Helen Fry
Reflections of Alan Turing by his Nephew
Summary
Dr Helen Fry speaks with Dermot Turing, the nephew of codebreaker Alan Turing who worked at Bletchley Park in World War II. Dermot discusses the myths surrounding his uncle and his real legacy.
Helen Fry
Helen Fry has authored and edited over 25 books covering the social history of the Second World War, including British Intelligence and the secret war, espionage, and spies, as well as MI9 escape and evasion. She is the foremost authority on the “secret listeners” who worked at special eavesdropping sites operated by British Intelligence during WWII. Helen is the official biographer of MI6 spymaster, Colonel Thomas Joseph Kendrick. She has also extensively written about the 10,000 Germans who fought for Britain during WWII. Helen has appeared in a number of documentaries and has provided advisory services for TV and drama. She also appears regularly in media interviews and podcasts. Helen is an ambassador for the National Centre for Military Intelligence (NCMI) and serves as a trustee of both the Friends of the Intelligence Corps Museum and the Medmenham Collection. She works in London.
Dermot Turing
Dermot Turing is the award-winning author of X, Y and Z: The Real Story of How Enigma Was Broken and has written numerous other books relating to his famous uncle, Alan Turing, codebreaking, and computing history. He is also a regular speaker at historical and other events. He began writing in 2014 after a career in law. Dermot worked for the Government Legal Service and then the international law firm Clifford Chance, where he was a partner until 2014. As well as writing and speaking, Dermot is a trustee of the Turing Trust and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford.
This is a good question and thank you for asking. I would very much like people to think like Alan Turing and move away from thinking about the past and having a sort of fuzzy, nostalgic, feel-good view about World War II, which really we shouldn’t have feel-good thoughts about World War II. What we should be doing is, if you were putting yourself into Alan Turing’s shoes, is to look ahead into the future because that’s what he did all the time. He was always inventing things and trying to imagine a new world. So let’s look forward. And I think what we would be regarding as his legacy as being to think about technology, to think about its role in the world that we’re about to embark upon, think about computing machines and whether things like AI will be problematic for us. Let’s continue that debate. And I think he would also want us to honour our kids and make sure that kids grow up infused by the idea of science and mathematics and technology and to embrace that. So if you’ve got girls at school who are wondering whether to go into technology type specialisms and careers, by all means, encourage them ‘cause he would have been very enthusiastic about that. His research students were women. So I think we should think of that part of his legacy. So look forward, not back. And let’s think about technology.