Bank of England Honours Alan Turing on £50 note

Bank of England Honours Alan Turing on £50 note

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre that produced Ultra intelligence. For a time he led Hut 8, the section that was responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. Here, he devised a number of techniques for speeding the breaking of German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

Turing played a pivotal role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements, including the Battle of the Atlantic, and in so doing helped win the war. Due to the problems of counterfactual history, it's hard to estimate what effect Ultra intelligence had on the war, but at the upper end it has been estimated that this work shortened the war in Europe by more than two years and saved over 14 million lives.

Adam Meredith Champion Bridge Player 


Born in Bangor, County Down, Ireland, (now Northern Ireland), to Hugh Owen Meredith and Olive Christabel Margaret Meredith Little is published about his early life, excepting that he was well educated.

Fearlessly honest, he refused to claim his ill-health from severe asthma and acute diabetes as a basis to avoid military service for World War II and instead registered as a conscientious objector.

Initially allocated to work as an ambulance driver and ARP warden, he was petitioned against by those who objected to working with "conchies" (conscientious objectors) and was reassigned to farm work, highly problematic for an asthmatic.

It was no secret, however, that for a great deal of the war he was in London; and when he was in London, he was playing cards. After the war, he spent months each year in the south of France where the dry climate helped his asthmatic lungs.

Adam Meredith was passionately artistic with interests in ballet and theatre. When the Ballet Nègre (a creation of Katherine Dunham) came to London "and teetered between success and failure ... he backed it with hard-earned savings he had amassed at bridge.

At bridge he liked to seize the initiative early in a match; some of his bidding manoeuvres (which often centred round the spade suit) became legendary. He was also a remarkable dummy player.[5] Regarding his fondness for the spade suit, Victor Mollo wrote: "No man, no three men, for that matter, have bid spades so often or so devotedly as Plum."Mollo also wrote that he "has been known to play brilliantly after despatching eleven glasses of green Chartreuse"