Alan Turing -
The Persecution and Destruction of a Genius
by Paul Broadhurst
Chair of the Helpline
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If you were told that one man’s inventions were responsible for Britain winning World War II’s Battle of the North Atlantic, which it was believed by Winston Churchill to be essential to win if ultimate victory in the war against Germany was to be achieved, and the creation of the computer that you may well use, would you be able to name him?
The man’s name is Alan Turing, and the main reason that his name is not a household one, especially in an age when merely appearing in a TV show can bestow iconic status, is that he had the misfortune to have been a gay man at a time in our history when for men to have sexual relationships with other men was a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment, which it has to be said was an improvement on the previous century’s punishment of execution by hanging.
Alan Turing’s parents had met in India, and returned to England for Alan’s birth, but a few years later left him along with his brother in the care of a St. Leonards family and returned to India, where his father was a civil servant.
The house in which Alan lived for around eight years was Baston Lodge, on Upper Maze Hill, St. Leonards. On 23 June 2012, the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, I attended along with around thirty other guests including several councillors, and by invitation of the curator of Hastings Museum who organised the event, the unveiling of a blue plaque on the wall of Baston Lodge by Cllr. Alan Roberts, the Mayor of Hastings.
Prior to the unveiling of the plaque, an excellent and very informative short address was given by Cllr. Peter Chowney, the deputy leader of Hastings Borough Council on the life and work of Alan Turing, during which he mentioned that Alan was a gay man, and mentioned what he considered to be his appalling treatment by the authorities after they became aware of his sexual orientation.
At the age of fourteen, Alan became a pupil at Sherborne, the public school in Dorset, and it was there that he met a slightly older boy named Christopher Morcom, for whom he developed a very deep affection, and this may have been the first intimation that he had of his sexuality. A letter written by Alan Turing and included in a Science Museum, London exhibition on Alan Turing's work and life, which will continue until June 2013 is considered to be evidence that Alan was in love, albeit in a platonic manner with Christopher, and he was devastated when Christopher died of bovine tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. His death resulted in Alan becoming an atheist, although he retained the belief that after death the spirit continues to exist with the knowledge acquired during life still retained.
After leaving Sherborne, Alan went to King’s College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a first class honours degree in mathematics, his specialist subject. An early sign of the genius that Alan was to develop had come at an early age when he had taught himself to read within a matter of weeks.
Like many brilliant people, Alan Turing was unconventional to the point of eccentricity. He was considered to be socially inept, could be opinionated, outspoken, and moody, whilst at other times extremely witty. He was often seen to be strangely dressed, at times with a tie serving as a belt.
At the age of only twenty-two Alan became a Fellow of King’s College, and went on to publish in 1936 a paper he had written to which he gave the title On Computable Numbers, and which described a method of computation carried out on what became known as Turing machines, the theory of which forms the basis of all modern computers.
In 1938, with the prospect of another war with Germany looming, Alan was recruited by the Government Code & Cypher School, a code breaking organisation, which moved to Bletchley Park when war was declared in September, 1939.
Whilst working at Bletchley Park, Alan formed a romantic relationship with a fellow mathematician named Joan Clarke, and after Alan asked her to marry him they became engaged. Realising that he would be unable to forsake having relationships with men, Alan confessed his homosexuality to Joan, and although she was apparently not too seriously concerned and still wanted the marriage to go ahead, Alan decided it was unfair on Joan to do so, and he reluctantly ended the engagement.
Much of Bletchley Park’s work involved cracking the codes that the Germans used for communications. Supplies vital to pursue the war with Germany were being shipped from North America in convoys of ships from the beginning of the war, but they were frequently being sunk by Germany’s U boats that used coded messages for communications. Winston Churchill, believing that victory in the North Atlantic was essential if Britain was to go on to ultimately win the war decided that the Enigma coding machine, which was being used to daily change the codes the German were using, must be cracked at all costs, but was proving impossible to achieve.
Alan Turing led a team of experts working on cracking the Enigma, and he eventually devised a machine that could do so. This invention gave Britain the advantage that it needed in the North Atlantic battle, and by May, 1943 victory in the ocean had been largely achieved, although German U boats continued to sink some allied shipping until the end of the war in 1945.
Winston Churchill did not have a reputation for bestowing unwarranted praise, yet he is reported to have informed King George VI that had it not been for Alan Turing’s cracking of the Enigma coding machine, Britain would have lost the battle in the North Atlantic, the subsequent allied landings in France in 1944 could not have taken place, and the war with Germany would ultimately have been lost.
Some experts on World War II take the view that whilst cracking the Engima code was not essential to have been done to secure victory, that had it not been achieved the war would certainly have lasted for another two years, D-Day, the allied invasion of Europe would have been considerably delayed, and resulted in a considerable loss of life.
For someone who played such a decisive role during the war as Alan Turing, the recognition by the state of his wartime work was meagre in that he was only awarded an OBE, but this was because the nature of his work was so sensitive that it remained classified until many years after the war ended.
In 1945 Alan worked on the design of what he called the Automatic Computing Engine, and the first personal computer was based upon his invention. Alan Turing is today regarded with justification as the father of modern computer science.
After the war had ended Alan had gone to work on the development of computer science at Manchester University, and in 1952 a chance encounter in the city centre with a young man named Arnold whom he befriended was to set in motion a catastrophic sequence of events that would lead to Alan’s tragic death.
Alan invited Arnold to stay at his house, and they had a relationship, but Arnold betrayed Alan’s generosity by enabling someone whom he knew to burgle Alan’s house. The items stolen included a watch that had belonged to Alan’s late father and had a great sentimental value to him. Unable to secure the return of the watch, Alan made a complaint to the police that he had been burgled, and freely revealed when questioned the nature of his relationship with Arnold.
For a man possessed of such a brilliant mind, Alan Turing was in some ways extremely naïve, and he genuinely believed that as it was the role of the police to investigate crime that they would act upon his complaint and that he would receive justice, but by making his complaint he unwittingly became a victim yet again.
The wartime years had been ones of moral laxity brought on by the ever present fear that death could come at any time, which for many people, both military and civilian, it did. People’s attitudes to morality though can swing like a pendulum, and by the early 1950’s Britain was in the grip of a moral clampdown which included the rigorous prosecution of men who committed homosexual offences, for they were to remain criminal offences until reform of the law in 1967.
The police to whom Alan Turing reported the burglary of his home proved to be far more interested in his relationship with Arnold than in Arnold’s complicity in the burglary, and the consequence was that Alan Turing was charged and prosecuted for having committed homosexual acts, to which he pleaded guilty at his subsequent trial.
Had Alan Turing lied to police when questioned about his relationship with Arnold he may well have escaped prosecution, but he was open and honest about it, and ultimately paid a high price for doing so.
Somewhat unusually, Alan was given a choice of punishment by the judge at his trial. He was told that he could opt for a prison sentence or serve a period of probation on condition that he undertook to receive regular injections of female hormones to reduce his libido and supposedly render him asexual.
Fearing that serving a term of imprisonment would lead to the loss of the mathematics post that he held at Manchester University, and which gave him access to one of the world's only computers, Alan Turing agreed to be put on probation and he received regular injections of the female hormone stilboestrol. This was effectively a means of castration that any reasonable person would surely now consider to be barbaric because it resulted in Alan developing physical female characteristics along with severe mood swings and bouts of deep depression.
During conversations that Alan subsequently had with friends, he said that he deeply regretted having opted for the chemical treatment, and that he would not have done so had he been made fully aware of the effects of the treatment.
In the early 1950’s homosexual men were regarded as prime targets for blackmail, and a consequence of Alan Turing's conviction was that his security clearance was removed, resulting in the termination of his consultancy work for GCHQ. (The government's communications headquarters).
As well as being denied the opportunity to do some work, Alan believed that he was being spied upon by the security forces, which may well have been the case given that he had considerable knowledge of security matters which could be used by a foreign power, and he also believed that his friends were being subjected to surveillance, which had resulted in one in particular being unable to contact him.
The friend was a young Norwegian gay man whom Alan had met whilst on a holiday in Norway, and after sending a postcard to Alan informing him that he was coming to England and would visit him, he mysteriously never arrived, and Alan discovered that his friend believed that he had been followed around the country, was afraid for his safety, and returned home.
Severely distressed by the physical and mental effects on him of his enforced drugs treatment, Alan Turing died a few weeks short of his forty-second birthday. He was discovered by his cleaner, and although he was believed to have partially eaten an apple which was found near him and considered to be laced with cyanide, it was apparently never tested for traces of poison, and no suicide note was found, which led to some speculation that he may in fact have been killed by the security forces who regarded him as a threat to national security.
A theory was expounded at an Oxford conference on 23 June 2012 by the New Zealand professor Jack Copeland, an expert on Alan Turing, that his death was not caused by suicide, but was in fact accidental. A small room adjacent to Alan's bedroom, where he was discovered dead in bed, had been used by him as a laboratory, and a police sergeant who visited the house said that he detected a strong smell of bitter almonds in the laboratory, and which can be caused by cyanide fumes.
Professor Copeland's theory, which he supports by statements made by people who met Alan Turing in the days prior to his death that he displayed no signs of obvious depression, is that Alan had been working in his laboratory on the night of his death, gone to bed, and then inhaled lethal fumes from cyanide fumes entering the room and that he may have been unable himself to smell them because around fifty per cent of men are unable to do so.
The professor, who believes the coroner who conducted the inquest into Alan Turing's death to have been biased by newspaper reports, and in describing Alan during the inquest referred to "men of his type" believes that had the same evidence been presented today that it would not have resulted in a sucide verdict but an open one, and that another inquest should be conducted.
During his speech, Professor Copeland mentioned incidents in which Alan Turing had narrowly escaped serious injury when conducting experiments through his well-known carelessness, and he considers his theory of accidental death to be supported by statements made at the time of Alan's death that in the weeks and days prior to it he was seen as being very cheerful and indeed happy at times, and that on his last day at work he had left a note on his desk reminding him of what he should do when he returned, which was his usual custom.
There is a common misconception that people who commit suicide display symptoms of depression immediately before doing so, and that sometimes these symptoms can be overlooked, even by the people closest to them. Whislt some people do end their lives in a sudden fit of despair, there are others who decide to do so after a great deal of thought, and having come to terms with the fact that they truly wish to die they maintain their daily rituals right up until the end and can project an image of being contented or even happy, which perhaps they are knowing that whatever is causing them misery will soon end.
The circumstances of the death of Alan Turing are likely to be never solved to everyone's satisfaction, and will no doubt be the subject of speculation for many years to come. Although we cannot rewrite history, we can learn from it, and not repeat the mistakes of previous generations. One way in which this can be achieved is by not allowing the circumstances that preceded Alan's death - his prosecution for committing homosexual acts which were at the time criminal ofences, and the effects on him of the treatment that he endured.
In recent years a growing body of public opinion has begun to express outrage at the way that Alan Turing and other gay men were treated, and in 2010, Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister, publicly made an apology following a petition to the government that had been signed by many thousands of people that Alan Turing's treatment by the State had been appalling, and he recognised the enormous debt that our country owes to him.
Although self-effacing when questioned about his contribution to the devlopment of computers, and he said that the Americans had carried out what he described as the donkey work, Alan Turing is acknowledged both as being the father of computer science and that had it not been for his inventions and work on computers we would not have the computers and many other technological devices that we use and take for granted today.
Had Alan Turing not died so prematurely, what might he have gone on to achieve? We can only speculate, but it is not inconceivable that had he lived that it would have been Britain and not America that achieved supremacy in the race to develop the modern computer, and that a British firm and not Microsoft would have been the dominant force in the world of computer technology.
The interest in matters of science that Alan Turing had extended into all areas, and he was fascianated by how life is created. Leading academicians have expressed the views in recent years that Alan's inventions are on a par with the invention of the wheel, that he was the equivalent in terms of genius as Albert Einstein, and had a more profound effect on the lives of the inhabitants of our planet than any other person who has lived in the last hundred years.
Had Alan Turing not had the misfortune to have lived during a time in our history when British society was far more repressive and conservative than it is today, with many people taking the view that they had the right to impose their views of what constitutes moral behaviour on others, despite them posing no threat to their way of life, then Alan Turing would not have died when he did and the world would not have suffered what it can reasonably be argued has been one of its greatest losses with the death of one of its inhabitants.
Although the criminal law regarding the prosecution of gay men was repealed thirteen years after Alan Turing's death, it has taken forty-five years since then for there to have developed any significant understanding and acceptance in Britain of the enormous debt that he is owed in respect of his inventions and achievements, and it is surely deeply regrettable that on the centenary day of his birth that events to commemorate the occasion were considerably more muted in Britain than in America.
A film of Alan Turing’s life may be made, possibly with Leonardo Di Caprio in the lead role, so perhaps then he will at last begin to achieve the celebrity status that he undoubtedly deserves.
Since Alan Turing’s death, although his work has gradually become more widely acknowledged and acclaimed, and Manchester has commemorated him in a variety of ways, Hastings has only seen fit so far to name a relatively minor road, Turing Way, an access road to one of the university buildings in his honour.
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The man’s name is Alan Turing, and the main reason that his name is not a household one, especially in an age when merely appearing in a TV show can bestow iconic status, is that he had the misfortune to have been a gay man at a time in our history when for men to have sexual relationships with other men was a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment, which it has to be said was an improvement on the previous century’s punishment of execution by hanging.
Alan Turing’s parents had met in India, and returned to England for Alan’s birth, but a few years later left him along with his brother in the care of a St. Leonards family and returned to India, where his father was a civil servant.
The house in which Alan lived for around eight years was Baston Lodge, on Upper Maze Hill, St. Leonards. On 23 June 2012, the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, I attended along with around thirty other guests including several councillors, and by invitation of the curator of Hastings Museum who organised the event, the unveiling of a blue plaque on the wall of Baston Lodge by Cllr. Alan Roberts, the Mayor of Hastings.
Prior to the unveiling of the plaque, an excellent and very informative short address was given by Cllr. Peter Chowney, the deputy leader of Hastings Borough Council on the life and work of Alan Turing, during which he mentioned that Alan was a gay man, and mentioned what he considered to be his appalling treatment by the authorities after they became aware of his sexual orientation.
At the age of fourteen, Alan became a pupil at Sherborne, the public school in Dorset, and it was there that he met a slightly older boy named Christopher Morcom, for whom he developed a very deep affection, and this may have been the first intimation that he had of his sexuality. A letter written by Alan Turing and included in a Science Museum, London exhibition on Alan Turing's work and life, which will continue until June 2013 is considered to be evidence that Alan was in love, albeit in a platonic manner with Christopher, and he was devastated when Christopher died of bovine tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. His death resulted in Alan becoming an atheist, although he retained the belief that after death the spirit continues to exist with the knowledge acquired during life still retained.
After leaving Sherborne, Alan went to King’s College, Cambridge, from where he graduated with a first class honours degree in mathematics, his specialist subject. An early sign of the genius that Alan was to develop had come at an early age when he had taught himself to read within a matter of weeks.
Like many brilliant people, Alan Turing was unconventional to the point of eccentricity. He was considered to be socially inept, could be opinionated, outspoken, and moody, whilst at other times extremely witty. He was often seen to be strangely dressed, at times with a tie serving as a belt.
At the age of only twenty-two Alan became a Fellow of King’s College, and went on to publish in 1936 a paper he had written to which he gave the title On Computable Numbers, and which described a method of computation carried out on what became known as Turing machines, the theory of which forms the basis of all modern computers.
In 1938, with the prospect of another war with Germany looming, Alan was recruited by the Government Code & Cypher School, a code breaking organisation, which moved to Bletchley Park when war was declared in September, 1939.
Whilst working at Bletchley Park, Alan formed a romantic relationship with a fellow mathematician named Joan Clarke, and after Alan asked her to marry him they became engaged. Realising that he would be unable to forsake having relationships with men, Alan confessed his homosexuality to Joan, and although she was apparently not too seriously concerned and still wanted the marriage to go ahead, Alan decided it was unfair on Joan to do so, and he reluctantly ended the engagement.
Much of Bletchley Park’s work involved cracking the codes that the Germans used for communications. Supplies vital to pursue the war with Germany were being shipped from North America in convoys of ships from the beginning of the war, but they were frequently being sunk by Germany’s U boats that used coded messages for communications. Winston Churchill, believing that victory in the North Atlantic was essential if Britain was to go on to ultimately win the war decided that the Enigma coding machine, which was being used to daily change the codes the German were using, must be cracked at all costs, but was proving impossible to achieve.
Alan Turing led a team of experts working on cracking the Enigma, and he eventually devised a machine that could do so. This invention gave Britain the advantage that it needed in the North Atlantic battle, and by May, 1943 victory in the ocean had been largely achieved, although German U boats continued to sink some allied shipping until the end of the war in 1945.
Winston Churchill did not have a reputation for bestowing unwarranted praise, yet he is reported to have informed King George VI that had it not been for Alan Turing’s cracking of the Enigma coding machine, Britain would have lost the battle in the North Atlantic, the subsequent allied landings in France in 1944 could not have taken place, and the war with Germany would ultimately have been lost.
Some experts on World War II take the view that whilst cracking the Engima code was not essential to have been done to secure victory, that had it not been achieved the war would certainly have lasted for another two years, D-Day, the allied invasion of Europe would have been considerably delayed, and resulted in a considerable loss of life.
For someone who played such a decisive role during the war as Alan Turing, the recognition by the state of his wartime work was meagre in that he was only awarded an OBE, but this was because the nature of his work was so sensitive that it remained classified until many years after the war ended.
In 1945 Alan worked on the design of what he called the Automatic Computing Engine, and the first personal computer was based upon his invention. Alan Turing is today regarded with justification as the father of modern computer science.
After the war had ended Alan had gone to work on the development of computer science at Manchester University, and in 1952 a chance encounter in the city centre with a young man named Arnold whom he befriended was to set in motion a catastrophic sequence of events that would lead to Alan’s tragic death.
Alan invited Arnold to stay at his house, and they had a relationship, but Arnold betrayed Alan’s generosity by enabling someone whom he knew to burgle Alan’s house. The items stolen included a watch that had belonged to Alan’s late father and had a great sentimental value to him. Unable to secure the return of the watch, Alan made a complaint to the police that he had been burgled, and freely revealed when questioned the nature of his relationship with Arnold.
For a man possessed of such a brilliant mind, Alan Turing was in some ways extremely naïve, and he genuinely believed that as it was the role of the police to investigate crime that they would act upon his complaint and that he would receive justice, but by making his complaint he unwittingly became a victim yet again.
The wartime years had been ones of moral laxity brought on by the ever present fear that death could come at any time, which for many people, both military and civilian, it did. People’s attitudes to morality though can swing like a pendulum, and by the early 1950’s Britain was in the grip of a moral clampdown which included the rigorous prosecution of men who committed homosexual offences, for they were to remain criminal offences until reform of the law in 1967.
The police to whom Alan Turing reported the burglary of his home proved to be far more interested in his relationship with Arnold than in Arnold’s complicity in the burglary, and the consequence was that Alan Turing was charged and prosecuted for having committed homosexual acts, to which he pleaded guilty at his subsequent trial.
Had Alan Turing lied to police when questioned about his relationship with Arnold he may well have escaped prosecution, but he was open and honest about it, and ultimately paid a high price for doing so.
Somewhat unusually, Alan was given a choice of punishment by the judge at his trial. He was told that he could opt for a prison sentence or serve a period of probation on condition that he undertook to receive regular injections of female hormones to reduce his libido and supposedly render him asexual.
Fearing that serving a term of imprisonment would lead to the loss of the mathematics post that he held at Manchester University, and which gave him access to one of the world's only computers, Alan Turing agreed to be put on probation and he received regular injections of the female hormone stilboestrol. This was effectively a means of castration that any reasonable person would surely now consider to be barbaric because it resulted in Alan developing physical female characteristics along with severe mood swings and bouts of deep depression.
During conversations that Alan subsequently had with friends, he said that he deeply regretted having opted for the chemical treatment, and that he would not have done so had he been made fully aware of the effects of the treatment.
In the early 1950’s homosexual men were regarded as prime targets for blackmail, and a consequence of Alan Turing's conviction was that his security clearance was removed, resulting in the termination of his consultancy work for GCHQ. (The government's communications headquarters).
As well as being denied the opportunity to do some work, Alan believed that he was being spied upon by the security forces, which may well have been the case given that he had considerable knowledge of security matters which could be used by a foreign power, and he also believed that his friends were being subjected to surveillance, which had resulted in one in particular being unable to contact him.
The friend was a young Norwegian gay man whom Alan had met whilst on a holiday in Norway, and after sending a postcard to Alan informing him that he was coming to England and would visit him, he mysteriously never arrived, and Alan discovered that his friend believed that he had been followed around the country, was afraid for his safety, and returned home.
Severely distressed by the physical and mental effects on him of his enforced drugs treatment, Alan Turing died a few weeks short of his forty-second birthday. He was discovered by his cleaner, and although he was believed to have partially eaten an apple which was found near him and considered to be laced with cyanide, it was apparently never tested for traces of poison, and no suicide note was found, which led to some speculation that he may in fact have been killed by the security forces who regarded him as a threat to national security.
A theory was expounded at an Oxford conference on 23 June 2012 by the New Zealand professor Jack Copeland, an expert on Alan Turing, that his death was not caused by suicide, but was in fact accidental. A small room adjacent to Alan's bedroom, where he was discovered dead in bed, had been used by him as a laboratory, and a police sergeant who visited the house said that he detected a strong smell of bitter almonds in the laboratory, and which can be caused by cyanide fumes.
Professor Copeland's theory, which he supports by statements made by people who met Alan Turing in the days prior to his death that he displayed no signs of obvious depression, is that Alan had been working in his laboratory on the night of his death, gone to bed, and then inhaled lethal fumes from cyanide fumes entering the room and that he may have been unable himself to smell them because around fifty per cent of men are unable to do so.
The professor, who believes the coroner who conducted the inquest into Alan Turing's death to have been biased by newspaper reports, and in describing Alan during the inquest referred to "men of his type" believes that had the same evidence been presented today that it would not have resulted in a sucide verdict but an open one, and that another inquest should be conducted.
During his speech, Professor Copeland mentioned incidents in which Alan Turing had narrowly escaped serious injury when conducting experiments through his well-known carelessness, and he considers his theory of accidental death to be supported by statements made at the time of Alan's death that in the weeks and days prior to it he was seen as being very cheerful and indeed happy at times, and that on his last day at work he had left a note on his desk reminding him of what he should do when he returned, which was his usual custom.
There is a common misconception that people who commit suicide display symptoms of depression immediately before doing so, and that sometimes these symptoms can be overlooked, even by the people closest to them. Whislt some people do end their lives in a sudden fit of despair, there are others who decide to do so after a great deal of thought, and having come to terms with the fact that they truly wish to die they maintain their daily rituals right up until the end and can project an image of being contented or even happy, which perhaps they are knowing that whatever is causing them misery will soon end.
The circumstances of the death of Alan Turing are likely to be never solved to everyone's satisfaction, and will no doubt be the subject of speculation for many years to come. Although we cannot rewrite history, we can learn from it, and not repeat the mistakes of previous generations. One way in which this can be achieved is by not allowing the circumstances that preceded Alan's death - his prosecution for committing homosexual acts which were at the time criminal ofences, and the effects on him of the treatment that he endured.
In recent years a growing body of public opinion has begun to express outrage at the way that Alan Turing and other gay men were treated, and in 2010, Gordon Brown, the then Prime Minister, publicly made an apology following a petition to the government that had been signed by many thousands of people that Alan Turing's treatment by the State had been appalling, and he recognised the enormous debt that our country owes to him.
Although self-effacing when questioned about his contribution to the devlopment of computers, and he said that the Americans had carried out what he described as the donkey work, Alan Turing is acknowledged both as being the father of computer science and that had it not been for his inventions and work on computers we would not have the computers and many other technological devices that we use and take for granted today.
Had Alan Turing not died so prematurely, what might he have gone on to achieve? We can only speculate, but it is not inconceivable that had he lived that it would have been Britain and not America that achieved supremacy in the race to develop the modern computer, and that a British firm and not Microsoft would have been the dominant force in the world of computer technology.
The interest in matters of science that Alan Turing had extended into all areas, and he was fascianated by how life is created. Leading academicians have expressed the views in recent years that Alan's inventions are on a par with the invention of the wheel, that he was the equivalent in terms of genius as Albert Einstein, and had a more profound effect on the lives of the inhabitants of our planet than any other person who has lived in the last hundred years.
Had Alan Turing not had the misfortune to have lived during a time in our history when British society was far more repressive and conservative than it is today, with many people taking the view that they had the right to impose their views of what constitutes moral behaviour on others, despite them posing no threat to their way of life, then Alan Turing would not have died when he did and the world would not have suffered what it can reasonably be argued has been one of its greatest losses with the death of one of its inhabitants.
Although the criminal law regarding the prosecution of gay men was repealed thirteen years after Alan Turing's death, it has taken forty-five years since then for there to have developed any significant understanding and acceptance in Britain of the enormous debt that he is owed in respect of his inventions and achievements, and it is surely deeply regrettable that on the centenary day of his birth that events to commemorate the occasion were considerably more muted in Britain than in America.
A film of Alan Turing’s life may be made, possibly with Leonardo Di Caprio in the lead role, so perhaps then he will at last begin to achieve the celebrity status that he undoubtedly deserves.
Since Alan Turing’s death, although his work has gradually become more widely acknowledged and acclaimed, and Manchester has commemorated him in a variety of ways, Hastings has only seen fit so far to name a relatively minor road, Turing Way, an access road to one of the university buildings in his honour.
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Sunday Telegraph article published on 17 June 2012
From the Hastings Observer
December 24th 2013
Alan Turing was granted a posthumous royal pardon today.