2007 Turing Memorial Lecture

About This Year's Lecture

To an excited full house in the Ballroom of the Mansion, Oliver Lawn related some of the codebreaking activities which followed Alan Turing's pioneering work on the breaking of the Enigma machine codes. He also gave a picture of what life was like for those working in wartime Bletchley Park. Oliver wrapped up by describing the explosion of public and media interest in wartime codebreaking after secrecy was eventually lifted in the 1970s. Oliver was accompanied by his wife Sheila who also worked at the Park during the War. The audience was very fortunate in that both Oliver and Sheila spent some time answering questions put to them about life at Bletchley and what followed afterwards.

About the Speaker

Oliver Lawn was born in 1918. He went to Kingswood School in Bath, and from there he won a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read Mathematics. On completing the Mathematical Tripos in June 1940 with Distinction, he expected to be called up into the Armed Forces. Instead he was recruited by Gordon Welchman to work with him in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park. He remained in Hut 6 until 1945, working as a member of the team of Mathematicians, and others breaking the Enigma codes used by the German Army and Airforce.

After the War, he joined the Administrative Home Civil Service, and worked in a number of fields in the Ministries of Works and Housing and the Department of the Environment until his retirement in 1978.

At Bletchley Park he met his future wife, Sheila, who had been recruited in 1943 as a Codebreaker/Linguist to work in the Naval Section. They met in the active Scottish Reels Club at Bletchley Park, and they married in 1948. Since secrecy was lifted, both Oliver and Sheila have been deeply involved in the extensive media publicity about wartime codebreaking.

About the Lecture Series

Each year, Bletchley Park hosts a lecture given by leading academics on aspects of Alan Turing's wartime achievements or academic work.

The eccentric British genius Alan Turing (1912-1954) is best known for his fundamental contributions to breaking German codes at Bletchley Park. Fellow codebreaker Jack Good summarised the importance of Turing's brilliant ideas like this: ‘I won’t say that what Turing did made us win the war, but I daresay we might have lost it without him’.

Turing's groundbreaking research at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester before and after the war trampled traditional academic boundaries, ranging as it did from mathematics and logic to biology, philosophy, and the study of the mind. The founding father of computer science, Turing also pioneered the fields now known as Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life.

The annual lectures aim to keep the memory of his achievements alive and make his life and work accessible to the general public.