Sir Dermot Turing is the acclaimed author of 7 books including Prof, a biography of his famous uncle Alan Turing. He is brilliant in his own right but has also strived to tell the ‘real’ story of an extraordinary man. As he says himself Alan Turing ‘crammed into a life of only 42 years the careers of mathematician, codebreaker, computer scientist and biologist. He is widely regarded as a war hero grossly mistreated by his country and it has become hard to disentangle the real man from the story.’
Fiona and Dermot discuss what Alan was really like, from his utter brilliance through to those areas that he was less adept. The truth about his relationships with a few close friends which stands in deep contrast to the portrait drawn of him as a loner, by Hollywood and many biographers. Of course we also talk about the people who impacted Alan Turing from shaping his thinking to the decisions he made. We also cover Dermot's own incredible career and how much Alan Turing influenced the course that he took.
Dermot Turing – like his celebrated uncle Alan Turing – was educated at Sherborne School and King’s College, Cambridge. After a doing a D.Phil in Genetics at Oxford, he concluded that scientific research was not for him, and moved into the legal profession.
Dermot worked for the Government Legal Service and then the international law firm Clifford Chance, where he was a partner until 2014. His specialism was financial sector regulation, particularly the problems associated with failed banks, and financial market infrastructure.
As well as writing and speaking, Dermot is a trustee of The Turing Trust and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford. He continues his interest in the financial world.
Dermot lives in Kippen in Stirlingshire. He is married with two sons, and as well as history his interests include cooking, gardening and opera.
To read more about Dermot and find links to his books go to DermotTuring.com
For Fiona's book that Dermot wrote an endorsement for click here Mirror Thinking - How Role Models Make Us Human
Fiona
Today I am joined by Dermot Turing who is fantastic in many ways. He wrote a wonderful endorsement for my second book to which I'm very, very grateful. Also, the nephew of Alan Turing, but I don't think that really gives you credit for what you've achieved in your own life, which is pretty damn amazing. So, an award-winning author, and you went to King's College, Cambridge, yourself the same as your uncle, you have a PhD? But then decided that wasn't the route for you and went into law?
Dermot Turing
Yes, all of that is true. Although the D Phil is sort of a bit of a strange episode in things because it really proved nothing. The only thing I discovered as a scientist is that I was a useless scientist.
Fiona
Yeah, so as a psychologist, I would say that's tells you a lot in and of itself.
Dermot Turing
It took three years to do the experiments necessary to prove this quite astonishing facts, but a more competent self-analyst would have been able to get there a lot faster.
Fiona
Perhaps there was a level of enjoyment there as well, to an extent even if it wasn't what you ultimately wanted to end up doing.
Dermot Turing
Yes, um, science is actually extremely hard. And I think, you know, we tend to sort of see these marvellous pictures of people in laboratories wearing white coats, doing things with amazingly fancy pieces of equipment and sort of imagine that, you know, it's all quite smooth plain sailing. And actually, it's not because designing good experiments is so hard. Most experiments prove nothing other than that you design the experiment badly.
Fiona
I mean, I know even from my naive experience of doing a Master of Science, part of what you learn is how to write up results to inconclusive or insignificant.
Dermot Turing
Yeah. So quite, quite clearly the whole, I think the other thing is that, of course, undergraduates are not really prepared very well for going into a sort of research environment. That's not kind of what not kind of what you do as an undergraduate, you tend to have to sort of sit there and absorb loads of stuff and being good at that doesn't mean that you're going to be good when it actually comes to the actual cookery. Yeah, so anyway, so that's not what I ended up doing. And I think I was happier. Well, it was interesting stuff these days, then, I have to say it was quite useful after that in the background.
Fiona
I mean, it's pretty significant, though, to have done that, and then gone into law, and then written books as well, because they're all quite different disciplines. I know, some might say, well, law is words, but it doesn't mean that what you're doing or how you're doing it is the same as writing books. And the thing that - so I've just finished reading prof one of your books, Prof and Turing Decoded. And the thing you do very well is simplify a lot of the complexity for a reader who might not otherwise understand the modelling and the mathematics and, and the science that sits behind all of those things. And translating science is very different from a learning science, like you said, absorbing it, and be actually applying science. translating it is another step entirely.
Dermot Turing
But I suppose it I mean, I don't disagree with you. But I would also say that interpreting, translating, trying to find ways of explaining legal complexities has been what I spent most of my professional career doing so you know, when you're trying to put things in a way that the lay clients can instantly grasp that's, that's kind of what it what it's all about. It's kind of what they paid for you to do. So, so, so it's not it's not that far off. But subject matter is obviously different, but the skill set's probably not far off.
Fiona
I would argue that not all lawyers managed to translate that well.
Dermot Turing
I couldn't possibly comment.
Fiona
So, I spoken to you on email before, I haven't spoken to in person. One thing that's always struck me from your work is, and please correct me if I'm wrong, because this is a hypothesis as such, is quite not only respect, but also fondness for your uncle, even though I don't think you ever met him, did you?
Dermot Turing
Know I didn't. And so, to some extent, I've been getting to know him in the course of the years and not really having much idea as to what sort of person he was. And the only way you can find that out is basically by talking to people, and you do get a very different picture from talking to people from the one that a certain movie might give you. And that's been part of the sort of discovery process, as well. So yeah, that's been it's been it's been interesting, interesting experience.
Fiona
And I mean, what a fascinating man and not the lone wolf that one might suppose. I think what I find interesting, and this is my interpretation, is the he did it his way, he did things his way. He solved complex problems his way. But that meant often he wasn't recognised for his brilliance, he was found irritating, potentially, by teachers, because he didn't follow the rules or do things, the way it was expected.
Dermot Turing
That was true when he was a school student, but I suspect that many school students would have sympathy with that kind of experience where their teachers don't recognise and let's face it, all teenagers, or many teenagers think that they're brilliant, anyway, and that their teachers, parents, whatever, don't recognise that. So that's not uncommon. That's not an uncommon sort of set of, you know, set of experiences. I think later on in going back around Alan Turing's side though, I think later on, I think people did recognise that they were dealing with somebody who was quite extraordinary and cut him some slack, because of because of that. And that becomes apparent, I mean, so just jumping forward to the end of his life, or the last few years of his life, I think this business where, you know, he'd been tried for gross indecency, which was about as big a social disaster as could have befallen anybody at the time. All sorts of interesting people came out of the woodwork to ensure that he didn't go to prison, and he was able to keep his job, didn't get criminal record, you know, all those kinds of things. And that's quite remarkable, because, you know, frankly, it's remarkable on sort of various levels but one, obviously, is that, that the image of Alan Turing being somebody that nobody could get on with it is obviously just wrong. And secondly, the idea that sort of he was hung out to dry and sort of abandoned. And, and that also couldn't be further from the truth, as well. So, you know, I think I'm just while we're on that subject, the interest, the thing that sort of interests me is that it's quite easy to sort of point the finger of blame at the judge in that case. And again, if you look at the judge's sentencing record, he was himself slightly out of line on a, compared with the national norm for sentencing gay men, because that was his job, it was his day job, it's what we had to do is take these horrible cases and, and you get a quite different, I've looked at his sentencing record and it's actually quite interesting how I was gonna say liberal, but that's possibly going to give people the wrong idea. But this, we're talking about the 1950s and 1950s view of liberalism would differ a bit from ours, but the point is that he was trying to deal with these cases in as sympathetic manner as possible. He wasn't just going to send them to prison, because they were gay. He did send a few guys to prison. But you could tell from the facts of the case that they were cases where probably there was some form of abuse going on or something where, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't just a couple of gay guys doing something in private. So, they were lucky in that, in the judge that happened to be trying the case because he was sort of basically willing to play the game of keeping Alan Turing essentially out of trouble. Quite different from the narrative that we have, which is he was persecuted.
Fiona
And I think you described that as Shakespearian persecution, don't you and we know that films will distort reality. But it's really good to be able to set that reality straight. And you've written as I said, before we started, you've written seven books, which in effect are on Alan Turing, some of them like the story of computing may not be as directly about his biography. But there's a lot to be said about him, not just him, but the incredible work that he did as the foundation for so much that we understand and live with today.
Dermot Turing
Yeah and I think that's the other thing. I mean, it's not fair to blame Hollywood for doing this, because they've had a bit of help. But the sort of potted Alan Turing life story is that oh, that's the codebreaker guy who was persecuted by the state because he was a gay person and then took his own life. I mean, it's all we've dealt with sort of the second half of that, but the first half of it is the sort of the codebreaker-ey thing and it's all completely overblown. And I read all sorts of interesting things about codes that he broke and sort of, you know, his achievement during World War Two. And there's an awful lot of nonsense there as well. People don't realise that Alan Turing was only at Bletchley Park for a couple of years. And that part of the reason he was moved on is that he wasn't actually a particularly good practical codebreaker. And he was great when it came to the sort of machine methods and thinking of logical structures and programming and that kind of stuff, which was very new to codebreaking when he started there, but when it came to the sort of daily grind, having to get the get the messages, converted into plain German and then translated and sent out so that could be useful intelligence, he was pretty useless at that. What he was known for in his lifetime was actually the computer science side of things. And Bletchley Park was a secret, and what Alan Turing was famous for was being a computer pioneer, one of the first people to work on the famous electronic brain of the late 1940s. So the guy who invented the computer that again is overblown, but there's probably more truth in that sort of distorted PC history than there is in the sort of Alan Turing single handedly winning World War Two, because of the Enigma achievement.
Fiona
Well, he was brilliant nevertheless. I don't think any one person can be attributed with winning the war, but he certainly played a part, didn't he? But what I find interesting from a personal perspective is when I was studying psychology as an undergraduate, we did a lot of work on artificial intelligence. And a lot of that artificial intelligence has moved on quite a lot, a lot from that, because that was a long time ago. But it was built on those computer models and the as you called it, the electronic brain. And could you could you tell if you were playing a computer at chess or another human, those sorts of models, which have brought us to where we are today in terms of the use of algorithms and machine learning and artificial intelligence, which I think get overblown in other ways, a lot of people use fancy words, or they think that using the words around those things, but don't fully understand the meaning behind them. But he was he was pioneering in those areas, was he not?
Dermot Turing
Well, yes, I can that sort of you were asking earlier about sort of him not being recognised in his lifetime. This is probably one area where his work colleagues, particularly those above him, struggled to see the value of his contribution. Because the history of it is that Alan Turing was hired by the National Physical Laboratory to build Britain's programmable electronic computing machine, they were only going to need one. So that was fine. And he completed the design of it before the end of 1945. So, he spent the next couple of years waiting for it to be built. It didn't actually get built during his lifetime. So, you can imagine it was pretty frustrating for him, he designed the thing, he'd written the programmes for it, and he couldn't run them because the machine was still years away from being completed. And so he then went off to start thinking about what we now recognise to be machine learning and artificial intelligence, and his paper on the subject, which is called intelligent machinery. I mean, the whole title sort of gave the entire game away to his boss, because it was just so frankly, absurd, it had to be lifted out of an HG Wells novel, and therefore, you know, didn't deserve the title of being a scientific paper. Even though Alan Turing managed to the circuit diagrams in the paper to show how you could actually make a computer, learn from its own behaviour. I think that probably is one example where he really didn't, didn't get much recognition. So, what that turns into is the thing that you were just mentioning a moment ago, now Alan Turing got very frustrated about that. And so, then decides to write a paper for not, not a computer science journal or a mathematics journal, but a psychology journal about whether machines could actually do this thing called thinking that leads precisely to this thing that we now recognise as the Turing test. Whether a human being can tell the difference between a computer and a human if you' stuck a curtain between the interrogator and the thing or person being interrogated. If you can't tell the difference, then you have to say that the machine was actually thinking. So that's all that's all quite interesting how all those sort of pieces fit together.
Fiona
I think I mean; I think it's fascinating. And I think what's coming back round is that things different multi disciplines are now having to combine to find how things work. So, psychology has always been strongly reliant on statistical methods and advanced statistical methods as you go through it. But there's been philosophy, AI, but now there's like computational neuroscience, neuroscience, computational modelling of different psychometric outputs, network theory, and all these things are coming together into basically to what we know as technology and our understanding of how humans interact with that technology. And a lot of I mean, from my perspective, as well, a lot of the cognitive psychology models are based on probably on what Turing came up with, in terms of the logic applied and how we understand the human brain. But we're now progressing sort of to the next stage where it's looking at this multifaceted, and I think, multifaceted, sort of multi-discipline hugely complex way of modelling and looking at information. And it's not just big data, it's small data as well. And I think from you know, if I imagine if Alan Turing was here, now, he would just be having a field day on, on everything that's going on, and what he could take from that. And he would be leaping us potentially several steps further. But equally, when someone is brilliant in that respect, people cannot understand what they're producing, because it doesn't fit with the expectations of what already exists. And so that brilliance is often overlooked or misunderstood, or seen as someone being difficult or, you know, obtuse. When actually that brilliance is what takes things a leap forward.
Dermot Turing
Yes, I think I think that's right. And I think in his case, he needed to be with the right people who could sort of relate to where he was going on this stuff. And that's where you get this idea that Alan Turing was a loner or had no social skills or whatever, it's because we put them in the wrong milieu, then he's with people who just can't connect with any of that stuff. And they want to talk about it don't know, sort of what regular people talk about when they go to the pub, but that's not going to be Alan Turing's forte at all. So yeah. So I think that's where this sort of vision of Alan Turing as being sort of socially inept and too difficult for his own good comes from. You've basically got two sides to his character, he wasn't going to compromise when in the sorts of social situations - he was expected to sort of behave like a, you know, middle class, Oxbridge, educated, public school, educated, sort of, you know, right thinking person who couldn't give a monkey's for all those kinds of social conventions. On the other hand, though, if you put him in the pub with somebody who he was working with, and wanted to talk about artificial intelligence, he'd be very good company, very interesting, probably quite sarcastic, witty, you know, I'm sure full of politically incorrect jokes. You know, I mean, bearing in mind that this is the 1950s. You know, I've think he was probably you would probably good fun to have around but as I say only with the right only with the right company.
Fiona
And he's spoken fondly of in when you, the clips throughout life that you put in of how he's written about. Or I think, at the end of his life, he was referred to someone who was very generous, very kind spirited, someone who was very good with children. And that doesn't that doesn't show someone who
Dermot Turing
No, it doesn't fit with the image does it?
Fiona
No, but what's interesting from my perspective, and obviously, I'm going to come on to this because of my second book being on sort of mentors, the influence of other people and role models. I'm interested to a) talk about how he and your Father John, and your mother, influenced you, but also b) how Alan had, you mentioned, mentors and people who nurtured his way of thinking you alluded to that just now as well. So I mean, it's starting with you so you're saying you got to know him throughout your life. But having said that, if you were to look in isolation at your, your path, you both went to the same school? You both went to the same college at Cambridge, he ended his life looking at mathematical biological models, if I'm correct in saying that, and you were doing genetics, which that so there's a lot of similarity there without having necessarily even have thought about that potentially. Was that influenced by the fact that there was an expectation in family that I mean, my kids go to the same school that I went to, there's a sort of a pattern that we go through in families. How much do you think you were aware of those things? How much were you influenced by sort of the expectations of the family culture?
Dermot Turing
Okay, so that's very good question. The answer could be extremely long, therefore, very, very tedious. But so but it's roughly a 50/50 split. So my father took the credit for Alan having been sent to Sherbourne because they had a sort of science based curriculum, which wasn't available at Marlborough, which is where he had been to school. And Alan thrived at Sherbourne and so he thought that this was sort of, obviously a good pattern to follow, and was very keen for me to go there. And, frankly, I wasn't resisting that at all. So that was, so that was quite overt that one. And then obviously, following in Alan's footsteps, it was my choice, rather than anybody else's that I should go to King's in Cambridge, if I could get in. The school very grumpy about that, because they didn't think they could pull any strings to get me in there. And while I don't want you to put any strings, I'll get there on my own merits, thank you. So, but then you also mentioned this whole business about me sort of doing biological sciences and sort of the extent to which that may have been influenced by Alan, I think, definitely, yes. I mean, obviously, if it hadn't been interested in the subject, it wouldn't have picked it up. And I was interested in it on its own terms, rather than just because it was some Alan Turing thing. But the whole question about what Alan Turing had actually been and what his foray into biology had been all about. One of the things I was hoping to get out of being taught some developmental biology, it was to get a bit closer to that. But here's the fascinating thing. He was off the curriculum. I mean, he was definitely off the curriculum. People either didn't know about it or considered it to be irrelevant until sort of a certain revival, which began around about 10 years ago. I mean, it was always sort of bubbling away in the very deep background, but it was essentially the developmental biologists didn't know anything about Alan Turing because nobody was talking about it. Nobody knew about it. So it's a sort of self-reinforcing sort of piece of darkness if you like. But then, once people had rediscovered it, oh, this is very interesting. There's another way of looking at the world beyond sort of route map that I thought which was all about chemicals in gradients, which are much, much too simplistic mathematical model to explain anything, sort of even vaguely complex and developmental biology is complex. So that was one thing. And then there was this other obsession with anything to do with DNA. I mean, everything to do with DNA completely, you couldn't get a grant to do anything in biological sciences, unless it had DNA in it up front and centre for about 30 years. So, because Alan Turing wrote his developmental biology paper, about a year before Watson and Crick's DNA paper was published, then, of course, he just got eclipsed. So yeah, it's only because people got interested in Alan Turing and wanted to know what other work, he'd been done that somehow is biology was rediscovered. So yeah, it's all it's all very interesting. So, I never found out about the biology work till very recently, when people started to write about it and started to explain it in because the equations are not easy. I mean, they're the sorts of degree level the equations and so if you haven't taken maths beyond A level, then that probably out of reach. So, so I had to wait years to find somebody who was able to explain it in a sort of, you know, layman accessible kind of way, but it's very interesting once you get there, it really is very interesting.
Fiona
So I think it's absolutely fascinating. And I think that he just continued to, to break down boundaries and to, to be able to see round corners and develop thinking in ways that was quite unconstrained because he wasn't following the rules in terms of 'you will get a research grant for this'. I mean, that becomes a big problem as well, doesn't it in academia, it's what are the research grants being given on what are the senior professors wanting to study? And therefore, what papers are you as a PhD student or someone lower down the ranks able to pursue?
Dermot Turing
Yeah, a serious bunch of questions there, which to be fair to the professors or the professors that I talk to are pretty uncomfortable with it, you can only get a grant for doing more of the same essentially. And you can only get a grant for discovering something positive, which means that you can't, as you can't get a paper published, per se, we tried all these things, and none of them worked. That won't ever get published. So that means that people are constantly reinventing wheels, and never publishing the fact that they've tried 100 things, another word because you can't get published. So you can get another grant for trying one of those things. And it becomes. And also the agenda becomes quite utilitarian, because the people who are awarding grants will only want to see the immediate stepping stone in front of the one that you're already standing on, rather than making a quantum leap into, you know, some other some other direction or dimension. So, yeah, it's very, it's very hard. The other thing is for cross disciplinary work is very hard as well, because you don't fit one thing and you don't fit the other, so therefore, you're not in either camp level, you don't exist. And so, yes, I think I think we are quite, were much too rigid and narrow in the way we constrain our research efforts. And the more abstract the direction of research, then the more challenging it is, I suspect. Yeah. So there's, there's plenty to plenty to do there in terms of gingering up the research community to do stuff that's as ground-breaking as what was being done, let's say 110-120 years ago, around the time of the first World War, there was some amazing stuff going on, because then these rules didn't exist.
Fiona
And it's interesting, in different ways, not necessarily talking about those rules, but we've seen a huge acceleration of a lot of research during COVID because when you have a global emergency, the rulebook goes out of the window somewhat and people can muck in and do things as they wouldn't normally. Which includes very rapid knowledge sharing rather than this is my research and I'm not sharing it with you because you might get there before I do if we do that.
Dermot Turing
Well and of course, my next grant depends on me being able to publish the stuff. And having a long track record of producing vast numbers of papers in a particular area.
Fiona
So, so that's academia, we can put the worlds to right on that. That's that one done. But there's also Alan himself had had mentors, didn't he? It wasn't just he had, from what I can decipher, and I may be incorrect, you correct me if I'm wrong. He had nurturing figures, people who cared about him and his way of approaching the world, throughout life in one shape or another.
Dermot Turing
Yes. And, again, this doesn't fit well with a sort of narrative that Alan's, some kind of solitary genius, and therefore all these ideas descended upon him, sort of plucked out of the ether, like sort of, you know, encrypted Enigma messages that only he could sort of understand. That's absolute nonsense. The most important mentor figure in his life was Max Newman, who was a slightly more senior mathematical figure at Cambridge. And a very bright and influential person who deserves a lot more deserves to be known for his own achievements a lot more than he actually is. But they've sort of got parallel lives in some sense, because Max Newman first comes into Alan Turing's life in the early 1930s, when he's teaching Alan Turing the fundamentals of mathematics and that sets him off, or conversations they're having set Alan off on this road to thinking about Computing Machinery and the idea that changing the programme, changes the function of the machine, which I mean, we all recognise today to be a sort of like, probably the ground-breaking step in computer science. And it's that partnership, if you like that sort of continues throughout their joint careers. They, Max Newman turns up at Bletchley Park, having decided not to work at Bletchley Park, the beginning of the war, but he's in constant correspondence on mathematical stuff with Alan Turing. And I think it's possibly because he recognised what Alan was doing at Bletchley actually that he recognised that he might himself be able to fit in there after all so, without Newman, the Lorentz Cipher, which produced much more high grade intelligence than Enigma ever did, would not have been turned into a sort of, just as the Enigma operation was turned into a factory style machine based codebreaking operation at Bletchley. And Newman, Newman's very influential in that he led the whole attack machine attack on the Lorenz Cipher. But that in turn, led Alan Turing to see what you could do with actual machinery, which had sort of effectively a stored programme facility. And that was very interesting. Seeing that machine being developed under Newman at Bletchley, that was all very interesting and set Alan Turing on the whole practical computer development course after the war, once again, came around, because after this period of Alan being sort of left in limbo, waiting for a machine to be developed, Max Newman had already built one and said to Alan, during one day, well, why don't you come and work with me in Manchester, and where, you know, we've actually got one up and running. To which Alan Turing's response was, 'Is the Pope a Catholic?' so you know, I mean, it was, it was kind of like a no brainer. But then what that little sort of technical narrative doesn't give you is a sense of how important Max Newman and his wife were in terms of Alan Turing's, sort of personal circumstances. And, you know, he was kind of kind of there for him for the whole time. And you know, I mean, they were constantly sort of having dinner at each other's houses and Alan playing with Mike Newman's kids and, you know, they went on holiday together and basically, you know, the they were they were good friends as well as, you know, constant work companion. So you know that that's all very interesting to me that there's this sort of I'm gonna guess it was a lot more common in the previous century than it is now but where you could actually have sort of close friendships developing that continued outside the workspace and they couldn't sort of compartmentalise their lives in perhaps the way they do now.
Fiona
And so important for not just for sparking and growing, but also validating ideas, you need an intellectual peer to be able to do that, to be able to see, like you said, it's, it was outside of the bounds of what was known. So you need someone else who can see that that is possible and where it's not, and push back where it's not, but they have to understand it to be able to do that and so that limits the number of people you can have those conversations with. But that but that the piece around his social and emotional well-being was being nurtured through that relationship, not just partly through talking and being stimulated, to help him with his intellect, which then feeds into the social and emotional, but also just on a very basic level of that need, that we all need to belong and we all need to feel like we're part of something. And what you're saying there is he was part of that, and he was also part of his school friend, his the mother of his school friend, who passed away I can't remember his name was Chris. Yeah. Again, there's that going away with the family and having in and I'm saying this from reading, reading your book, but that, that closeness and being part of something.
Dermot Turing
Yeah definitely, I mean, what's what reading Chris Morcom's Mother's diary was very interesting, because it just dawned on me halfway through reading this stuff but 'So what is this woman doing with somebody else's son when their own son has basically passed away?' and sort of 'What's going on here?'. I mean it's very odd because Alan and Isabel Morcom carried on seeing each other writing to each other, sort of, he went to stay with her on numerous occasions, for about 10 years after Christopher had passed. And it's a very odd thing for somebody when he'd only met her twice, while his friend was still alive. So that the relationship that he's got with this, this woman who is old enough to be his mother is very interesting. And it suddenly dawned on me that they've actually got this other piece of symbiosis going on there. Alan Turing has actually got a mother for the first time. And Isabel Morcom was sort of kind of half replaced her missing son. So it's kind of working well for both of them. And I mean I found that, found that all very interesting. And I don't think that other biographers of Alan Turing really sort of pick up on this, particularly, there's a soppy tendency amongst some biographers, and particularly those who don't go back to the primary materials and rely on what other people have said, so that basically reheating last night stews. But there's a bit of a soppy tendency to assume that 'Ah well, because my grandmother wrote this sort of hanging graphic biography of in 1959, after he had died, that they had this sort of wonderful relationship. And, you know, it was a sort of perfect parent child kind of thing. And it completely ignores the rather other uncomfortable evidence that Alan Turing couldn't actually stand the sight of his mother. So, you know, there wasn't really a mother in his life other than somebody who's generally being a bit of a pain and agh but for 10 years, from the point where Alan's about 17, to the point roughly where World War Two breaks out, then he's actually he's got a substitute, which is, which is sort of kind of cool. And I don't understand why people don't sort of think 'Well, that's fascinating', but we're obsessed with his interview with his the fact that it was Isabel son that he was friendly with at Sherbourne and this boy had died and that sort of seems to get in the way of the much more interesting story about him finding a replacement for his mother.
Yeah, I mean, I find that I find that fascinating. And I think it's a really significant age still, I mean, we now know more recently that our brain continues to develop until about the age of 27-28, in something known as emerging adulthood. So that was still a very formative time for him. And having that, probably, you know, losing Christopher, who had the same sort of relationship, I know that there are inferences and I don't know, what you what you would say about this, but inferences that they had more than a friendship, but the intellectual relationship that you've described is very similar to the one that he that later has with Newman. Whilst it's more developed...
So since you raised the question, I don't think anyone's asked this one before about what my opinion is about whether Alan and Chris Morcom had a sexual relationship. I mean, we don't know there is no, there is no evidence, either from witnesses or documentary to help us with it. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence, and the circumstantial evidence points away from it, the circumstantial evidence is to do with the fact that they're in different boarding houses, so there will have not been anything like the many opportunities. Though, it didn't mean that they couldn't meet outside their boarding houses, but it meant that the opportunities for that were quite highly regulated. And therefore, it was probably - you probably had to be very determined to sort of find ways around the sort of supervision to be able to do that. But then, so I'm not saying it wasn't impossible, but it would have been difficult. And then there's a question about sort of whether it was actually likely, and I think you have to accept that Christopher was in a higher year group than Alan. So there's an imbalance of seniority in this relationship with Christopher definitely being the dominant character. So if he hadn't initiated, it wasn't going to happen. And I don't think there's any evidence to suggest that he would have wanted to initiate it. I mean, I think they got on, famously, because they were interested in the same kind of stuff. And of course, Alan hero worshipped, Christopher, because Chris was incredibly good looking and I've no doubt that he fantasised about him and would have loved the things to have been able to go further. But you know, this is a senior boy who’s in another house. And it's not it's probably to my mind, I don't think it was ever going to happen. So my take on it is 'No', and I don't think there's anything is anything to suggest it was anything other than sort of, from a non-science perspective, anything completely one sided relationship.
Fiona
That's interesting. It's helpful. And, and
Dermot Turing
I might be wrong about all that. But only because as I say, there's not anything that one can sort of concretely put one's finger on.
Fiona
And equally does it matter either way, to be honest?
Dermot Turing
Well I think that's pretty much where I end up, except that I do get grumpy when people tease inferences out of this and sort of put things in a place where there isn't any evidence, and then that then somehow settles itself down to be established facts. And that process is something that I find sort of bothersome to be honest, but I guess it's how we all form our impressions of historical figures anyway. It's, we have all these influences that come to us from various different angles and bits of media and stories and films and books that we read and, and actually sifting out what is the truth is something most of us don't have time for. So we all end up with our own little inaccurate views of what the world is and the people in it, and that's sort of how we're all built up.
Fiona
Absolutely. I think that's the thing we don't have the time and many people don't have the inclination either. And think about the amount of work you've put into understanding this and you've done it with a legal hat on to an extent So can this be proven or not proven? Or actually you could say, in from the perspective of Alan Turing is, is it true or is it false? But I had another question for you, what struck me is when Alan Turing was before Sherborne, the school that he was at there, and at Sherbourne it was, they both use the word practical. So it was a sort of a practical school. And then we see Alan coming out, Alan Turing coming out as someone who understands very complex conceptual models, but also is bringing that into the real world into practical application. Do you think that was influenced by the schools and the environments he was in?
Dermot Turing
Um, I do, but I'm less, less inclined to think this has to do with Sherbourne than his prep school, actually, because my father and his brother didn't have a great deal in common. But there's something I sort of recognise from stories about what Alan was getting up to, I could see in front of my own eyes with my father who was constantly I mean, he had this wherever, wherever he was, he wanted to have a very large garden and shed, and the garden shed were, yes, it had some sort of garden tools on them - but the main purpose of the garden shed was he had his carpentry bench in there a very beautiful, old, old style carpentry bench, and obviously spent a lot of money on it. And we're not talking a Black and Decker workmate, we're talking thing that's the size of a sort of huge desk, with vices on both sides. And he'd have all these elegant tools and very expensive carpentry tools, all sorts of lined up neatly and little clips on the wall and on shelves and things as always wanting to make things. So he'd make his own furniture, and it was all a bit wobbly and it wasn't sort of particularly great, my mother would go spare when he come up claiming I've made another piece of furniture. But this, and he'd also do his own brick laying. So he'd sort of build garden buildings, again, they weren't hugely successful, but but so I would hesitate to say that he was a craftsman, but they were, they were both of them very keen to sort of do it themselves, because that was kind of part of how you were supposed to be. And it was a it was the Boy Scouts traditions in the old sort of Baden Powell spirit of scouting, where what you have to do is you have to be completely self-reliant. And this was instilled into them at their prep school. So they both the same school though they were four years apart, same headmaster, same values for both these kids. And it was all in the reading the school sort of magazine thing, which is basically the headmaster sort of term in review, kind of report, very interesting reading, because it's all about carpentry and scouting and sort of, you know, which kids are able to sort of manage to, you know, basically look after themselves, you know, might be campfires, or it might be sort of making a covenant or something. But the, this whole sort of hands on approach, self-sufficiency ideal, it's not, I mean, it's not peculiar to this particular school, but it's sort of very much with that sort of pre-World War One sort of spirit of exploration, sort of doing it yourself and being able to cope without external help. I think are very influential when I think that sort of starts, particularly off thinking about how you have to have your own sort of self reliant approach to problem solving. And it also means that working with your hands is not something to be ashamed or something that you think is for other people. When it gets to a point, where is it crazy, where he's building a machine at Blechley Park in 1944, which is a thing for enciphering speech, which is very, very hard. I mean, it's medically hard, and it's engineering wise is extremely hard. And so that's kind of what he spent the last two and a half years in World War Two working on this thing. But, of course, he's doing his own soldering, and he's really not very good at it. But of course, it's the kind of it's the mindset you know, you do this yourself. So fortunately, somebody from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers world and sort of help him in other words, take over the practical side of doing this stuff and do it right. It's doing neatly and doing it like an engineer would as oppose to a Boy Scout. But I sort of find that whole sort of yes, I'm trying to figure out how this is by doing it myself. And it's all in there. It's all in the sort of approach to the machinery and building your own thing to solve a particular problem. And he then is there right through it right, throughout his career. I mean, before he went to Bletchley Park, making machines, milling wheels with prime number teeth, and you know, that kind of stuff that was all all going on. What's all that's all part of that, that being who he was. And I instantly recognise all that from my father's own behaviour. I mean, he's exactly what he would have done.
Fiona
It's really fascinating. Now, I'm conscious of your time, because I know your time is precious. And I haven't talked about you as much as I would have liked to. And one of the things I was going to say, and I think I alluded to at the beginning is you have your own amazing life and career. You spend a lot of your time talking about your uncle, which I know is an interest from the perspective of exploring and discovering and putting together things in the right way rather than it being incorrectly deciphered. But I yeah, I mean, maybe another day you'll talk to me again, a bit more about you, because I think there's a lot there as well. And so, it would be good, good to hear more about Dermot Turing.
Dermot Turing
I'm not such an interesting character. So
Fiona
I think everyone's interesting, personally, and I think someone that's got your background is even more interesting. But what I will end on is asking you this, and it is about Alan, are you proud of him?
Dermot Turing
Oh, okay. Well, I get asked this a lot. I constantly struggle with the question, because here's the thing. You can be proud of what your kids have done. And he's not my child. And he's not somebody I in know, so I'm not quite sure what you're asking me. I mean, are you asking me - am I proud to bear the same surname? I suppose, yes, I guess. But pride is also one of those things which I was taught when I was a kid was a deadly sin.
Fiona
Very good. It's a very good analysis of that, I think, and actually quite rightly put. So what would I ask differently?
Dermot Turing
Can I Yeah, attempt an answer to your question without trying to sort of pull it apart and do a piece of sort of linguistic analysis on it? I think what I do feel about him is that clearly, it's an honour to be associated in some way with somebody who was so brilliant. It's an accident of sort of family planning, well, that I happen to have the same surname, and I don't have any of the other qualities that he had. So I mean, that's kind of bind. So sometimes it's a nuisance, because you can imagine that sort of people want to bounce up to you with their own life stories about things, which they imagine that I'm interested in, because I'm related, and I have to pretend that I am. And so, you know, I mean, yes, it's a it's a complex bundle of things, which, but, you know, to imagine that there was somebody in my family tree who managed to achieve all those amazing things. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Yeah. I mean, who would not be pretty amazed by that. Does it make me a better person, I'm sort of fairly sceptical about that, and probably doesn't make me a better person. And maybe therefore, one should focus on other things more likely to make me a better person.
Fiona
I mean, I would argue that there are aspects of him in you beyond the genetics, but, but that again, would be that whole other whole other conversation. Yeah, and I think it's, I think you have done him a remarkable honour for properly exploring his life and documenting in a way that is fair and honest. Which, as you know, like you say most stories in history get distorted in some way, shape or form. And as a relative, you have honoured him by taking the story and looking at it from a legal perspective to an extent of saying, is this true? Or isn't it? What does the evidence show me? What can I say about this? But presenting a number of different narratives which people are able to engage with because of the way you've written that helped them understand his life.
Dermot Turing
Wow. Thank you.
Fiona
And thank you, thank you so much for sparing your time I think, you know, people are going to be absolutely fascinated by this. And as I said, maybe another time Dermot we do a Dermot Turing focused only no mention of Alan whatsoever.
Dermot Turing
Very good. I look, I look forward to that almost as much as to what we did today.
Fiona
Thanks so much.
Dermot Turing
All right. Very good. Thank you.
Fiona
Thanks to my guests, thanks to you for listening. If you want to find out more about me and my work, go to funimation.com or my social media handle is also Fiona Murden. If you enjoyed this, please do subscribe, review and tell your friends it'd be a massive help. But for now, goodbye, and I hope you have a great week.