Max Newman—Mathematician, Codebreaker, and Computer Pioneer

Like many British children in my age g­roup I can pinpoint my first memory of my father to the particular day when he and I were reunited after being separated since my infancy. It happened in October 1943, at Poole Docks on the south coast of England. My mother Lyn, my older brother Edward, and I had spent three years as evacuees to the United States, and after a lengthy and hazardous journey by ship and flying boat had arrived back, exhausted. I remember a crowd of people on the dockside, from which a thin, bald, agitated man emerged and strode up to us saying, ‘Oh, there you are!’ This was my father, Max Newman. While I retain a clear image of that meeting, I was to discover almost nothing of what my father was doing at the time until many years later. I was placed in the same position as others in codebreakers’ families. During the war I knew of Bletchley only as the place where my father went to work. After the war ended I came to know it more as a railway station where we changed trains in order to travel between Cambridge and the North. Then a silver tankard appeared in our house, resplendent with the inscription: ‘To MHAN from the Newmanry, 1943–45’. After much pestering from me to know what this was about, my mother took me aside and whispered conspiratorially in my ear, ‘Codes . . . but you must never tell anyone!’ My father, although one of the most discreet of men, must have trusted my mother enough to tell her this much, and she must have trusted me. By the time the first account of Colossus and the Newmanry was published my father was nearing his eighties, and the habit of keeping quiet about these events was as ingrained in him as eating, sleeping, and solving crossword puzzles. Furthermore the authorities would allow him to mention only certain aspects of the Colossus work. He was obviously pleased to be free at last to talk about his war work, but he did so hesitantly, choosing his words carefully and sometimes describing things only by oblique reference.