Latest news with #BletchleyPark
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Alan Turing papers found in loft set to fetch £150K after nearly being shredded
Scientific papers by codebreaking war hero Alan Turing which were discovered in a loft are expected to fetch £150,000 at auction - after almost being shredded. The incredible archive was found gathering dust in an attic in Bermondsey, London, after its owner moved into a care home and her daughters began clearing out her loft. Among the documents which were nearly destroyed was a personal copy of the mathematical genius' PHD dissertation from 1938-39 and his first published paper from 1935. The papers, known as "offprints", had originally been gifted by Turing's mother, Ethel to her son's friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge. They were produced in very small numbers and distributed within academia, making them "incredibly scarce" survivors that rarely ever appear on the market. The documents were nearly destroyed. (Image: SWNS) The collection is now expected to sell for between £100,000-£150,000 when it goes under the hammer at Rare Book Auctions in Lichfield, Staffs, on June 17. Turing was one of the famous codebreakers at Bletchley Park who played a vital role in cracking the Enigma code, which led to Allied victory in World War Two. Despite helping to shorten the war by an estimated four years, on March 31 1952, he was prosecuted for homosexual acts and died from cyanide poisoning on June 7, 1954, aged 41. Shortly before pleading guilty, Turing sent a poignant letter to Norman Routledge, the original owner of the papers being sold. The letter, known as 'Yours in distress', was read by Routledge when he appeared in "The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing" on the BBC's Horizon in 1992. It has also since been read by Benedict Cumberbatch after it was presented by Routledge to King's College, Cambridge, where it now resides in The Turing Archive. The collection is expected to make £150k. (Image: SWNS) But he kept the collection of Turing's offprints, which were eventually rescued by his nieces and nephews. One of the nieces explained: 'Following his retirement from Eton College, Norman bought and lived in a house in Bermondsey. "When he died in 2013, two of his sisters had the unenviable task of sorting through and emptying the contents. "There were lots of personal papers which one sister carted away and stored in her loft. The papers lay dormant until she moved into a care home almost a decade later. "Her daughters came across the papers and considered shredding everything. "Fortunately, they checked with Norman's nieces and nephews because he'd always been a presence in our lives. The papers were saved by Turing's friend, Norman. (Image: SWNS) Adding: "One cousin felt the Turing and Forster papers might be of interest to collectors. "After taking them home for a closer look, she decided to attend a local valuation day hosted by Hansons Auctioneers, who consigned them for research with their specialist saleroom, Rare Book Auctions. "We were bowled over by the valuations and level of enthusiasm.' The collection includes his PhD dissertation from 1938-39, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, which is signed by Turing, having been his personal copy. This document alone has been valued by the auction house at £40,000 to £60,000 as has his 1936-37 paper entitled On Computable Numbers. The paper introduced the world to the idea of a 'universal computing machine', which, despite the model's simplicity, is capable of implementing any computer algorithm, and has been described as the first programming manual of the computer age. The papers have been checked by experts. (Image: SWNS) Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, who is more famed for finding Harry Potter first editions, described the collection as "the most important archive I've ever handled.' He said the exchange of offprints had historically been a method of correspondence between scholars and is prized by collectors as representing the first separate edition of an important work. He added: 'Nothing could've prepared me for what I was about to find in that carrier bag. "These seemingly plain papers-perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their unadorned, academic wrappers - represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing. "Literature has always been my forte, not mathematics, so the past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers has left me feeling that Alan Turing was superhuman. The collection includes letters. (Image: SWNS) "For me, it's like studying the language of another planet, something composed by an ultra-intelligent civilisation." The collection also includes The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis, which dates from 1952, and is Turing's lesser-known masterpiece of mathematical biology. It has since become a basic model in theoretical biology, describing what have come to be known as 'Turing patterns'. Mr Spencer said: 'As recently as 2023, a study confirmed Turing's mathematical model hypothesis as outlined in The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. "In this way the papers are still alive. They're still relevant and groundbreaking. 'We even have Turing's first published paper from 1935 – Equivalence of Left and Right Almost Periodicity – which is simply a single sheet of paper. The collection is set to get interest from around the world. (Image: SWNS) "And the provenance couldn't be better. The archive was gifted to Turing's friend and fellow mathematician Norman Arthur Routledge (1928-2013) by Turing's mother Ethel - and we have her handwritten letter explaining this." In the letter, dated May 16, 1956, Ethel Turing says: 'I have to-day sent by registered post 13 of Alan's off-prints...I don't know what people in Cambridge thought of the manner of Alan's death. "I am convinced it was accidental as the experiment of coke under electrolysis – which smelt of cyanide had been going on for weeks – I feel sure he got some of this on his fingers & so on to the apple he customarily ate in bed...I have had some requests to write a biography of Alan...I have masses of material because from the time he was about 6 I spotted a winner – despite many detractors at school – and kept many papers about him.' Mr Spencer added: "This fascinating letter is a golden thread that neatly ties up and seals the authenticity of everything being offered. "The potential value compels us to offer the papers individually. The price is unknown and could run to any amount. Recommended Reading London company allowed to keep name as lawsuit dropped Beckenham woman befriends stray dog in Bali to bring home London chimney sweeper shares what the job is really like 'Anything with a direct connection to Turing is highly desirable and almost impossible to find. "These papers were owned by his close friend Norman, having been gifted to him by Turing's mother. That's what makes this collection so significant. 'Hardly anything like this appears on the open market, so predicting hammer prices is fortune-telling." Adding: "I suspect interest will be strong in Silicon Valley – where Turing's influence shines brightly – but it would be lovely to see material acquired by institutions who could share things with the public."
CTV News
28-05-2025
- General
- CTV News
University of Waterloo professor featured on stamp for his role in cracking Nazi code
An image of William Tutte is seen on a stamp by Great Britain's Royal Mail. (Courtesy: Royal Mail) The United Kingdom is honouring a University of Waterloo professor by featuring him on a stamp. Great Britain's Royal Mail commemorated the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe day with a new stamp series. Victory in Europe Day, also known as V.E. Day, is celebrated on May 8 and marks the end of the Second World War. Dr. William T. Tutte was selected as one of ten people who will appear on the stamps. Tutte worked at Bletchley Park, a legendary organization of code-breakers in the U.K. who cracked Nazi ciphers. Some of their work was featured in the movie 'The Imitation Game' starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Tutte's work centred on a code known as TUNNY and the Germans' Lorenz machine. According to the University of Waterloo, it was used for high level communication between Berlin and field commanders. He also developed a statistical method to help Bletchley Park decrypt Nazi messages in hours instead of weeks. After the war, Tutte eventually moved to Canada and worked at the University of Toronto. He was then invited to join a new school, the University of Waterloo. For most of his life, the public didn't know the role he played in the Second World War, as he was sworn to secrecy. The fruits of his labour remained a closely guarded secret until the late 1990s when his TUNNY work was declassified. He died in 2002 at the age of 84. The stamp will recognize Tutte's work in the fight against Hitler's Nazis, featuring him in front of a Lorenz cipher machine.
BBC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Milton Keynes man spends 50 years recreating Theremin spy bug
A specialist in counter surveillance who spent 50 years recreating a "totally unique" 1940s covert listening device has had a documentary made about his life's was in the 1970s that John Little first learnt about The Thing - a gadget that had been hidden in a hand-carved ceremonial seal that the then-USSR had given to the US in 1945. The 79-year-old said he was so "fascinated" by it that he became determined to make a new version of the bug, which had no wires or batteries and had passed unnoticed in the office of the US ambassador in documentary, called The Thing, will preview at the National Museum of Computing, at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, on Saturday. Mr Little used to be a telephone engineer from Lowestoft in Suffolk before he moved to Bletchley Park and he still lives in the Milton Keynes said he had his 56 years of experience in technical surveillance counter measures (TSCM) , said he was first introduced to The Thing in 1975 when he worked for the British Foreign Office, and was on a radio monitoring course. In 1945, a large wooden seal was presented to the US ambassador, Averell Harriman, and it stayed on his embassy office in the Russian capital for seven years, listening to his conversations."I was fascinated. It's totally unique and I was determined I was going to make one of those and make it work, and I did... but it took a long while," Mr Little said. "It was like no other surveillance device and even today it's looked at as a work of absolute genius."The original was made by the Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, who also created the musical instrument the theremin, which could be played without being touched - creating an eerie sound. Emily Barnard, a partner of St Albans based Omph Creative, who made the film with Ben Killner, said Mr Little's work was "mind blowing". "It was going to be a short video to put on YouTube, but we just realised how momentous this was and a documentary story needed to be told."She said the device was called The Thing because no-one knew what it was, how it worked and it led to "scandal, espionage and political wrangling on a global scale". "John is very humble, but he's also a genius like Leon Theremin," she said. "Sometimes technology doesn't need to be complex; it needs to be simple and clever and go under the radar and not be noticed." Mr Little said that after working on The Thing recreation, he started on "the 2024 version". "This one incorporates internet, 4G, sat-phone technology, which gives us the ability to remote control the system so now it has a range of 12,500 miles - half way round the Earth," he said. "I'm sure if Leon was still alive he would do that."He said his work was only possible due to a team of about 10 people, including Greg Williams and John Carter. "You can't retire from this," he added. The film's premiere sold out within 48 hours and another screening was being planned for 27 September, Ms Barnard added. Follow Beds, Herts and Bucks news on BBC Sounds, Facebook, Instagram and X.
Telegraph
08-05-2025
- General
- Telegraph
Veteran code-breaker ‘haunted by lives lost' through her work
A veteran code-breaker has told how she is still 'haunted by the lives lost' because of her work. Dorothy Walsh, 98, spent the year before VE Day monitoring the Bombe machines used to decipher German Enigma-coded secret messages at Stanmore, an outstation of Bletchley Park. She described work on Enigma as a 'constant pressure', and upon the German surrender on May 8 1945, she celebrated in front of Buckingham Palace and did the conga with American soldiers. Her cousin later messaged her from Germany to say that her joyful antics had been published in a newspaper – but she has never found out which one. 'I was having a great time,' she said. 'I had never seen anything like it. I was standing in front of the Queen Victoria statue when the Royal family came out onto the balcony.' Mrs Walsh said that as an 18-year-old during the war she would have happily fired on the enemy and even parachuted into France. But as the decades passed, she eventually became haunted by her wartime work. She said: 'You feel these things emotionally when you're much older. 'I often think about the German lives that were lost because of us. I couldn't go to Germany.' 'Noisy, hot and intense' During the war, Mrs Walsh worked with the Women's Royal Naval Service, undergoing eight-hour shifts in silence to break the Enigma codes before they changed every 24 hours. She said: 'It was noisy, hot, and intense – no windows. You wouldn't be allowed to work in those conditions today. The Bombes worked 24 hours a day and never stopped. I spent my 18th birthday working there.' Mrs Walsh, who lives in Waterlooville, Hampshire, said Alan Turing would occasionally visit to check that the machines were functioning properly. 'I just knew him as a nice, quiet person with a slight speech impediment – I think his brain was quicker than his speech. He made us giggle. We knew that he was responsible for the Bombe.' Mrs Walsh signed the Official Secrets Act and was not allowed to talk to her colleagues about what they did outside the building. She added: 'We thought we would never be able to speak about it. If people asked what I was doing, I'd say I was a confidential writer.' Mrs Walsh was frequently reminded of how vital their input was and sometimes informed of the breakthroughs which occurred as a result. Her team had been previously told that they had been pivotal in sinking the prized Nazi battleship Bismarck three years before. She said: 'No one knew how the Bismarck had been sunk, but we knew it was because of our work, the intelligence that meant they knew where to find her.' Glitches with the Bombes were fixed by RAF technicians, who naturally weren't allowed to know what the machines they were mending were used for. Mrs Walsh kept her classified war work a secret from her family until they were watching a television programme about Bletchley Park together, and only recently told her story to the Royal Navy and Royal Marines Charity. She recalled knowing the end of the war was imminent because the Enigma messages requiring decoding had dried up, but being unable to tell her childhood friend, Ronald Walsh, when they met up a week before VE Day. When it was later declared she helped to demolish the machines. Mrs Walsh and Ronald eventually married, moved to Portsmouth and raised sons, Morris and Colin, while she worked as a pharmaceutical dispenser for two doctors. On Thursday, Mrs Walsh visited shore establishment HMS Collingwood, in Fareham, to mark the VE Day anniversary with the Royal Navy.
The Independent
08-05-2025
- General
- The Independent
Has national pride and celebration made us forget what war is really about?
Philip Jarman is a 101-year-old Second World War veteran, but he has little truck with the 'celebratory' clamour that accompanies our numerous wartime anniversaries: the bunting, the obligatory fly past, the royal gloss. Eighty years ago, he was still fighting a brutal war in Burma, and his reticence goes beyond mere end dates. 'We've got war all wrong,' he insists, disconsolately chasing crumbs around his plate. 'After 1945, we didn't have these repeated celebrations. We got on with building back Britain. In the years following VE Day, we were in no mood to celebrate.' The outpouring of joy on that one May day in 1945 – according to Ruth Bourne, a 98-year-old Bletchley Park veteran, 'a feeling that was almost electric' – speaks to the grinding toil of war directly preceding it, a painstaking slog through privation and pain. In the words of one former female soldier, 'wartime Britain was dull and difficult, spiked with occasional horrible bits of news'. The country had earned its celebration on 8 May, but the euphoria was not protracted. News archive confirms that the 1950s, Sixties and Seventies slid by with minimal pomp and ceremonial recall – Britain was too busy facing down problems in a post-imperial world to get excited about a war which ended with two new superpowers calling the shots. Even the fallen had to make do with scaled-down memorialisation. Jarman explains: 'We'd been badly bombed. And we knew war monuments did not work.' After the First World War, Britain had witnessed an unprecedented public art campaign; in a country scorched by the loss of nearly one million young men, memorials, cenotaphs, and monuments sprang up in market squares and city centres nationwide, but they had not stopped a second war. 'Let's have no more stone crosses or war memorials in the 1918 sense of the word,' insisted one disconsolate soldier. In a country desperate to crack on with the peace after five-and-a-half long years of fighting, the Second World War's 380,000 military casualties were bunched up on pre-existing war memorials. Only outstanding services like the Commandos enjoyed their own iteration in stone. The real sea change in Second World War commemoration came in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, when a full-scale war in the Falkland Islands and an upscaling of the conflict in Northern Ireland ushered in a new era of jingoism and dewy-eyed pride. Britain needed to remind itself, and the world, of our unequivocal fight for freedom in the 1940s, positing good versus evil in the context of British military encounters. Four decades after the end of the conflict, the nation doubled down on an outstanding victory narrative as, one by one, our great wartime leaders – Churchill, Alanbrooke, Montgomery – died, making way for an elderly rank and file to have their moment in the sun. By the 1980s, crucial distance had been established; where once the Second World War's death toll had been dwarfed by the First, now in the modern era, few could believe the scale of the devastation and havoc wreaked by a conflict that quickly became a cornerstone of our national identity. Lest we forget, our entire nation bent its neck to an all-consuming war effort in the name of King and Country. The record-breaking Overlord Embroidery was given its own museum and the gallant efforts of men who risked life and limb on D-Day and beyond were re-remembered. In 1984, the IRA detonated a bomb in Brighton's Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party Conference. Thatcher emerged from the rubble to channel her inner Churchill and face down her attackers. 'The government will not weaken. This nation will meet that challenge. Democracy will prevail.' The martial prime minister had already learnt the value of binary language and military prowess. Since then, another 40 years have passed and remembering has gathered pace. Commemoration in stone and marble reveres the legions who fought from our former colonies, the millions of women who played their part, and even the animals and children caught up in the mindless wreckage. We live in a modern era when being seen is all-important and living a long life is taken for granted. Philip Robinson, 99, was balloted (compelled) to serve underground, mining coal as a 'bevin boy'. The absence of a uniform, and later a memorial, burned deep; when finally four Kilkenny stones in the National Memorial Arboretum arrived to honour the bevin boys' war in 2013, he was delighted. But others, like Philip Jarman, are still equivocal about the role of commemoration. He is one of the few remaining survivors from the Second World War; today returning to memories of a war that killed his brother, his sister-in-law and his best friend, is challenging. And he insists we get the tone all wrong. Reluctantly, Jarman tells me the story of Richard Combes, his childhood friend who joined the navy in 1939: 'I was looking forward to him coming home on leave. But his father said, 'I'm afraid you'll not be seeing Richard this weekend'. I joked, 'Has he been confined to barracks?' Mr Coombes' retort was quietly devastating. 'He was on HMS Hood.' 'That shook me so much that, although his parents lived nearby, I couldn't bear to go and see them for six months. He was their only child.' The quiet parlour, the ticking clock, the terrible pain, the accountant and his wife without their precious boy. Jarman never went back. 'Oh dear,' he says, 'you've made me dredge it all up.' The Bismarck 's sinking of HMS Hood, the largest battleship of its kind, in May 1941 was felt nationwide. The aft magazine exploded and the ship sank within minutes. From a 1,418-strong crew, there were three survivors. Silently, I wonder how Mr and Ms Combes marked VE Day. Jarman concedes it might be touching after all this time to find his friend's name on a monument; Combes R. A. L. etched in perpetuity, so I plan a trip to the famous Portsmouth Naval Memorial. Apparently, Richard was listed there when they adjusted the monument to make space for thousands more deaths at sea in a devastating Second World War. I arrived in late May 2024, a week before the 80th anniversary commemorations of D-Day. The whole area had been cordoned off for the King's arrival, so I couldn't access the naval memorial. 'How ridiculous,' said Jarman. It felt ridiculous. A buoyant sounding brass band practised on the shoreline; anticipation in Portsmouth was mounting. A high green metal wall blocked my way to the giant obelisk, and two security guards refused me access. They offered to take a picture of Richard's name instead. One shrugged apologetically. 'It's all a bit celebratory, isn't it? Like we've forgotten what war is about.' I nodded, and felt strangely gutted. An engraved name isn't much, but it is better than nothing. The Commonwealth Graves Commission insist that the memorial is 'accessible at all times'. I can confirm this is not true. Eighty years after the D-Day landings, it felt like commemoration had been sidestepped for celebration on an epic scale. I watched the ceremony on TV a week later and wondered if perhaps Jarman had a point. Has confected national pride and triumphalism engulfed our recall of what war is really all about? Likewise, 80 years after VE Day, it is worth being mindful of what 'victory' meant. Yes, 8 May 1945 saw an extraordinary outpouring of joy: young surviving servicemen and women celebrating a free and peaceful life that now unfolded in front of them, but what of the impact of war not caught on the cameras, beyond the bombed-out houses, hidden in empty bedrooms, and silent sitting rooms? An aching hole that no amount of ticker tape or jitterbugging could bring back. The real cost of war.
