The man with the terrible trousers

My uncle, Alan Turing, was not a well-dressed man. It is a tribute to those who employed him that he was able to flourish in environments that ignored his refusal to comply with social norms as much as he disregarded mindless social conventions. Social conventions, however, became an increasingly powerful influence over his life. Here I retell the story from the family perspective. There is an old photograph in the family album that shows Alan in his last years at Sherborne (Fig. 2.1). It was taken in June 1930—a few months after his friend Christopher Morcom’s death—and Alan looks relaxed and happy. But his trousers are a complete disgrace. It is not clear who took the picture, but the timing suggests that it was done at Commemoration, the annual festival at Sherborne to which parents and dignitaries are invited, and where boys, particularly senior boys, should be smartly turned-out. Ordinarily, Alan’s mother (my grandmother) would have intervened and spruced him up. But given that Alan was, like other boarding-school boys, responsible for his own clothes, she probably had no control over him any more, if indeed she ever had done. My grandmother had had little direct control over Alan during his formative years. My grandfather was serving the Empire in India, and she, as a good memsahib, was expected to be with him to run his household. (From the distance of a century or so, this seems a waste of talent, for my grandmother had a formidable intellect as well as many other gifts, and in a later age would probably have become a scientist of distinction.) So Alan was deposited in England with foster parents in St Leonards-on-Sea, and at nine years of age was sent off to a prep school called Hazelhurst, near Frant in Sussex. School seems to have been a reasonably good experience for him—at least in his first term. There was the incident of the geography test. At that time my father, being four years older than Alan, was in the top form while Alan was in the bottom one. The whole school was made to do a geography test. Turing 1 (my father) got 59 marks and Turing 2 (Alan) got 77; my father considered this a thoroughly bad show.