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TURING (SARA) Six autograph letters signed ("E. Sara Turing", "Sara Turing" and "Sara"), to Hilla, widow of her son Alan's Jungian analyst Franz Greenbaum, Waterden Road, Guildford, 1964-1973 image 1
TURING (SARA) Six autograph letters signed ("E. Sara Turing", "Sara Turing" and "Sara"), to Hilla, widow of her son Alan's Jungian analyst Franz Greenbaum, Waterden Road, Guildford, 1964-1973 image 2
TURING (SARA) Six autograph letters signed ("E. Sara Turing", "Sara Turing" and "Sara"), to Hilla, widow of her son Alan's Jungian analyst Franz Greenbaum, Waterden Road, Guildford, 1964-1973 image 3
TURING (SARA) Six autograph letters signed ("E. Sara Turing", "Sara Turing" and "Sara"), to Hilla, widow of her son Alan's Jungian analyst Franz Greenbaum, Waterden Road, Guildford, 1964-1973 image 4
Lot 174

TURING (SARA)
Six autograph letters signed ("E. Sara Turing", "Sara Turing" and "Sara"), to Hilla, widow of her son Alan's Jungian analyst Franz Greenbaum, Waterden Road, Guildford, 1964-1973

24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £1,625 inc. premium

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TURING (SARA)

Six autograph letters signed ("E. Sara Turing", "Sara Turing" and "Sara"), to Hilla, widow of her son Alan's Jungian analyst Franz Greenbaum ("...I never forget his goodness to Alan & me... I look back with great gratitude to the welcome you all gave me so many years ago. It meant very much to me..."), sending news of herself and family, 15 pages, 8vo, Waterden Road, Guildford, 1964-1973

Footnotes

'THEY KNEW NOTHING ABOUT HIM!' — a touching series to the widow of the analyst whom her son Alan consulted in the last months of his life and to whose family he became particularly attached. Although in ignorance of his wartime work at Bletchley and writing decades before the rise of widespread computing and thirty years before the advent of the World Wide Web she wrote a pioneering memoir of her son, Alan M. Turing, published locally by Heffer's of Cambridge in 1959 (selling, so she told Lyn Newman, Librarian of St John's College, scarcely 300 copies).

The letters give glimpses of the slow growth of Alan's posthumous reputation. In 1964 Sara reports: "You will be pleased to hear that the Governors of Sherborne School have decided to name the new science block, now well under construction after Alan. It is to be the 'Alan Turing' block. His housemaster told me he was going to propose this so I prepared a short statement about Alan's achievements – for with one exception they knew nothing about him! I gather my bit of homework was appreciated. I don't think any modern scientist is commemorated there & no old Shirburnian". Two years later she tells her that "Robin Gandy seems to make little progress over getting Alan's 'Collected Works' published"; and in 1973 that "The Turing Museum has now been opened in Lauriston Castle on the outskirts of Edinburgh".

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