Rare Alan Turing papers narrowly escape shredder to be auctioned off in Lichfield
After narrowly avoiding a shredder in Lichfield, scientific papers written by Alan Turing are expected to fetch thousands at auction.
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Jim Spencer, director of Rare Book Auctions, who are handling the auction, described the collection as ‘the most important archive’ he had ever handled.
The collection was gifted to Mr Turing’s friend and fellow mathematician Norman Routledge by Turing’s mother, before being stored in Routledge’s niece’s loft following his passing in 2013.
Mr Spencer said: “Nothing could've prepared me for what I was about to find in that carrier bag.”
"These seemingly plain papers - perfectly preserved in the muted colours of their unadorned, academic wrappers - represent the foundations of computer science and modern digital computing.
"Literature has always been my forte, not mathematics, so the past few months of intensively researching and cataloguing these papers has left me feeling that Alan Turing was superhuman.
“For me, it's like studying the language of another planet, something composed by an ultra-intelligent civilisation.”
The collection includes Mr Turing’s personal signed copy of his PhD dissertation from 1938-39, Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals, which has been individually valued at over £40,000.
One of Mr Routledge’s nieces explained how the papers were discovered: “Following his retirement from Eton College, Norman bought and lived in a house in Bermondsey.
“When he died in 2013, two of his sisters had the unenviable task of sorting through and emptying the contents. There were lots of personal papers which one sister carted away and stored in her loft.
“The papers lay dormant until she moved into a care home almost a decade later. Her daughters came across the papers and considered shredding everything.
“Fortunately, they checked with Norman’s nieces and nephews because he’d always been a presence in our lives.”
Despite his world-changing research, being the father of theoretical computer science and cracking the Enigma Code to help the Allies win the Second World War, Alan Turing died aged 41 in 1954, two years after his prosecution for homosexual acts and chemical castration.
