Alan Turing's Manchester E-Book

Jonathan Swinton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 334

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Alan Turing is a patron saint of Manchester, remembered as the Mancunian who won the war, invented the computer, and was all but put to death for being gay. Each myth is related to a historical story. This is not a book about the first of those stories, of Turing at Bletchley Park. But it is about the second two, which each unfolded here in Manchester, of Turing's involvement in the world's first computer and of his refusal to be cowed about his sexuality. Manchester can be proud of Turing, but can we be proud of the city he encountered?

Leseprobe

for Emma

First published Infang Publishing

This edition published 2022

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This book is set in Univers.

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Despite diligent search It has been impossible to locate the copyright owners of some material. The publishers will correct attribution errors in future editions and at the supporting website for this book, which is: www.manturing.net

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 8039 9075 0

Original print design by birthday: birthdaystudio.com

Printed in Turkey by IMAK

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

‘Manchester is a good centre from which to watch the world’

The Guardian, on the day in 1959 it dropped the word Manchester from its title

‘Manchester continues to attract the perverse gaze of the urban voyeur’

Peck and Ward, 2002

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Turing before Manchester

Manchester before Turing

Industrial Dismal

The Manchester Mindscape

Why Manchester?

The /////// at the Window

Manchester By the Sea

Is a Mathematician a Human?

The Festival of Manchester

Atoms and Whimsy

Is a Mathematician a Man?

On Growth and on Form

Playing, Learning and Working

Oxford Road Show

The Course of the Bee

Appendix: Turing's Biomathematics

Acknowledgements

Notes

Figure 1. Central Manchester’s road system from a 1947 plan. Line thickness shows pre-war traffic density.

Cast

There are many names mentioned in this book; there’s no need for the reader to keep track of most of them, but this is a list of those that recur. It gives the person’s age during 1948, the year when Alan Turing arrived in Manchester aged 36, and the number of the page where they are named in bold. All except those marked NW have Wikipedia entries.

Bates, Audrey (age about 20) p119

Bernal, John Desmond (age 47) p105

Blackett, Costanza (NW, age 49) p32

Blackett, Patrick (age 51) p31

Bowden, Vivian (age 38) p145

Braithwaite, Richard (age 48) p94

Carlson, Kjell (NW, age unknown) p75

Cartwright, Mary (age 48) p46

Clarke, Joan (age 31) p46

Cunliffe, Mitzi (age 30) p110

Emmet, Dorothy (age 44) p87

Flowers, Tommy (age 43) p38

Hartree, Douglas (age 51) p50

Hush, Noel (age 24) p25

Irvine (Newman), Lyn (age 33) p43

Jefferson, Geoffrey (age 62) p80

Kermode, Frank (age 29) p28

Kilburn, Tom (age 27) p55

Lockspeiser, Ben (age 57) p57

Lovell, Bernard (age 35) p21

Megaw, Helen (age 41) p105

Newman, Max (age 51) p37

Nicolson, Phyllis (age 31) p118

Peierls, Rudolf (age 41) p24

Polanyi, John (age 19) p66

Polanyi, Michael (age 57) p87

Popplewell, Cicely (age 29) p119

Prinz, Dietrich (age 43) p148

Russell, Bertrand (age 66) p10

Rutherford, Ernest (died 1937) p31

Simon, Ernest (age 69) p18

Simon, Shena (age 61) p18

Strachey, Christopher (age 32) p146

Streat, Raymond (age 51) p57

Swirles, Bertha (age 45) p117

Thompson, D’Arcy (age 88) p127

Webb, Roy (NW, age about 36) p70

Wiener, Norbert (age 52) p79

Williams, Freddie (age 37) p53

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (age 59) p48

Woods, Mary Lee (age 24) p121

Wrinch, Dorothy (age 52) p130

Yule Bogue, James (NW, age 43) p18

Foreword

Alan Turing came to Manchester in 1948, ‘stolen away’ from the National Physical Laboratory by his lifelong mentor and friend M.H.A. (Max) Newman. Newman, who used that phrase, was perhaps being unfair about the process of recruiting Alan Turing into his nascent computing laboratory. The fact is that Alan Turing was frustrated at the NPL, by its bureaucracy, its lack of imagination, and above all by its inability to convert his design for a computer into an actual machine. Manchester, by contrast, was energetic, unconventional, and rather messy, just like Alan Turing himself. Manchester took Alan Turing by surprise. He fitted in.

Jonathan Swinton’s book sets the scene into which Alan Turing arrived: crumbling in its heritage yet experiencing the massive transformation of the British economy which began at the end of the Second World War. The transformation was in part led by the technology being developed under Newman in what became the Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory. It was no coincidence that Turing and Newman were, in turn, responsible for the two machine puzzle-solving projects which brought wartime codebreaking into era of computing. Now, in Manchester, the knowhow gained at Bletchley could be put to uses which everyone could discover and understand. Manchester was the home of the Electronic Brain.

But a codebreaking puzzle remained even after computers had become commonplace. Alan Turing’s untimely death in 1954 meant that his last project, which was deciphering the mystery of how plants develop mathematical patterns, remained a work in progress. He drew the beautiful pictures to illustrate his forthcoming paper on the subject, but writing the paper was something he put off. The meaning of the Turing drawings remained one more of those coded secrets with which the final months of Alan Turing’s life abound. Until, that is, the painstaking analysis by Jonathan Swinton brought their meaning into the light: it is through his research that we are able to understand and appreciate what Alan Turing was actually doing in his last years of research using the Manchester University computer as his collaborator.

Jonathan is highly qualified, as a mathematician working on problems in biology, to master this challenge and to describe what the Turing drawings mean. But, unlike the stereotypical maths professor, Jonathan has many interests and occupations beyond mathematics. His portrait of Manchester midway through the last century has a lightness of touch as well as wealth of incidental detail. I hope you will enjoy this book as much as I have.

Sir Dermot Turing, 2022

Preface

Alan Turing is a patron saint of Manchester, his face popping up in street art and heritage branding. Indeed, with the dignity of a civic celebrity, his name now marks the dual carriageway to the Velodrome. Turing was never quite forgotten after his tragic 1954 death, but only emerged as a public figure after 1983 when Andrew Hodges’ passionate biography was published. There is a direct line from that book to a Hollywood film and more importantly to a change in English law, offering retrospective pardons to those convicted under now-obsolete sexual behaviour laws. But Hodges was a careful scholar and bears no responsibility for three myths also now in circulation: I exaggerate them, but not that far, if I say Turing is now remembered as the Mancunian who won the war, invented the computer, and was put to death for being gay. Each myth is related to a historical story. This not a book about the first story, of Turing at Bletchley Park. But it is about the second two, which each unfolded here in Manchester, of Turing’s involvement in the world’s first computer and of his refusal to be cowed about his sexuality. Turing provoked — intellectually and socially — and I was curious about how his chosen home rose to those provocations. Manchester can be proud of Turing, but can we be proud of the city he encountered?

So this is a book about the people one might have met in Turing’s Manchester. It records the patronage of older men, triumphant from the successful prosecution of a scientific war, who could provide time to think and valves to think with; book-chats with a frustrated but sharply literary housewife and board-game sessions with young academic families; lunchtime speculations with the botanist hungry for a systematic biology and with the chemist refugee from totalitarianism who abhorred systematisation of science; the successful brain surgeon whose pomposity camouflaged unignorable fears; the proud inheritors of a local but world-class engineering tradition, still gruffly defensive about class; the younger men — and women — learning to become the first generation of hackers and futurists; the grammar schoolboy runner and, albeit on the margins of the historical record, the young working-class men of the Oxford Road cruising sites. There are marginal glimpses too of those one might not have met: the Special Branch bag searchers, the MI5 analysts, the GCHQ codebreakers.

This book leaves out some important parts of Turing’s life, and indeed his most towering achievements, which were made away from Manchester. But what he did do in our city was enough in its own right to secure him, and us, a place in intellectual history. And Manchester was also where he was prosecuted for a sexual act which is today no crime. Twenty-seven months after his public guilt was pronounced, he was dead by his own hand.

Figure 2. Glazed tiling on the Palace Hotel, Oxford Road Manchester. The former Refuge Assurance building is close to where Alan Turing met Albert Murray in 1951.

Turing before Manchester

To understand Turing’s time in Manchester, it is — unsurprisingly — essential to understand his class background. Alan Turing, son of a colonial civil servant, was conceived in India, born in London, and educated as a boarder at Sherborne School, a relatively prestigious public school in Dorset. He was securely part of an English upper middle-class culture that had no direct connection with northern or industrial Britain. One early sign of his departure from the norms of that culture was his preference at school for studying science, causing his teachers to regret: ‘If he is to stay at a Public School, he must aim at becoming educated. If he is to be solely a Scientific Specialist, he is wasting his time at a Public School’. 1

Turing was already an able mathematician when he turned 18 in 1930. At that time, the University of Manchester was an institution which could well have made a first-rate scientific specialist out of him. In physics there was worldleading research taking place, and chemistry was not far behind. Manchester mathematics was thought less distinguished but the question did not arise: for the Turing family of Guildford it was geographically and socially obvious that Alan should go to Oxbridge. 2

Alan indeed went as an undergraduate to King’s College in Cambridge in 1931. 3 It was a time when the modernist cultural elite around the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group was — at least in hindsight — in an ascendancy, with what is now a famously relaxed attitude to the morals of wider society. His Cambridge was an institution where homosexuality, if kept obediently discreet, was not a bar to inclusion. 4 The subsequent involvement of some of the Apostles in Soviet espionage has drawn much wider attention to that particular tiny group. While the interwar Apostles now provide a convenient shorthand for a certain cultural moment, that secretive, all-male, society with no more than a handful of undergraduate members was perhaps not visibly significant at the time. Though Turing knew men who were Apostles and was considered for membership, he was not an Apostle and may not even have known of the group’s existence. To Cambridge contemporaries, a much more visible arena was offered by the Heretics, a public debating society open to both sexes, partly born out of the atheist and pacifist debates at the end of the Great War, and which perhaps Turing and certainly a number of those around him attended.

After a slow start, Turing shone academically and quite soon after graduating he was appointed in 1935 to a prestigious Fellowship at King’s, offering board, lodging and a comfortable stipend. It was as a graduate student that Turing attended the lectures of mathematician Max Newman, who would become the closest to a mentor that the independently minded Turing would ever have.

Figure 3. King’s College Cambridge in a pre-war postcard.

It was from Newman that Turing heard about questions perplexing the more fundamentalist mathematicians of the time. In 1903 Bertrand Russell had published a book arguing that all of mathematics consisted only of making logical deductions from initial principles. 5 What are the limits of this mathematics? What does it mean to say we know how to find the answer to a question? A natural, if incomplete, modern response is to say that we can answer a mathematical question if we can program a computer to do it. But in the 1930s a computer was a woman who dutifully used a desk adding machine to multiply the numbers involved in ballistic trajectories. The modern response is unimaginable without the modern concept: the general-purpose computing machine. The computer is built of billions of logic gates made in silicon, which combine binary truths and falsehoods into new implications, with ands and ors and exclusive-ors. Russell, and the other logicians that Newman had learned from, already used the same logic gates, though built of mathematics, as the stuff from which human thought might emerge. But it took Turing’s intuition to build a general mechanism for reasoning out of these parts. In 1935, Turing went away from Newman’s lectures and, a full year later and without any further discussion, presented Newman with a paper that gives our best mathematical description of what a computer is: what we now call the Turing Machine. In later years, Newman described Turing as only averagely competent as a day-to-day mathematician — but that it was this idea in mathematical logic which propelled him into the international first rank of mathematicians. 6 It must have been a remarkable experience for Newman to be presented with this tour de force, and he remained Turing’s champion for life.

Turing remained in Cambridge, apart from two years in Princeton, until the end of the decade. By 1939 he had been recruited for duty as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park. 7 After Turing’s at first invisible and now famous war service helping to break the Enigma and other codes, he moved to the National Physical Laboratory in an abortive attempt to lead a computer project. The NPL in west London, together with the Universities in Manchester and Cambridge, emerged as three British centres, each separately competing with the Americans to build the world’s first computer. 8 By 1947 it was obvious that the NPL would not finish in time to win that race, if at all. Amid bureaucratic fallout over the failure of the project, Turing retreated to Cambridge to take up a year of his King’s Fellowship. Though he never lost his interest in practical electronics, back in Cambridge Turing concentrated on writing, thinking, and programming. In particular he took up the idea of the brain itself as a computer, perplexing contemporary neuroscientists with questions such as how many neurons the brain contained. 9 And it was during this year that Turing was offered a job, by Max Newman, who had preceded him to a Manchester whose industrial and scientific resources were ready to provide the next step.

Figure 4. GCHQ requesting funds to pay the ‘men of the Professor type’, including Turing, it recruited for codebreaking duty at the outbreak of war.

Manchester before Turing

Manchester is irredeemably ugly…there are times when it seems…wrong-headed to call Manchester the centre of a civilisation. But it is.

AJP Taylor. 10

You might think this was the end of the world, but we were very resilient. Manchester was the Athens of the North. ‘What Manchester thinks today,’ they said, ‘London thinks tomorrow,’ and it was indeed intellectually highly stimulating.

Noel Hush. 11

Turing’s Cambridge was a town dominated by its University, and dependent on education for the majority of its economic activity. By contrast, what was then the Victoria University of Manchester was a creation of its city, firmly under the control of local industrial wealth. It served to educate the sons and daughters of the local middle classes, and to provide a technical and managerial elite to the surrounding industry. But it also hosted fundamental physics, most extraordinarily Rutherford’s 1917 splitting of the atom, and was much more than an institution for the provision of useful facts. Like the Central Reference Library and the Art Gallery, the University was a considerable source of civic pride, and world class research a visible fruit of the city’s wealth. 12

At the start of the Second World War, the majority of this wealth was still identified in the public mind with the cotton trade and the industrial engineering businesses that fed on it. Before the war foreign competition had significantly damaged trade and though war saw a temporary boost, cotton was in what is now evident as a terminal decline. But engineering had outgrown cotton, and the decades before the war had seen the development of relatively new, American-facing industries, symbolised by the vast Metropolitan Vickers plant at Trafford Park. 13 When war came, these sites had been well placed to move to production for the wartime economy — Metro-Vicks churned out a thousand Lancaster bombers over the course of the war — and Manchester’s distance from German airbases had partially protected it from the destruction wreaked on other cities. War drove innovation in Manchester’s industrial base. Radar, for example, created both new technical expertise and an industrial infrastructure for the mass production of electrical and electronic components.

Figure 5. ICI was primarily a bulk chemical company, whose Manchester branch diversified into pharmaceuticals in the 1930s. Along with Britain’s other hi-tech companies, ICI advertised in the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition of Science programme.

Figure 6. Metropolitan Vickers was the largest of Manchester’s engineering firms. Though in peacetime primarily an electrical company, in war it had produced the Manchester and Lancaster bombers in large numbers. This futuristic post-war landscape of 1946 recalls the imagery of the Manchester City Plan and other planning dreams of the time.

Figure 7. Metropolitan Vickers’ actual home in 1947 was in low, red-brick factory buildings set in the huge, partly developed and semi-planned industrial estate of Trafford Park. The centre block was used in wartime for the assembly of Lancasters. The site that ICI used for penicillin fermentation is on the far left, just above the Bridgewater Canal.

Pre-war, the family-owned Ferranti firm had established a ‘browngoods’ factory at Moston, producing consumer radios and electric clocks. The corporate history records that Ferranti had moved from London to Manchester in 1896 in search of lower land prices for its heavy industrial plant, making transformers nearby at Hollinwood. But the availability of a workforce disciplined by the experience of the cotton mills must also have played a factor. The Moston factory worked on a conveyor-belt system strictly segregated by gender, with lower-paid women carrying out the assembly tasks. 14 This factory was profitably turned over to war work assembling the radar receivers that those thousand Lancasters and more demanded.

Cotton engineering continued to create new sectors even as the trade itself declined. An important spin-out had long been the dye trade, a sector which drove great innovation in chemistry, although not always locally. The First World War forcibly demonstrated that the organic chemistry expertise essential for explosives and fertiliser was dominantly German. After that war, German patents were simply taken over, and the occupying British Army had moved through the Rhine Valley with a specialist chemical mission to ‘pinch everything they’ve got’. 15 Then domestic technology development was promoted: banning imports, creating the chemical giant ICI via merger, and for the first time, offering state support for University research. 16

Figure 8. Ethel Gabain’s Cathode Ray Tubes. Lawrence Haward, director of the City Art Gallery, set up a scheme by which local companies commissioned artists to document their war work and then donated the pictures to the Gallery. Ferranti’s plant at Moston made cathode-ray tubes for radar purposes during the war. After the war they returned to producing them for televisions.

A large nineteenth-century dyestuff works in Blackley, founded by a German Jewish migrant to make magenta, evolved as this local leadership in organic chemistry developed into a home for the ICI Dyestuffs Division. In the pre-war years this expertise evolved further into pharmaceuticals, and during the war, this fledgling section of ICI was instructed to replace and then improve German anti-malarial drugs. Eventually it created Paludrine, which arrived in time for the British to use during postcolonial fighting in Malaysia in 1948. ICI’s chemical experience was also used for the wartime mass production of penicillin at Trafford Park. 17

Blackley, enfolded in the Irk Valley just north of the city, today is a typical piece of Manchester’s post-industrial landscape, with networks of EU-funded cycle paths threading through housing built by the mass housebuilders, with gardens and drives if little social housing. It’s now a pleasant, sheltered valley for lovers to stroll in. But when the dyeworks stood there, the shelter meant few winds to disperse the fumes. One of the lead developers of the anti-malarial drugs remembered that the air killed the lab animals before the malaria could: ‘You couldn’t open the window for black smuts. It was like a Lowry picture, but it was convenient for the textile industry’. The work to make new drugs had to be done somewhere much cleaner than toxic Blackley, even though ICI used for its tests the canaries bred for unmetaphorical use in the coal mines, and it wasn’t just canaries at risk: one of the human co-developers of Paludrine died in a rail accident caused by Manchester fog. 18 So ICI opened a research station amid the green and relatively clean fields of Fulshaw Hall in Wilmslow. The North West had little pharmaceutical infrastructure to provide trained staff or specialist supplies, and so when ICI recruited an Oxford professor, James Yule Bogue, to lead the post-war drug discovery effort, Bogue immediately and unsurprisingly recommended relocating the research laboratories to somewhere back down in the golden triangle of Oxford, London and Cambridge. But Bogue was overruled by the head of the board — a Mancunian — and ICI settled for a site near Fulshaw Hall. This became Alderley Park, for decades the region’s most important pharmaceutical research centre. 19 Bogue himself settled in Bowdon, where he was to become a friend of Turing’s mentor Max Newman. 20

Figure 9. Rupert Shephard, A Penicillin Factory: Girls Filling Bottles, 1945. A fermentation plant was used at ICI’s Trafford Park to develop the mass production of penicillin.

In the food industry, Robert McDougall had been the local patriarch of a national milling and chemical concern, whose most visible Manchester legacy today is the Rank Hovis (McDougall) grain elevator behind the Imperial War Museum North. There were multiple fortunes to be made: a German engineer, Henry Gustav Simon, came to Manchester as a penniless refugee in 1860 and developed a flour rolling mill for the McDougalls. The fortune that Simon made from this invention in turn funded the building of the Physics Laboratory at the University. It was in a building funded from Simon’s wealth that the atom would be split and the world’s first computer program run. The family money also enabled the public service of his son Ernest Simon and Ernest’s wife Shena Simon, who would both long be linked with Manchester City Council and with the University. 21

Post-war Manchester, then, had declining industries but also growing ones. In 1949 military contracts were declining and Manchester’s firms were trying to resume consumer production, but Ferranti, for example, found it hard to sell radios from its reopened Moston line because of the lack of consumer credit. 22 It would still be the defence budget, and the personal connections of the science war, that caused the great post-war innovation of the electronic computer to appear in Manchester. Creating that new technology meant recruiting another new generation of incomers, and at first they did not like what they saw.

Figure 10. ICI’s pharmaceutical division library bookplate showed its heritage in the dyestuffs trade, and a certain pride in its highly industrial Blackley birthplace, even as it moved to a new, greenfield site in Alderley Park.

Figure 11. The war caused a temporary halt in the decline of the UK’s cotton exports, but foreign competition rapidly recovered.

Industrial Dismal

There is a rich, coal-black seam of tales of arriving in Manchester. Today we read a blackened urban environment as a clear sign of economic decline, but around the time of the war, the recurrent first impression was not neglect but activity.

Civilian Manchester had not been untouched by the Second World War. As well as the death and injuries to family members directly engaged in fighting, and the privation of a war economy, bombing killed hundreds of people and left derelict sites in the centre of Manchester. 23 But as Bernard Lovell, later the creator of Jodrell Bank, almost lamented ‘Manchester had been bombed but by no means devastated. In particular the dark grime-encrusted Victorian buildings of the University and the surrounding dreary slums had survived unscathed’. 24 Independently of the Luftwaffe, Manchester’s houses were simply falling down at the rate of two a day in 1944, a fifth of what still stood post-war was unfit for human habitation, and all was filthy. 25 A commuter from Altrincham arriving by train at Manchester Central, and seeking the University on the Oxford Road, would on their way pass slums intermingled with the municipal gas works and the coal-burning industry which penetrated into the centre of the city. Ernest Simon, a local cheerleader for post-war University expansion, frankly described it as in a ‘blighted area, dirty and depressing’. But we have to be careful not to jump too easily from the dirty into the dismal. The removal of soot from the London Road Fire Station was an annual ritual. The station had been built in 1906 by the Manchester Corporation with a façade of glazed terracotta specifically so that it could be cleaned in this way. A new arrival, as Turing was in 1949, emerging from Piccadilly Station, would see a modern building, sometimes dirty but proudly and expensively maintained. In 2017, the building was again filthy, this time as a consequence of a long period of private sector neglect; it took the combination of the public in the form of dogged legal action by the City Council and other private investment to clean it in that year. Today’s visitor to Piccadilly can see a clean building too, but the implication of clean and dirty has changed. 26

Sometimes the smut newcomers saw was vulgarity, such as when broadcaster Olive Shapley arrived at Piccadilly station in 1934 to ‘a surprising number of advertisements for trusses’. But much more often it is literal smut which is prominent in their memories: as in historian AJP Taylor’s memoir of arriving in 1930 to a city ‘very dirty, the buildings begrimed’, or in Geoff Tootill’s recollection of coming after the war to work on the computer, and noting the black marks settled on children’s faces. Marcelle Kellermann, arriving in 1946 after a war spent working for the French Resistance, came to Manchester through marriage to her physicist husband. At first she admired the resemblance to the quartz-black townscapes of the Auvergne; it was only when her husband stopped their taxi and used a penknife to cut through the grime on one building that she realised the stones were not granite. In 1933 the physicist Hans Bethe at least had the benefit of low expectations: ‘Manchester is attractive well beyond my expectations. The city is not even anywhere near as dirty as I had remembered it’. Another physicist, Rudolf Peierls, found the buildings both dirty and in a poor Victorian taste, aggravated by a fog, though one would think that would have helped. The ‘soot-black’ place was nevertheless made pleasant by ‘the warm and friendly nature of the local population’, a trope which often recurs. When John Barbirolli arrived at Piccadilly in 1943 to discuss leading the Hallé Orchestra he was whisked straight to the Midland Hotel by taxi so that he should ‘see as little as possible of the city’ but he too said that Manchester was good for those ‘who can be oblivious to their surroundings provided they are content in their work’. Physicist Bernard Lovell ‘had spent my life in the West Country and all that I had ever heard about Manchester appalled me’ but he saw ‘attributes more valuable than the superficial rain and fogs that confronted us’. When mathematician Mary Lee Woods arrived at Piccadilly and took a bus up the Oldham Road to the Ferranti factory, the view out of the bus window was so grim she resolved ‘never, never, never will I live in this ugly place’, but the interview, for the brand-new job of computer programmer, was so exciting that she changed her mind.

Figure 12. The University in a 1937 watercolour commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce for its promotional booklet Manchester: Heart of the Industrial North. Although the accompanying text frankly acknowledges that the city was undergoing a serious economic recession, the images show a bright, well-ordered city.

Figure 13. The cleaning of London Road Fire Station, an annual event until stopped by union pressure in 1957.

Figure 14. Bomb damage map of central Manchester, 1941. There had been small raids on Greater Manchester every few nights from July 1940 onwards; ‘Manchester’s Blitz’, on two nights just before Christmas 1940, killed over 500 people. There were a dozen more small raids in 1941, and the last in 1942.

Figure 15. James Chettle’s 1941 War Memorial, with the Grand Hotel on Aytoun Street visible through the bomb ruins around Piccadilly.

Figure 16. Manchester & District Planning Exhibition 1945 was designed to show the public how planners would sweep away not just military damage but decades of poor housing.

Chemist Noel Hush, coming from Australia, may too have found Manchester a new Athens, but nevertheless saw ‘it was black with soot. Even the hedges were black with soot. It was freezing cold in the winter’. Hush also recalled a side effect of bomb damage to the Free Trade Hall: the Hallé was having to play in a large tent alongside the zoo out at Belle Vue, and during the slow movements a lion’s roar or hyena’s scream would contribute. But the Hallé was nevertheless playing, in a symbol of Manchester’s proud place in the world, and when the Hallé returned to the Free Trade Hall in 1951, Ferranti built an electronic tuning fork into the stage for it. Another chemist, John Polanyi, grew up in the city rather than migrating to it, and remembers his family in a ‘vigorous social-cum-intellectual life’ in a milieu of professors but also ‘remarkable doctors, lawyers, factory and mill owners, people connected with the art galleries, the Northern Service of the BBC, the Manchester Guardian and the odd (really quite odd) aristocrat — a remarkable village community drawn together by a liveliness of mind through which they triumphed over the nastiness of their environment’. 27

Figure 17. Manchester’s increasing prosperity drove higher demand for water, and wartime interruption to infrastructure development meant that by 1945 dry periods saw regular official warnings of shortages and standpipes.

The nastiness was supposed to be temporary. Much of the centre of Manchester was designated as the site of the nation’s first ‘smokeless zone’ in 1946, although it was not to come into effect until 1952. 28 Slum clearance had been planned since at least 1935, and was a clear promise in 1945, inherent in the richly visual, if illusory, Manchester City Plan, though large-scale clearance didn’t restart until a decade after that. 29 One of the largest pre-war schemes had been Wythenshawe, conceived in the 1930s as a new garden city, with considerable political and financial backing from Ernest and Shena Simon. As soon as war was over the Council restarted buying up land there but the immense need meant that the density of housing increased, the build quality decreased, and local amenities were endlessly postponed, so that the garden suburb started a long decline in reputation. 30

Pre-war Manchester had a fast-growing thirst for clean water, and for all the rainfall jokes the Corporation had difficulty in bringing enough from the surrounding hills. Though there were ambitious plans to remedy this, they had been slowed by recession and then war, and 1947 saw threats that water would be cut-off for 12 hours a day. The great Victorian reservoir at Thirlmere in the Lake District had been supplemented with an even larger one at Haweswater in 1941, but the old aqueduct to Manchester had a very small capacity. It was not until 1948 that funding was secured to build a second route, and a further seven years to finish the work, culminating in the Heaton Park pumping station which was proudly decorated with a large mural designed by local sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe. But the funding was found, and all the smut in the air was not unrelated to the promise of economic power to support science and the humanities too, not to mention a deep pool of technological knowhow. 31

The industrial basis of the city was continually generating possibilities for new science. There were a series of boosterish reports on how the region and the University had a mutually beneficial relationship, though occasionally a sardonic tone was smuggled in: ‘The climate of Manchester provides special opportunities for research into the effects of damp and smoke on human psychology and physiology’. The reports were created by a committee partly comprising University Professors like Blackett, Williams and Polanyi but in fact was largely the creation of the cotton trade administrator Raymond Streat, who recorded how Blackett had been ‘snooty and difficult to a degree’. They could have added Darwinism to the special opportunities too: the dark tint of the peppered moth in a polluted landscape is now a textbook example of evolution, and the first genetically blackened example ever caught was in Manchester. 32So as the 1950s dawned, Manchester was still a dirty, slum-ridden city, short of water despite all the drizzle, but well-publicised improvement plans were in place and intellectual culture was not bowed. Literary critic Frank Kermode did not arrive until 1958; he still found it dirty but: ‘the university had a kind of grim friendliness and a justified assurance of its own value, at a time when the metropolitan claims of Manchester were weakening but still pretty strong...the mood of the place was always to oppose the south, and the university had, or professed no inferiority feelings about the ancient universities; if bright people came to Manchester, sharpened their talents, and left for Oxbridge, that was their business and they might well come to repent their foolishness in leaving a serious place for institutions that devoted themselves to feasts and gaudies…But the city had more to give than the dense fogs, industrial filth and bronchitic subclimate that depressed most newcomers’. 33

Figure 18. Age-related grime in St Peter’s Square in 1961. The three-storey building on the right housed the Clarendon Club.

Figure 19. Mitzi Cunliffe’s mural on the Heaton Park pumping station, 1955, the only post-war building in England listed solely for its sculpture.

Figure 20. Manchester’s last tram ran in 1949. The removal of the service had been planned as early as 1929, and when it did occur represented a significant investment in new petrol motorbuses which were more comfortable and efficient.

Although Kermode had arrived with southern prejudices he soon found he was wrong to think of Manchester as a place of scholarly deprivation. Kermode found, behind black walls on Deansgate, the John Rylands library to be a wonderfully lavish place, a product of Victorian cotton riches, as was the Hallé Orchestra, and found that ‘fun’ of a superior sort was guaranteed by the presence of The Manchester Guardian. But these three institutions were essentially nineteenth-century creations of the cotton trade and could also now be seen as leftovers struggling to find a new role. And despite living out in the Cheshire fringe and driving tediously into work each day, in the end Kermode left Manchester for the south after being advised his bronchitic children needed cleaner air.

There had been a sense in the University between the wars that it could not keep up with the pace at which Cambridge, Oxford and London were expanding research. Manchester University lost not just Rutherford and then his successor Bragg from its prized Physics department, but also what the University hierarchy was heard to call a whole ‘first class waiting room for the career train south’. 34 But every departure of an established Professor created an opportunity for a new and younger one: in Blackett as in his predecessors, the University had recruited a Nobel Prize winner before they had been recognised as such. And new state funding allowed the post-war University to make ambitious expansion plans which it started on as early as 1951, although completing them took decades.

Both pre- and post-war, then, Manchester was an ugly city, but one of promise, and two couples, the Blacketts and the Newmans, separately drawn to this opportunity, were to be crucial in the story of both the Manchester computer and of Turing.

Figure 21. Post-war Manchester was the subject of multiple planning documents with different agendas depending on their source. This 1947 illustration of planned population density, with Manchester at the centre, is from a county-level plan that did not want to see large-scale movement of people away from the industrial centres into the surrounding land.

The Manchester Mindscape

The two Pat Blacketts

In 1937, Patrick Blackett arrived to cut a dash as Manchester’s Professor of Physics. He came to chair what was perhaps the only part of the University with an international research reputation, and he and his wife would successfully deploy their charm to keep it that way. Pat and Pat Blackett were a glamorous and successful couple. Patrick was a Naval officer, a Nobel Prize-winner, and an ethical thorn in the paw of British defence policy even as he worked at the highest level of the state. It can’t have hurt that Patrick was very handsome, his chiselled face evident in every photograph. His wife, often called Pat though her actual name was Costanza, also offered an educated, polyglot charm: to be invited into their home was to feel part of a community, not just of cosmopolitan intellectuals, but attractive ones at that. In the autobiographies of Patrick’s scientific juniors, a sense comes through of a couple that shone in a dreary world: Bernard Lovell recalled his own wife saying Blackett was the only man she would have left him for. 35

Blackett had been schooled at Naval College and saw action at sea in the First World War. He noted that German ships had much more accurate firing techniques than the Royal Navy, but when he found his own superiors intellectually uninterested in improving gunnery technique, he started to lose interest in a career under the men of action. In 1919, Britain’s surviving elite young men were sent to belatedly catch up on their studies, and Blackett was accordingly despatched by the Navy to Cambridge. It was when he wandered into Ernest Rutherford’s