Please enter your number below.The official website for BBC History Magazine, BBC History Revealed and BBC World Histories MagazineChristopher Grey explains why Alan Turing was not the only star of Britain's Second World War secret data gathering centre...Mention the words ‘Bletchley Park’ and most people will immediately think of Alan Turing.
This in turn meant that they had to develop a complex data management operation, mainly based on cross-referenced card indexes that were sometimes filed in shoeboxes. (Getty)Alan Turing was a war hero, a giant of computer science, and a gay man who simply wanted to be able to live freely.History should remember Turing as the innovative mathematician and codebreaker who played a pivotal role in ending the Second World War, and laid the foundations for personal computing and artificial intelligence.“Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today,” Mark Carney, then governor of the Bank of England, said “Turing is a giant on whose shoulders so many now stand.”However, it is impossible to speak of Turing’s achievements without also mentioning the brutal, institutionalised homophobia that ultimately cut his life short.Born June 23, 1912, Alan Turing was a uniquely gifted thinker. So many things that it would be impossible to catalogue them all.
It certainly wasn’t the case that Turing alone cracked Enigma, any more than there was a single Enigma to be cracked.And in any case, breaking an Enigma ‘user group’ was only the first stage.
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.So, if you look at his contribution in that context, it was quite limited in terms of scope and the amount of time he spent on codebreaking; but on the other hand, it was enormous, in terms of the sheer volume of decrypts and intelligence that came out of the processing of Enigma as a result of his invention of the bombe machine. In 1939, Turing took up a full-time role at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire – where top secret work was carried out to decipher the military codes used by Germany and its allies. It’s something of a puzzle because he wasn’t a professional codebreaker and his role at Bletchley Park was actually much more limited than people might imagine.
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. Some of them became famous in other contexts—politicians, academics, writers and so on—and some stayed on and worked for what is now GCHQ; but a lot of the women at Bletchley went back into civilian life and to all intents and purposes disappeared.
For the early part of the war he was head of Hut 8, working on decrypting the German Naval Enigma. 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. I suspect that underneath this paradox it is the story of Alan Turing himself which people find fascinating and that is why we tend to inflate his importance as a code-breaker. The US Navy and US Army later produced their own machines to the same functional specification, albeit engineered differently both from each other and from Polish and British bombes. It is sometimes said that the operation at Bletchley shortened the … Despite these accomplishments… 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. The high-level intelligence produced at Bletchley Park, codenamed Ultra , provided crucial help to the Allied war effort.