Gordon Brown says sorry for persecution of maths genius because of his homosexuality, writes MARK HENNESSY,London Editor
INAGH PAYNE remembers her uncle, legendary second World War codebreaker Alan Turing, as “very generous, untidy, rather unkempt with a very high-pitched voice and with a sort of whinnying-type laugh”.
When she was eight, the mathematical genius whose deciphering of German Enigma codes helped to win the war gave her a clothes-iron for her birthday, all neatly wrapped in a parcel.
Ten years later, on June 8th, 1954, Turing, was found dead in his home outside Manchester by his housekeeper, a congealed white froth around the corners of his mouth and a half-eaten, cyanide-injected apple lying on the floor.
Now, British prime minister Gordon Brown has apologised on behalf of the British people for the legal persecution that drove Turing to take his own life.
Two years before his death, the scientist had been convicted of gross indecency on account of his homosexuality and injected with oestrogen hormones so concentrated that he developed breasts and became bloated.
Ms Payne is grateful for the official apology but still conscious of Turing’s suffering.
“It’s so sad that he was persecuted and hounded at the end of his life. I am sure it must have absolutely ruined his life. It was absolutely miserable,” Ms Payne said yesterday.
Pressed by 30,000 petitioners, including scientist Richard Dawkins and author Ian McEwan, to apologise, Mr Brown yesterday acknowledged the injustice meted out to Turing.
"It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the second World War could have been very different," the prime minister wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
“He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war.
“The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.”
Shortly before Christmas 1951, Turing, a brilliant, eccentric mathematician dubbed the father of computer science, had met Arnold Murray as he walked down Manchester’s Oxford Street.
The chance meeting developed into a sexual relationship, but one that was sometimes difficult.
A month later, Turing, one of the leaders of the still-secret Bletchley Park code-breaking team, returned to his detached home in Wilmslow on the outskirts of the city after he had given a talk on BBC radio about his pioneering work on artificial intelligence only to find it burgled.
Murray had boasted of the relationship to an acquaintance, who had preyed on the working-class man’s previous male lovers, robbing their homes, confident that they would not go to the police for fear of being “outed” in days when homosexuality brought a two-year jail sentence, and social ruin.
Unlike his predecessors, Turing did go to the police. He reported, naively in the view of his friends, his suspicions that the culprit was a friend of his gay lover. The police quickly forgot about chasing a burglar when faced with the more salacious prospect of prosecuting a middle-class academic for his sexual leanings.
Though Turing was not jailed as so many others had been when he came before the courts the following year, he escaped only by agreeing to subject himself to hormone treatment to “beef up his masculine urges and suppress his homosexuality”, a process commonly called chemical castration.
Following his conviction, Turing’s secret career was over. The climate had always been hostile to homosexuals, but now in the fear-filled days of the bleak early 1950s they were seen as security risks just months after MI5 agent, Guy Burgess, another gay man, had been revealed as a Soviet spy.
Denied security clearance, Turing was banned from travelling to America, where he had studied before the war. His life, according to his biographer, David Leavitt, went into “a slow, sad descent into grief and madness”.
The loss was not just Turing’s, but society’s. In 1936 he had laid the foundations for the computer age when he wrote what quickly became a seminal paper called On Computable Numbers. In 1950 he devised a test to measure the intelligence of a machine. Still today, it is called the Turing Test.
Mr Brown said: “While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him.”
However, gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell believes the 100,000 others, including Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, convicted by the same laws that crippled Turing deserve a similar apology. “Singling out Turing just because he is famous is wrong”, he said.