Alan Turing watch sells for seven times estimate

A gold wristwatch thought to have belonged to Alan Turing has sold at auction for more than £75,000.

The watch had been expected to fetch up to £10,000, but sold for a hammer price of £58,000, rising to £75,400 with fees.

Auctioneer Richard Bromell said a similar watch without the Turing connection would normally sell for about £300 to £400.

"A lot of these things, they are bought with the heart, not necessarily the head," he said.

In 1976, the 9ct gold watch was given to a 15-year-old boy working at a hotel in Cheltenham by Joan Clarke, a fellow codebreaker and friend of Turing.

The boy was "perpetually late", prompting Clarke to gift him the watch to help him be on time. The auction house said it "sadly did not" improve his timekeeping.

Charterhouse Auctioneers said the watch was presented to Turing when he joined the University of Manchester in 1948.

Its case is engraved "Our New reader of Mathematics A M Turing U.O.M."

Bromell said it was not known when it came into Clarke's possession.

It was the first lot of the sale in Sherborne on Friday morning.

"I asked for £5,000 and the internet immediately jumped to £22,000, which doesn't normally happen like that," Bromell said.

It was bought by a bidder in central England who registered about 15 minutes before the sale, ahead of interest from Singapore and Switzerland.

Despite Turing's links to the town, where he attended Sherborne School from 1926 to 1931, Bromell said Charterhouse had never sold a Turing item before.

"There is so little out there," he said. "This is a very personal item, and something that he would have treasured."

Turing helped crack the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War Two and is widely seen as the father of theoretical computer science.

Clarke, who died in 1996, worked alongside Turing at Bletchley Park and was briefly engaged to him.