Free Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges Page B

football (‘footer’) and cricket which for most boys would dominate the years at Sherborne and through which the emotional lessons were taught. Nor had the social changes of the Great War made any difference to the total, introverted, self-conscious system of house life, with its continuous public scrutiny and control of every individual boy. These were the true priorities.
    In one respect only a token concession had been made to Victorian reform. There had been a science master at Sherborne since 1873, but this was primarily for the sake of the medical profession. It was not for the Workshop of the World, stigmatised as too mundanely utilitarian in spirit tooccupy the time of a gentleman. The Stoneys might build the bridges of the Empire, but it was a higher caste which commanded them. Neither did science enjoy respect for its enquiry, irrespective of usefulness, into truth. Here again the public school had resisted the triumphant claims of nineteenth century science. Nowell Smith divided the intellectual world into Classical, Modern, and Science, in that order, and held that
     
it is only the shallowest mind that can suppose that all the advance of discovery brings us appreciably nearer to the solution of the riddles of the universe which have haunted man from the beginning …
    Such was the miniature, fossilised Britain, where masters and servants still knew their places, and where the miners were disloyal to their school. And while the boys were playing at being servants, loading the milk churns on to the trains until the strike was broken by the masters of their country, the shallow mind of Alan Turing had arrived in their midst. It was a mind that had no interest in the problems of would-be landowners, empire-builders, or administrators of the white man’s burden; they belonged to a system that had no interest in him.
    The word ‘system’, indeed, was one which was a constant refrain, and the system operated almost independently of individual personalities. Westcott House, which Alan joined, had taken its first boarders only in 1920, and yet already existed as though the traditional prefects and ‘fags’ and beatings in the washroom were laws of nature. This was true even though the housemaster, Geoffrey O’Hanlon, had a mind of his own. Then a bachelor in his forties, and nicknamed (rather snobbishly) Teacher, he had extended the original house building with his own private fortune derived from Lancashire cotton. He personally did not believe in moulding the boys to a common form, and failed to instil the religion of ‘footer’ with quite the enthusiasm of the other housemasters. His house enjoyed in consequence a dim reputation for ‘slackness’. He encouraged music and art, disliked bullying, and stopped the song-singing initiation soon after Alan arrived. A Catholic classicist, he was the nearest thing to a liberal government in the ‘nation in miniature’. Yet the system prevailed, in all but details. One could conform, rebel, or withdraw – and Alan withdrew.
    ‘He appears self-contained and is apt to be solitary,’ commented O’Hanlon. 16 ‘This is not due to moroseness, but simply I think to a shy disposition.’ Alan had no friend, and at least once in this year he was trapped underneath some loose floorboards in the house day-room by the other boys. He tried to continue chemistry experiments there, but this was doubly hated, as showing a swottish mentality, and producing nasty smells. ‘Slightly less dirty and untidy in his habits,’ wrote O’Hanlon at the end of 1926, ‘rather more conscious of a duty to mend his ways. He has his own furrow to plough, and may not meet with general sympathy: he seems cheerful, though I’m not always certain he really is so.’
    ‘His ways sometimes temptpersecution: though I don’t think he is unhappy. Undeniably he is not a “normal” boy: not the worse for that, but probably less happy,’ he wrote somewhat inconsistently at the end of the spring