Alan Turing’s school report reveals little of his genius

Items from codebreaker's life - and death - go on display at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge

In 1929, a teenager's end-of-term report noted that his English reading was weak, his French prose was very weak, his essays grandiose beyond his abilities, and his mathematical promise undermined by his untidy work.

The report gave few clues that Alan Turing would come to be seen as a genius, a mathematician and computer pioneer whose codebreaking work at Bletchley Park helped shorten the second world war and whose name is given to a test for artificial intelligence.