DORSET.- To mark 100 years since Alan Turing (1912-1954) arrived at Sherborne School, a new exhibition explores the pioneering British polymath’s formative friendships, school years and ideas before his crucial role at Bletchley Park during WW2.

Today, Turing is famous not only for his role in breaking the Enigma code, but he is also widely regarded as the founder of modern computing and AI.

The exhibition, Turing Before Bletchley traces back to May 1926, when at the age of 13, Turing was enrolled at Sherborne School, then an independent boarding school in the picturesque Dorset market town, where he boarded at Westcott House. Turing’s first day of term coincided with the 1926 General Strike, but he was so determined to attend that he famously rode his bicycle 60 miles (97 km) from Southampton to Sherborne.

If this wasn’t remarkable enough, Turing had already travelled alone from Dinard in France, where his family were living, taking the ferry from Saint-Malo to Southampton, from where he intended to travel by train to Sherborne.

However, on arriving in England and discovering that no trains were running, Turing sent a telegram to his housemaster Geoffrey O’Hanlon at Westcott House informing him that he would be a day late arriving at Sherborne. Having brought his bicycle with him from France, he bought a map and set off for Sherborne.

This extraordinary story and many others from his early life are brought together in a fascinating display of archive material, photographs, school reports, transcripts and correspondence. The Sherborne’s new exhibition looks beyond Turing the codebreaker, to explore the young man whose ideas and relationships developed during his school years in the town.

Of course, as Turing is and always will be synonymous with Bletchley Park, Hut 8, and his vital codebreaking work, the exhibition will also give visitors a chance to see a rare replica of the Enigma machine at The Sherborne, placing Turing’s early life and personal story alongside the wider history of his wartime work, mathematics, computing and his extraordinary legacy.

Offering further insights into Turing’s early life and thoughts, high-quality facsimiles of selected correspondence, including previously unseen private letters between Alan and Christopher Morcom, his close friend at Sherborne will help visitors to explore and understand some of the highly personal strands of Turing’s story.





Turing Before Bletchley will be further accompanied by a programme of talks, family activities and codebreaking events throughout the autumn, including STEM workshops for children and special programming opportunities across the October half term holiday.

Alongside the scientific story, The Sherborne will explore some unexpected cultural connections. These include Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1898/99), a work created around a musical puzzle and portraits of the composer’s closest friends. Although unrelated to the Enigma machine, Elgar’s most famous work offers an intriguing parallel with Turing’s letters and the exhibition’s wider themes of friendship, hidden meaning, interpretation and unresolved questions.

“Before Bletchley Park, before the Enigma machine and before Turing became one of the defining minds of the twentieth century, there was Sherborne,” says Liz Gilmore, CEO of The Sherborne. “Our new exhibition will also explore the meeting point between art, music, mathematics and early computing, reflecting The Sherborne’s wider ambition to bring different disciplines together and inspire curiosity.”

Alan Turing was born on 23rd June 1912 in Maida Vale, London. His mother was Chief Engineer at the Madras Railway and his father was a Civil Servant. Turing did well at school and went on to study mathematics at Kings College - Cambridge, where he was awarded a first-class honour in 1934. He subsequently went on to obtain his PhD from the Department of Mathematics from Princeton in 1938.

Alan Turing joined the GC&CS – the forerunner to GCHQ - in September 1939 to help with the code-breaking effort during WW2, working alongside Gordon Welchman (1906-1985). Turing was a leading cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park and spearheaded the effort in Hut 8 focusing on the German Naval Enigma, where he worked closely with Joan Clarke (1917-1996).

Turing was inspired by those around him, using their knowledge and initiative as a foundation to develop further. In January 1940, Turing met with Polish counterparts who gave him the insights he needed to design the Bombe. The Bombe was the first special-purpose British cryptanalytic machine and made a major contribution to the exploitation of Enigma. The combination of the Bombe and the brilliant minds and perseverance of those working at Bletchley Park led to the breaking of Enigma.

After working on Enigma, Turing moved to the US where he worked on investigating secure speech systems and helped with the development of what would become the US cipher machine SIGABA. After his return to the UK in 1943 he developed a portable secure voice scrambler (codenamed Delilah). His skills at finding and exploiting weaknesses in other people’s systems made him best placed to design new secure systems.

In 1945, Turing moved on to work at the National Physical Laboratory in London. While there, he worked on the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) which was the first detailed design of a stored-program computer.

In 1948, Turing joined the Mathematics Department at Manchester University. A year later, he became Deputy Director of the Computing Machine Laboratory. Working with Max Newman (1897-1984), he led a team that produced Britain's first general-purpose stored programme computer (the Manchester Mark 1) and then the first commercial computer (the Ferranti Mark 1). In 1950, Turing turned his attention to artificial intelligence and proposed an experiment attempting to define a standard for a machine to be called “intelligent”, this became known as the Turing Test.

In January 1952, Turing was prosecuted for indecency over his relationship with another man in Manchester. In March 1952, Turing pleaded guilty to the charges and was given a choice between imprisonment and probation; he chose probation which was conditional upon him undergoing hormonal treatment intended to reduce his libido.

On the 8 June 1954, Turing took his own life.