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The Turing enigma: Campaigners demand pardon for mathematics genius

He should have been hailed a hero for his wartime codebreaking. Instead he was prosecuted for his homosexuality and took his own life. So why has Britain never said sorry? Jonathan Brown reports

Alan Turing helped crack German Enigma codes during the Second World War

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Alan Turing helped crack German Enigma codes during the Second World War

He may have played a pivotal role in securing victory in the Second World War for his country six years earlier, but few outside the academic community would have recognised Alan Turing as he made his way down Manchester's Oxford Street shortly before Christmas in 1951. Someone who did notice the athletically-built scientist, however, was a young working class gay man called Arnold Murray.

Homosexuality was still illegal under the same repressive laws which had sent Oscar Wilde to jail half a century earlier. But regardless of the risk, the chance encounter was to develop into something more substantial and Murray spent a number of nights at the older man's modest home in suburban Wilmslow.

A month later, after Turing, a veteran of the then still secret Bletchley Park code-cracking team, had been giving a talk to the BBC on his pioneering work on artificial intelligence, he returned home to find his house burgled.

The culprit was an acquaintance of Murray's, who would prey on Murray's lovers, thinking they would be so afraid of being outed that they would not report the thefts to the police.

But Turing defied this convention and went straight to the police, where he admitted his affair – a "crime" for which he was spared the normal two-year jail term in favour of a hormonal treatment designed to beef up his masculine urges and suppress his homosexuality. The resulting publicity was to prove too much to bear and in June 1954, the 41-year-old was found dead in bed by his housekeeper. He had eaten an apple he had laced with poison.

The consequences which unfolded were not only a tragedy for Turing, his friends and family, it also robbed the world of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. Now campaigners are demanding an official apology from the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, recognising the "consequences of prejudice that ended his career". More than 700 people have signed a petition started by the leading computer scientist John Graham-Cumming on the Downing Street website, including gay rights campaigners, politicians and scientists.

"What really annoyed me about this was here was a man who died in his early 40s because he was a homosexual. He was a war hero but here was a part of our history that we were turning a blind eye to when we should be celebrating it. There were a lot of homosexual people during the war doing incredible work – if it was not for Turing we would most likely be having this conversation in German," Mr Graham-Cumming said.

Turing had already made major contributions to mathematics and the embryonic computing sciences before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939. But it was for his work among the wartime Enigma code crackers at Bletchley Park for which he will be best remembered. "Turing realised that we had to turn what was then a cottage industry of code breaking into a full scale industry. He was probably the most important person there," said Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust.

His "bombe" machine was able to rapidly de-code the 158 million, million, million variations used by the Nazis in their commands with the creation of a prototype high speed processor. It saved tens of thousands of lives and variations on the original helped both the British and the US to eventual victory.

But although he was, by any measure, a genius, Turing was an idiosyncratic figure bordering on the strange. A runner and rower of Olympic ability, he used to occasionally run the 40 miles between London and Bletchley to attend meetings. His behaviour and high-pitched voice drew furtive smiles from colleagues who tolerated his eccentricities such as chaining his tea mug to the radiator or riding his bicycle wearing a gas mask to avoid hay fever.

After the war, and having been awarded an OBE, Turing moved to the US to work at the National Physical laboratory where he began work on creating the stored-program computer but returned to Manchester in 1948, where he continued his pioneering work in the field of mathematical biology. But the arrest and conviction in 1952 for gross indecency shattered him. The chemical castration caused his breasts to enlarge and bloated his athletic physique. He was also banned from travelling to America. What followed was described by his biographer David Leavitt as a "slow, sad descent into grief and madness" and Turing began travelling abroad in search of sex safe beyond the reach of the British law.

Professor Richard Gill, Professor of mathematical statistics at Leiden University, is among those to sign the petition. "He was one of the geniuses of the 20th century and I have the feeling he was also a pretty decent guy. How his life ended was incredibly sad. In his last years he was thinking very deeply about some very difficult puzzles which give most people a bit of a headache. He was surely going further with this work and was certainly not finished yet," he said.

But there is another twist in the story of Alan Turing. Some have been moved to question whether he saw himself as a gay martyr. His chosen mode of death echoed his favourite fairytale Snow White, from which he was often moved to quote the phrase "Dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through". His family insisted his death was merely a tragic accident while others have even hinted more darkly at murder because the inquest was never to establish that the apple contained cyanide. Recent years have seen his reputation partly restored. A memorial statue has been erected on the fringes of Manchester's Gay Village while the city's inner ring road bears his name. An official apology, however, continues to elude him.

Homosexuality and the law: Why Alan Turing was considered a criminal

*The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act made any homosexual act illegal, even in private. Among the most famous prosecutions was that of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

*Section 11 stated that "any male person who, in public or private, commits ... any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour."

*This part of the Act was inserted at the last minute after being drafted by the MP Henry Labouchere. It did not fit in with the rest of the Act, which dealt with sex crimes relating to young women, but was still passed by the House of Commons.

*The amendment was described as a "blackmailer's charter" as it effectively outlawed any and every form of male homosexuality. It prompted a number of prosecutions.

*The Act was repealed in England and Wales in 1956, but homosexuality was not fully legalised until 1967.

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Comments

Heartbreaking....
[info]tal55 wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 07:24 am (UTC)
Turing's story is heartbreaking, and not because he was a great mind, but because he was a human being. But, then you add into that what he did for the war effort, and he becomes really tragic. I'm an American, and don't get me wrong, we've persecuted our quota of gay people. We're still doing it. But, Turing saved your lives, and you chemically castrated him for that. He is unspeakably sad. He deserves an apology, but I'm not sure that Gordon Brown is the right one to do it. It's probably the queen. (She'll get a capital-q if she actually does it.)
LINK
[info]sudseax wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 07:29 am (UTC)
[info]pefra wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 08:21 am (UTC)
i can't quite see the logic of an official apology only for turing. yes he was a genius who saved thousands of lives during the war, but if we're apologising on the basis of a bad law then surely we should have an apology to everyone who was affected by such a law - to every gay man who was persecuted due to their sexuality, not only to the geniuses
[info]iaintom wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 09:15 am (UTC)
Agreed pefra - there should be a pardon and apology to all gay people who were prosecuted.
Pardon?
[info]dydor wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 09:49 am (UTC)
If I represented someone who'd been persecuted to death by an inhuman law, I'd tell any representative of the authority that sanctioned the persecution to stuff their pardon.
Re: Pardon?
[info]iaintom wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 11:29 am (UTC)
Fair enough dydor - I hadn't realised the full meaning of "pardon". The government should retrospectively overturn all such convictions and apologise.
Apologise to whom
[info]forthurst wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 12:21 pm (UTC)
It is the politicians who need to apologise to the British people for destroying their mathematical genius and one who had done more than any man to advance the politicians' war against Germany.

I do not see Turing as a gay icon; I see his as a perfect example of the contempt which politicians have for their intellectual betters who nevertheless are not part of their world of self-serving skulduggery and vainglorious delusion. There is no possibility otherwise why Turing would not have been a national hero during his lifetime and whose foibles would quite simply have been overlooked.
Re: Apologise to whom
[info]sportingmac wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 12:29 pm (UTC)
Hear hear. How many genuises have died at the hands of lesser men who had only the wits to grab some limited political power. It makes you weep inside that we have killed off some great people in this way.
Very sad end and such a waste of a great mind
[info]sportingmac wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 12:25 pm (UTC)
Whatever the cause of his death it is a very sad loos to humanity. Maybe it is the Lib Dems who should be apologising - Gladstone was PM when teh law was passed. Or even Churchill since he was Pm when Turing was 'condemned'

I say this because I have no faith in Brown to do what needs to be done.
no mention I see
[info]goatjuggler wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 01:15 pm (UTC)
of british intelligence's concern that he was blabbing "their" strategically important computer secrets willy-nilly. A slightly over-zealous field officer might have thought the lack of one highly strung boffin was worth it to prevent the Sovs getting their hands on the thinking machine.

Or indeed of the mighty Tommy Flowers, easily as much a genius with his hands as Turing was with his brain and one of the little-sung heroes of early IT.
Laws may be unjust, but they are still laws
[info]flacksteen wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 01:19 pm (UTC)
While it would be nice to think that a progressive and caring sociey wod gradually dismantle repressive and vicous
There will always be laws
[info]flacksteen wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 01:35 pm (UTC)
Turing suffered because the law of the time said the way he behaved was wrong. A century earlier children were hanged for stealing small sums of money. Two centuries before that 'witches' were killed on nothing more than rumour. Today it is illegal to express intolerant views on many subjects - and those who are alleged to possess such views are not allowed to enter the country (these are new offences). None of this is "right" if you believe you can stand outside the society you live in and take a higher moral tone than anyone else. But you can't. If you are going to pardon Turing then there are many other candidates of equal or greater merit. It would be more appropriate to recognise his enormous contribution to computer science in a more whole-hearted way than hitherto. Galileo broke the religious laws of his days, but his reputation as a scientist and mathematician is nonetheless for that, nor should be Turing's.

As with Mozart, we will never know what Turing might have done if he had not died young, but most mathematicians do their best work well before the age of 40.
Giant
[info]turingstarpit wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 02:52 pm (UTC)
Turing is a hero. One of many from the day, all extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, who's work lay the foundations of so much that we take for granted today.

He wasn't a front page, muscle flexing hero, but a considered, self accomplished, human individual, devoted to his intellectual adventure.

Like so many giants, he became a victim of the prejudice of his day, and we can only imagine what he might have achieved in a different age ... what would he make of all of this web business? ;-)

We're still picking over his thoughts, and that is the legacy of a true thinker and paradigm shifter.

I've signed this petition because I think Alan Turing, and all of his team mates at Blechley and beyond, deserve to be recognised for some of the most astonishing achievements ever un-recorded.

I was born in Manchester, and I continue to have a successful career in IT. Both totally unrelated facts that somehow manage to point to Turing. Both facts I'm sure he could eventually relate to Zebra stripes ;-)
A Sad tale
[info]mowfalmighty wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 03:58 pm (UTC)
A really sad tale. An apology seems a bit late, somewhat pointless a bit tokenistic. What about an admission of regret that the system was wrong to persecute not only him but all the gays who were ostracised over the years, would this not be more appropriate? . Maybe they should put a statue of Turing in Westmister or something, he is afterall up there with Newton, Babbidge etc in terms of the originality of his scientific thinking.

tal55@ WHy on earth would we want the queen to do anything? Please note that the majority of British people do not recognize her or her families authority. and want rid of them. Tell you what you can have her for free, and yield to the yoke of imperial oppression, and take Charles and Philip and the no good princelings et al while your at it. Oh I forgot you yanks had the good sense get rid of them a few hundred years ago.
If Turing then all
[info]shah_kenaw wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 03:58 pm (UTC)
demanding an official apology from the Prime Minister Gordon Brown, recognising the "consequences of prejudice that ended his career"

I wonder who write this tripe. The prejudice did not end his career, it ended his life. The laws, as unjust as they were, were nothing but a concrete expression of this brutal intolerance. Allan touring is not, by any means the only person to have committed suicide when confronted with this prejudice. To this day thousands of teenaged children make the same choice every year. A pardon for Turing would be a drop in the bucket but at least it would be yet another break in this constant and idiotic barrage of discrimination.
Wrong
[info]bobbellinhell wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 04:02 pm (UTC)
I totally disagree with this - by seeking a pardon from the establishment, the campaigners are legitimising the original decision to prosecute.
Re: Wrong
[info]dydor wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 06:52 pm (UTC)
Exactamondo!
Turing moved to the US to work at the National Physical laboratory
[info]ffrancsais wrote:
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 at 09:46 pm (UTC)
Sincw when has Kew been in the US?
Petition
[info]rbgilbert wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 01:07 am (UTC)
The petition is available online at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/
[info]northwest0161 wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 03:56 am (UTC)
I would challenge the suggestion in the article that "resulting publicity was to prove too much to bear". Where is the evidence to suggest that? In the BBC Horizon programme "The Strange Life and Death of Doctor Turing" the people who knew him said he was laid back, even flippant, about what had happened. One suggested that perhaps he committed suicide because he knew he had done his best work.
Time to let his genius shine not his personal life
[info]lush_laroo wrote:
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 at 07:01 am (UTC)
A simply tragic death for such a great man both on the human and intellectual scale, what if only he lived? must be asked what could he have achieved?
What a barbaric treatment was meted out to him but remember the time in which he was maimed by those drugs.
My mother went to the dentist for tooth ache in 1951 and he after his advice took out all her teeth to obviate further problems such was the perceived wisdom in those dark dark days of rationing and post war austerity.
Let our memory be one of respect for such a great man a pardon will do nothing for his reputation it is like asking the Mongolian Government to make an apology for Genghis Khan for the murder of millions and the destruction of so many cities and societies i nAsia and Eastern Europe.
A hollow gesture with no meaning or resonance.
What Turing would have done next
[info]gill1109 wrote:
Friday, 21 August 2009 at 06:51 pm (UTC)
The Catholic Church has recently apologised about Galileo. Let the British Government show they are more enlightened and apologise for Turing. Of course countless other deserve apology too (from both quarters). But one should begin somewhere.

Turing's whole life was spent pondering on the meaning of thinking and being; on the paradox of consciousness in the physical object (human or machine). He was fascinated by choice, determinism, randomness, quantum theory. He was ahead of his time in seeing paradoxes in conventional quantum theory (recognised the possiblity of phenomena which the physicsts of his day poo-pooed but later have been rediscovered and confirmed by experiment). He was not just a brilliant but weird mathematician who might well have been burnt out by age 40 - he was a "homo universalis" whose range was ever broadening and whose depth was ever deepening.

So that just shows the stupidity of the mores of the time. It remains a human tragedy. The creative individual crushed by mediocrity and conventionality.

I recommend the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy's article about him which shows that he was much more than a computer nerd avant la lettre.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/
recognition for Alan Turing sans Englands' ego
[info]us_non_albion wrote:
Friday, 21 August 2009 at 09:12 pm (UTC)
Dear Steven Pruner, Please tell us in the US how to sign your petition to Downing Street asap as in yesterday. I do not have the words to tell the English People how I feel about their decision to hide Turing under the rug. I do not have the words! My name is Martin and I am at: evapat@charter.net in US. Thank you, Steven. England, thank you too.
Re: recognition for Alan Turing sans Englands' ego
[info]gill1109 wrote:
Saturday, 22 August 2009 at 07:08 am (UTC)
Premier Gordon Brown only allows Britains to sign petitions to him,
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/
Guildford
[info]zaphod_es wrote:
Monday, 31 August 2009 at 04:59 pm (UTC)
There is an Alan Turing Road in the Science Park in Guildford where he was brought up.

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=alan+turing+road+guildford&ie=UTF8&split=0&gl=uk&ei=0ACcSojOEZiQmAeKzcjIBA&t=h&z=16&iwloc=A
Why?
[info]anon_pwntage wrote:
Tuesday, 1 September 2009 at 10:40 am (UTC)
He won't hear the apology... unless you can deliver it to hell.
Long overdue
[info]majical1 wrote:
Tuesday, 1 September 2009 at 12:18 pm (UTC)
it would go a long way to recognising the witch hunts and scapegoating and it is symbolic of the persecution of thousands perhaps hundreds of thousands of gay men and women who were hounded and whose lives were ruined during the repressive years ,I believe it sets the historical record "straight " (pardon the pun ) , whilst it is not possible to make an apology to all those who suffered the repression of the past , an posthumous apology and pardon in respect and regard of Alan Turing would be representative historically of the damage done to hundreds of thousands who suffered and whose lives were damaged, careers ruined and lives taken during those times , it is a recognition officially of the persecution and mistreatment metred out to and leading to the untimely death of one of the greatest minds of his time . (others driven to suicide during this period were Brian Epstein, Joe Meek amongst many many countless others ).
When I sat by the Alan Turing statue in Sackville Gardens in Manchester I was moved to tears at the injustice and cruelty of a previous regime, and not only to Alan Turing.

I believe this to be an opportunity to pay homage to Alan Turing and to exact an apology and a pardon ,
JAW
[info]jaw999 wrote:
Friday, 4 September 2009 at 03:08 pm (UTC)
I am always astonished how no-one knows of this man - a ring road in Manchester was the only overall dedication to him for years and just recently a statue in Hyde Park in London.

He should have been named as one of the greatest Britains.

I would like to see the apology and then he might be better known.

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