The Imitation Game

There is no reply to the taunt that ‘You Have No Sense of Humour’. Apart from the fact that, in all such arguments, while you're explaining, you're losing, there are other difficulties. For a start, it doesn’t mean what it appears to mean. I have come away from broadcast discussion programmes or debates in which I have won the best laughs of the evening, and been told by those who watched to ‘lighten up’ and ‘smile more’, and of course that ‘I have no sense of humour’.

 

What it means is ‘You do not share *my* sense of humour, or that of the majority of people present’.

 

In other words: ‘You are different from me and my friends, and therefore inferior’.

 

Humour’s a strange thing, often foolishly mistaken for happiness. Laughter is often a badge of belonging, a noisy way of affirming our membership of the crowd we’re in. Sometimes my homebound train is invaded by football fans, and I can bear almost everything, the tuneless singing, the loud swearing, the needless shouting and banging and the aggressive swaying down the aisles, the enveloping  miasma of lager fumes. But the repeated hee-haw of loud, fake communal laughter (nothing could be that funny) is deeply dispiriting.

 

There are other kinds of laughter which are nearly as horrible, especially the high-pitched giggle of the intellectual. Real laughter (I tend to think) is involuntary, and emerges as a sudden shout, a snort, or silent shaking accompanied by tears of mirth streaming uncontrollably down the face.

 

Anyway, all this is a preliminary to some thoughts about the much-praised new film ‘The Imitation Game’, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley.  I watched it last night in a crammed cinema (I assume it’s the strange Cumberbatch magic that brings them in, a magic brewed mainly from his stardom as a new kind of Sherlock Holmes, beautifully designed for the 21st century, without the heart, the romance or the originality).

 

And quite close to me a young woman fell for every single crude laugh-line. Most of the audience had the decency to laugh at only about one in ten of these supposed jokes. But this person was so transported that she forgot the basic rule of laughter – do it in company. I suppressed my rare snorts of amused contempt, though everyone within ten feet of me could have heard the low rumble of my eyes rolling in scorn.  

 

Oddly enough, this is the second attempt to make a drama out of events at the Bletchley Park codebreaking establishment, the first being ‘Enigma’, based on a Robert Harris novel, made in 2001, with Kate Winslet instead of Keira Knightly. Love interest is important in such productions, but I suspect that the women of Bletchley were not much like either of these striking young women.

 

Harris’s reasonably successful book made a clever connection between Bletchley and the Katyn massacre of Polish army officers by the Soviet NKVD, a crime which it suited many people, for many years, to lay at the door of the Germans. The film, from what I can recall of it, was a bit silly (it even contained a car chase, rather hard to stage with the vehicles and English roads of the time). And I’ve no doubt it was full of the usual anachronisms but I can’t recall what they were.

 

This one (I’ll get this over because at least one reader is sick of me pointing these things out) makes the usual mistake of thinking that if you get some old cars, hire a steam engine, get the clothes right (acres of tweed), distribute red lipstick to the women and hair-oil to the men, and make  everyone smoke all the time, you’ve recreated the past. You haven't.

 

In the past, people didn’t talk about others being ‘radicalised’. They didn’t say ‘Omigod!’. They didn’t fall about and embrace each other when they succeeded at their tasks.  They didn’t make sexual jokes in mixed company. The police hardly used cars at all, and certainly wouldn’t have driven to a burglary.  The silly scene in which the brilliant Cambridge mathematician Joan Clarke (in reality a perfectly ordinary-looking, bespectacled young woman very unlike Keira Knightley) is snubbed and refused entry to a suppsoedly top-secret codebreaker’s examination because she is female) seems to me to be infuriatingly superior and unlikely.  How coudl she even be in a top-secret building for a top-secret examination if she hadn't been invited?  And how could the person in charge not know that one of the examinees was female?

 

And I objected strongly to the portrayal of the Bletchley Commanding Officer,  Commander Alastair Denniston, as nothing but an obstruction. Can this really have been true?

 

Once again, the clothes are right but the portrayal is wrong. Commander Denniston is shown wearing the distinctive wavy rank stripes of a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) Commander, which he was. The RNVR was in fact known as ‘The Wavy Navy’ because of its very different uniform. But he is made by the scriptwriters to refer to himself as being part of the ‘Royal Navy’, which I doubt very much an RNVR officer would have done, the RNVR having its own pride, and its members being reluctant to claim to be regulars.

 

A few other quibbles.  There is not and so far as I know never has been such a rank as a ‘Gunnery Ensign’ in the Royal Navy, though the US Navy still has ‘Ensigns’ .  ‘Honour’ is spelt with a ‘u’ in Britain. Military Policemen looked gaunt and terrifying, not like the mild-faced pasta-fed new Brits in unconvincing red caps that feature in the film, looking more like porters at American railroad stations, as seen in 'North by Northwest'  than military policemen. (Did someone order the wrong kind of Redcap?) The chief of the secret Intelligence Service could not , I think, have been telephoned by an unnamed outsider on an open line. Educated people pronounced the ‘hom’ in homosexual’ to rhyme with ‘bomb’, not with  ‘dome’ (It’s a Greek root, you see, not a Latin one).  

 

But they would have been unlikely to use it at all, or even allude to the existence of homosexuals, a subject regarded as embarrassing and unmentionable in an age when embarrassment was a much more potent force than it is now.

 

My favourite total misunderstanding of the past in the film was the label on a compartment window in a supposed 1939 train, saying ‘Standard Class’. This euphemism for ‘the cheaper seats’ is very much a feature of the present day, dating from 1987. In 1939, they would have been more honest, and said ‘Third Class’ (in those days there was no ‘Second Class’. That was reintroduced in 1956, when ‘Third Class’ was abolished). I laughed and laughed (silently) that anyone can have believed that such a term would have been in use in those franker (about most things) days.  

 

For the first 30 or so years of my life, hardly anyone knew about Bletchley or Alan Turing. The film claims that Bletchley was kept secret for 50 years, which would mean until 1995, and I am sure that it was well-known by then. A book called ‘The Ultra Secret’ was published in 1974 by Frederick Winterbotham and was by no means the first mention of the secret in public.

 

I am genuinely unsure if modern claims of its huge importance (that it ‘shortened the war’ by two or four years) are true. Espionage needs to secure and maintain budgets, and to be mythologized in popular ways, and today’s GCHQ and NSA benefit from the belief that Ultra was decisive, so I hope readers will forgive me for being a little sceptical about these assertions.

 

As the film quite rightly if rather crudely makes clear (in an absurd episode in which one of the codebreakers has to remain silent about information which might have saved a naval convoy in which his brother is a ‘gunnery ensign’), Bletchley would have been useless the moment the Germans realised that we had cracked their codes. We had to be very careful what we did with the information. So its actual application in combat was limited, and had to be covered by credible alternative explanations.

 

It might well have tipped the balance in the Battle of the Atlantic against the U-Boat menace, but then again, so did the extreme dedication of those engaged in this fight, such as Captain Frederic John ‘Johnnie’ Walker, who died of exhaustion in 1944 after a distinguished and gruelling period of unrelenting battle against the U-boats, from which he would not rest (His son, a submariner, died in action in the Mediterranean). One might add that the concentration of the RAF on bombing German civilians weakened the enormously important RAF anti-submarine operations. Given that its product cannot have been fully shared with Stalin,  It is hard to see that it can have turned the balance on the Eastern Front. But I’m open to persuasion.

 

The real issue here is, of course, the rehabilitation of poor Alan Turing, who fell foul of the stupid laws of the time (the so-called ‘Blackmailer’s Charter’, repealed at last in 1967) which made homosexual acts a criminal offence.  He was abominably treated, though the offer of hormone treatment to repress his sexual urges (‘chemical castration’) was viewed by the authorities of the time as a humane alternative to prison.

 

Quite rightly, everyone now recognizes that this was wrong. Quite rightly, it is now clear that Turing was a considerable genius, a truth only partly understood in the pre-computer age of the 1940s and 1950s.

 

Restitution is impossible for these failings, as Alan Turing is dead, and in terrible circumstances. His mother never believed he had killed himself, but it is the general view. We don’t know why, for certain, though it is easy to speculate that public humiliation, combined with the (no doubt very disturbing) effects of the hormone treatment were to blame.

 

Whether a posthumous pardon does any good, it is hard to say. In any case, what about the many thousands of others, similarly ruined and dragged through the slime, according to the laws and customs of the time? Many are still alive. Just because they were not incomparably brilliant codebreakers and computer scientists, does that mean that they too must endure criminal records?  Hard to see why. It’s an odd situation, deeply unsatisfactory. Part of me thinks that we just ought to recognize that the past was as it was, and look for failings in the present rather than handing out posthumous pardons to make ourselves feel better about ourselves. That is what we were like. If we admit that, then we might be better at discovering what are we doing now that we will one day feel equally sorry for? It’s no good looking down on our dead forebears, while failing to examine our own conventions and customs with a critical eye.

 

I’ll make a small suggestion in that direction in a later article.

 

But I’d also like to say that I’m sorry that Turing’s childhood and schooldays have been so gloomified in the film. My reason for saying this is a charming and touching memoir by his nephew, Sir John Dermot Turing, published (alas behind a pay wall) in The Times newspaper of Friday 14th November. It is worth getting hold of.

 

He casts some doubt on the suggestion that his uncle was bullied at Sherborne, which his parents chose for him precisely because it was then ‘more relaxed and accommodating’ and ‘had a more progressive outlook’ than most such schools of the time. Sir John says that his uncle hung a Foucault’s Pendulum in the staircase of his boarding house in his final year, adding ‘ If you’ve been relentlessly bullied and are retreating into a tiny shell it’s not something you would do’. As for the touching friendship with the boy ‘Christopher’, (Christopher Morcom), points out that the friendship lasted only 15 months (until Christopher’s premature death at 18 from Bovine TB, then an incurable scourge).  Sir John says that his friendship with Christopher’s mother, a wealthy and bohemian sculptress, lasted for ten years. The story sounds happier than its portrayal. Pre-1939 England was not as uniform or as crabby as people think it was. The past is another country. They do things differently there. And one day, today will be a long time ago, and others will wonder at how we behaved, and get it wrong.