Lost collection of Alan Turing letters found in old filing cabinet

A lost collection of nearly 150 letters from the codebreaker Alan Turing has been uncovered in an old filing cabinet at the University of Manchester.

The correspondence, which has not seen the light of day for at least 30 years, contains very little about Turing’s tortured personal life. It does, however, give an intriguing insight into his views on America.

In response to an invitation to speak at a conference in the US in April 1953, Turing replied that he would rather not attend: “I would not like the journey, and I detest America.”

The letter, sent to Donald Mackay, a physicist at Kings College London, does not give any further explanation for Turing's forthright views on America, nor do these views feature in any of the other 147 letters discovered earlier this year.

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The correspondence, dating from early 1949 to Turing’s death in 1954, was found by chance when an academic cleared out an old filing cabinet in a storeroom at the University of Manchester. Turing was deputy director of the university’s computing laboratory from 1948, after his heroic wartime codebreaking at Bletchley Park.

Father of modern computing

Turing was a visionary mathematician and is regarded today as the father of modern computing who broke the Nazis' second world war Enigma code. While his later life has been overshadowed by his conviction for gross indecency and his death from cyanide poisoning in 1954, aged 41, a posthumous pardon was granted by the Queen in 2013. His life was featured in the 2014 film the Imitation Game.

Prof Jim Miles, of the university’s school of computer science, said he was amazed to stumble upon the documents, contained in an ordinary-looking red paper file with “Alan Turing” scrawled on it.

“When I first found it I initially thought, ‘that can’t be what I think it is’, but a quick inspection showed it was, a file of old letters and correspondence, by Alan Turing,” he said.

“I was astonished such a thing had remained hidden out of sight for so long. No one who now works in the school or at the university knew they even existed. It really was an exciting find and it is mystery as to why they had been filed away.”

The collection focuses mainly on Turing’s academic research, including his work on ground-breaking areas in AI, computing and mathematics, and invitations to lecture at some of America’s best-known universities including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It contains a single letter from GCHQ, for whom Turing worked during the war, asking the mathematician in 1952 if he could supply a photograph of himself for an official history of Bletchley Park that was being compiled by the American cryptographer William Friedman. In his reply to Eric Jones, GCHQ’s then-director, Turing said he would send a picture for the “American rogues gallery”.

The collection also contains a handwritten draft BBC radio programme on artificial intelligence, titled “Can machines think?” from July 1951. The documents were sorted, catalogued and stored by the University of Manchester archivist James Peters and are now available to view online.

Peters said: “This is a truly unique find. Archive material relating to Turing is extremely scarce, so having some of his academic correspondence is a welcome and important addition to our collection.

“There is very little in the way of personal correspondence, and no letters from Turing family members. But this still gives us an extremely interesting account and insight into his working practices and academic life whilst he was at the University of Manchester.”

He added: “The letters mostly confirm what is already known about Turing’s work at Manchester, but they do add an extra dimension to our understanding of the man himself and his research.

“As there is so little actual archive on this period of his life, this is a very important find in that context. There really is nothing else like it.”

The Guardian