A 'rare insight' into Alan Turing's mind: Unpublished papers sell at auction for £381,400 - revealing his attempts to develop a portable encryption system and voice scrambler

Alan Turing was a British mathematician born on June 23, 1912 In Maida Vale, London, to father Julius, a civil servant, and mother Ethel, the daughter of a railway engineer. His talents were recognised early on at school but he struggled with his teachers when he began boarding at Sherborne School aged 13 because he was too fixated on science. Turing continued to excel at maths but his time at Sherborne was also rocked by the death of his close friend Christopher Morcom from tuberculosis. Morcom was described as Turing's'first love' and he remained close with his mother following his death, writing to her on Morcom's birthday each year. He then moved on to Cambridge where he studied at King's College, graduating with a first class degree in mathematics.