Alan Mathison Turing, became famous as the father of computer science as well as for the breaking the Nazi German Enigma Code. This character appears in Addlestone, the first book of the Addlestone Chronicles trilogy. Alan was the same age as James Harcourt-Heath, but James was a year behind Alan at Cambridge as he had to take a year off due to the Spanish flu pandemic effectively closing James’s boarding school, Dulwich College in South London. Both read Maths at King’s College, Cambridge and both achieved a 1st class degree with honours, thus achieving the status as Wranglers. At Cambridge, Alan was an oarsman and ran Olympic-standard marathon times. He became known as the Bletchley Park Codebreaker for his work decrypting German radio messages and deciphering the Enigma machine, captured from the Nazi’s in May 1941. In 1948, along with the economist, statistician, and mathematician, David Champernowne, he developed a chess playing computer game. In 1952, Turing was charged with homosexual acts and accepted chemical castration instead of the alternative of a long prison sentence. In 1954, at the age of 41, he committed suicide. A film chronicling his life appeared in 2014 titled The Imitation Game.
Bletchley Park became the new home to GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) after it was transferred from Broadway Buildings in Westminster, London. In 1936, Admiral Sir Hugh Francis Paget Sinclair, KCB, was head of section MI6 of the British Secret Services. He initiated the formation of Section D, which was dedicated to sabotage. Using £6000 of his own money (equivalent to a quarter of a million pounds today), he bought Bletchley Park, a large estate in north London. It became the wartime intelligence station. Sinclair famously said about Hitler, “He possessed the characteristics of fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exaltation and depression, fits of bitter and self-righteous resentment, and only what can be termed a streak of madness.” His widely circulated opinion was not well received by the Foreign Office, as it didn’t gel with the government’s official policy of appeasement.
I wonder if anybody sees a similarity between Sinclair’s assessment of Hitler and the presumptive Republican party’s nominee for the November 2024 general presidential election?
Alan Turing, King’s College, & Bletchley Park
