[News] Alan Turing

[Gwylan]

We went to Bletchley Park a couple of years ago and the one thing that fascinated me most was the idea that the person in charge - whose name escapes me - had the foresight to realise that they needed to employ brilliant people and to accept that they would include a number of oddballs and eccentrics

Alastair Denniston.

I only found out recently that Hugh Alexander, who was British chess champion and whose columns I read every week, was part of the merry gang at Bletchley.

The most remarkable aspect of the whole BP operation was that the government didn't actually own the house or estate. It was owned by a bloke called Hugh Sinclair (who was a big cheese in the secret service). He died just after the war started and the house passed to his estate.

That just seems so British somehow

EDIT: Just looked up Hugh Alexander and discovered that Harry Golombek, another big chess name from my youth, was also at BP. It really was a Who's Who of British chess (strangely, there seem to be no big names from British bridge involved - although Boris Schapiro was an intelligence office, but not at BP)

 

[boik]

But Turing was a genius beyond his work at Bletchley. I get frustrated his name is usually only associated it.

He is one of the most influential people in the world of modern computing and is known as "the father of computer science".

Completely off the scale genius who was describing how software could be written for modern computers years before those computers existed.

He is the UK's Leonardo Di Vinci. Unlike Leonardo his "machines" actually worked and dominate our modern lives.

Agree with all of that. It's just that when people talk about the Bletchley war effort it tends to be all about Turing, which he himself wouldn't have wanted. For a telephone engineer to even understand Turing was quite something, but then to make it work by going against conventional wisdom and at a lot of his own expense was amazing.

 

[DavidinSouthampton]

Alastair Denniston.

I only found out recently that Hugh Alexander, who was British chess champion and whose columns I read every week, was part of the merry gang at Bletchley.

The most remarkable aspect of the whole BP operation was that the government didn't actually own the house or estate. It was owned by a bloke called Hugh Sinclair (who was a big cheese in the secret service). He died just after the war started and the house passed to his estate.

That just seems so British somehow

EDIT: Just looked up Hugh Alexander and discovered that Harry Golombek, another big chess name from my youth, was also at BP. It really was a Who's Who of British chess (strangely, there seem to be no big names from British bridge involved - although Boris Schapiro was an intelligence office, but not at BP)

We were fascinated by Bletchley Park and the whole story. And we realised through that and through the family history research that my daughter has done that my dad was probably part of it in his own small way much further down the food chain. He was a private in the signals - radio operator - but based for two years plus at a place called Rothamsted in Harpenden, which was top secret. So I presume he was one of the big network of people who would be picking up the messages which were fed in to the system. They would have been total gibberish - not only in a foreign language but also in code - so they were recruited for their diligence and accuracy. His war record, when we requested it, was exemplary - solid, dependable, reliable, works on his own initiative.

And then of course others would be involved in couriering things to Bletchley Park. I always wondered why the Royal Corps of Signals used to have a Motorcycle display team!

 

[FamilyGuy]

Agree with all of that. It's just that when people talk about the Bletchley war effort it tends to be all about Turing, which he himself wouldn't have wanted. For a telephone engineer to even understand Turing was quite something, but then to make it work by going against conventional wisdom and at a lot of his own expense was amazing.

What he said