’ magical money powers, was used to support young men as Research Fellows at the start of research careers. The older man, economic historian John Clapham wrote

Image by permission of King’s College Cambridge.

One of the 6 [non-permanent King’s Fellows] is Turing, a most brilliant fellow I should like to see kept in Cambridge, for Cambridge’s sake if not his. As our mathematical staff is overfull his proper destiny is the staff of another College. Several are weak in mathematics… [22 May 1939; Keynes KC/2/384]

In a similarly polite and collegiate reply - although I sense an underlying tension in the correspondence - the younger and more worldly Keynes responded that he had

a little doubt as to whether we have been strict enough in the past’ [about terminating Fellowships] ‘the average quality is by no means bad; it is the comparative lack of outstanding figures which is so striking. The prospect of going on with substantially the current staff … is death to the College’. The real test case on your list, because it will come to a head fairly soon, is to my mind Turing. If another College elects him to a Fellowship, well and good. But if not I would consider it absolutely disgraceful if we should drop him after six years, and we should take the earliest opportunity of giving him some small emolument beyond his Fellowship. He is, in your words, ‘a most brilliant Fellow’…if the expert reports on him turn out to be what I and I gather you expect them to be, I would feel a blight had fallen on our prospects if we were to drop him. [23 May 1939; Keynes KC/2/389]

Clapham in turn responded

Turing I am quite prepared to consider under the nine-year rule. I am not at present prepared to put him on the Tutorial Fund (unless for next year in Ingham’s absence; in which case of course I would).. I am prepared to carry on men of the Turing stamp now and then. [25 May 1939; Keynes KC/2/397].

Turing certainly had made a brilliant contribution with his 1936 paper on computable numbers, but neither Clapham nor Keynes were in a position to judge its value in a then small field of mathematical logic thought to have no practical application. (It would have helped, though, that there was a lineage from GE Moore and Bertrand Russell.) I wonder who the experts were who persuaded Clapham that Turing was a ‘most brilliant fellow’. My guess would be a Cambridge mathematician capable of impressing a historian with the civilised nature of their High Table conversation, so probably it wasMax Newman. But it’s odd that Keynes seemed to be expecting ‘expert reports’ on Turing in May 1939. I wonder if Turing was being tested out, with or without his knowledge, for a university promotion to a permanent job at the time. Four months later, of course, Turing reported for duty at Bletchley Park and everything changed. When he returned to King’s in 1947 to take up the final year of his Fellowship both Keynes and Clapham were dead, and there is no record of whether anyone still wanted to carry on with ‘men of the Turing stamp’. Whatever King’s or the ‘weak in mathematics’ colleges thought, Turing left for Manchester and for good at the end of the year.

There is a caricature of post-First World War King’s as populated by elderly dons desperately trying to re-elect young men as beautiful and brilliant as Rupert Brooke into vacancies in the Apostles and the Fellowship; it is a caricature I’ve both seen written as a homophobic slur, and alternatively heard as a point of some Pride. I doubt there’s much truth in the caricature, and in my view it’s more interesting to think about the class and national backgrounds of those who did and didn’t (Gray Walter, say) get chosen for these prestige positions. But I don’t think it’s entirely irrelevant to finish with a ditty said to have circulated a few years earlier. Andrew Hodges recorded this as oral history in 1983 and did not name his source. My guess would be Richard Braithwaite, himself elected in 1924, and whose own interviews with Laurie Khan about Frank Ramsey reveal him as someone who would have found this amusing in the 1980s:

Turing

Must have been alluring

To get made a don

So early on

Alan Turing's bathtub

Institutional memory in of Turing in King’s College (about which I have written here) tends, not wrongly, to point to a rather nice set of rooms by the river as ‘Turing’s room’ and I thought it was finally time to check.

True, for Alan Turing by Antony Gormley, with information plinth (critique? homage?) by King’s College Entrepreneurship Laboratory. It was revisiting King’s to watch the unveiling of this sculpture which prompted me to reflect on Turing’s bed and bath…

Turing’s first year room in the 1931 plans preserved in the Archive Centre, King’s College, Cambridge, KCAC/1/3/2/1.

The archive research, then: The College still hold schematic room allocations from the period. In his first year at King’s in 1931/1932, Turing had rooms in J.11 at the top of the Scott Building; in his second year on the ground floor of Webb’s Court in Q.2, and in his final undergraduate year he moved into S.8 at the top of S staircase in Bodley’s Court, paying a termly rent of £9 5’. He stayed there in the following year as a graduate student before winning his Fellowship in 1935 and moving into rent-free rooms in X.8, also on the top floor but with windows opening onto a view of the Cam. The floor plan records stop in 1938, but chances are Turing was re-assigned this room upon his return from Princeton in August 1938 until he finally relinquished his Fellowship in the spring of 1947; he went on visiting Cambridge for long periods from then until his death in 1954 and it is unclear where he stayed when he did but very strong chances are it was a room in King’s.

The title of this post was briefly ‘I had sex in Alan Turing’s bedroom’ as I had first thought that the 20 year old Jonathan Swinton had spent a year in what had once been the bedroom of Q.2, and that Turing’s ghost would have encountered my coming to terms with the physical realities of two bodies in one single bed. After a bit I borrowed a double mattress off someone; I vividly recall four of us carrying it across King’s Parade in something of a visible challenge to the don’t-ask-don’t-tell attitude to extramural overnight visitors then prevalent. But I was wrong (about Q.2: the mattress definitely worked) as I had miscalculated how the rooms were renumbered in the 1950s when the sets of sitting-room and bedroom had been split into two separate bedrooms to double the accommodation for students. So I didn’t ever sleep in Turing’s bed in Q.2, alone or not. (In any case, the college didn’t provide furniture in Turing’s time: students had to rent or buy their own, often from the previous occupant) But Turing’s first year room, J.11, I now realise from seeing the maps, was later converted into what was my shared bathroom in my final year. And the bath was huge. And the water was boiling hot and I could lie in that bath for hours and hours and I did, instead of revising. Unfortunately Turing’s ghost was no good at helping me out with my finals, which I hated and did very much worse in than Turing’s extremely good First.

Please don’t be tempted to try and take a bath in any of these rooms yourself: they still function as student and staff accommodation and even if you can conquer both the locked doors and your own respect for privacy half of them have changed numbering anyway, so you wouldn’t even be seeing the correct shrine. And making a pilgrimage to a shrine won’t get you a First any more than it did me.

Some slightly more historically relevant observations on these room allocations. Firstly, in the language which often introduces elite male friendships of the time, Turing ‘shared a staircase’ in that impressionable first year with, among others, the zoologist JWS Pringle. Pringle went on to be a significant zoologist who was one of Turing’s post war links with the Ratio Club, and perhaps more significantly for his thinking on morphogenesis, with the Society for Experimental Biology. (As an aside, I’ve just recently noticed this oral history which if accurate pushes back the date when Turing talking in public about morphogenesis to the first British Mathematics Colloquium in the summer of 1949. It would be great if a printed programme for that emerged). Also on that staircase was the grammar school boy Fred Clayton, who would become a significant friend, although Hodges asserts this wasn’t until their third year.

The room plans, which are far from forgotten and do come out on show regularly, are potentially quite interesting for the (relative) social gradations on display. There was a set of rather dark and dank buildings on the other side of King’s Lane, swept away in the 1970s, and the plans show that the rents for these were slightly cheaper at £8 a term rather than £9 for the rather nice sets in Bodley’s or the very grand (but austere and bath-less) staircases in the Gibbs building at £10. I wonder if there’s a correlation between the desirability of the rooms and the perceived prestige of the occupants. King’s in the 1930s had for decades been taking more than Etonians but it would be interesting to see where they, or students who had done well in the entrance examination, were placed spatially: in particular I wonder if they were the only ones allowed to live in the Gibbs building. That prestige space has now long been reserved only for Fellows. I’ve also sometimes wondered why Keynes had rooms in the (currently) less valued Webb’s Court development of 1909; perhaps he thought they were more contemporary and stylish than Gibbs, or perhaps he liked the fact there were toilets (in the basement). He was a vigorously modern man, though I bet he only had a single mattress.