The crime and punishment of Alan Turing
In 1952, Alan Turing, patriotic codebreaker and pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence, was arrested, tried, and punished on the basis of his homosexuality. In this adapted extract from The Turing Guide, Jack Copeland walks us through the events leading up to his arrest and trial, which sentenced him to chemical castration.
Turing wrote a short story. Although only a few pages long and incomplete, it offers an intimate glimpse of its author. The central character — a scientist by the name of Alec Pryce, who works at Manchester University — is a thinly disguised Alan Turing. Pryce, like Turing himself, always wore what Turing described as “an old sports coat and rather unpressed worsted trousers.” Pryce, whose work related to interplanetary travel, made an important discovery in his twenties, which came to be called “Pryce’s buoy.” The nature of the discovery is left unexplained, and Pryce’s buoy is obviously a proxy for the universal Turing machine.
“Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used,” Turing wrote revealingly. “The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word was spelt without the ‘u.’”
Pryce, we are told, has not had a sexual relationship since “that soldier in Paris last summer.” Walking through Manchester, Pryce passes a youth lounging on a bench, Ron Miller. Ron, who is out of work and keeps company with petty criminals, makes a small income from male prostitution. He responds to a glance that Alec gives him as he passes, calling out uncouthly “Got a fag?”. Shyly Alec joins him on the bench and the two sit together awkwardly. Eventually Alec plucks up courage to invite the boy to have lunch at a nearby restaurant. Beggars can’t be choosers, Ron thinks meanly.
“Ronald” is an anagram of “Arnold,” and it was in December 1951 that Turing first met Arnold Murray, the Ronald Miller of his short story. Turing picked up Murray in Manchester’s Oxford Street and the two ate together. Their first time was a few days later at Turing’s house, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow. Afterwards Turing gave Murray a present of a penknife: probably the unemployed Murray would have preferred cash instead. The next time they had sex, Murray stole £8 from Turing’s pocket as he left Hollymeade in the morning, and not long after this the house was burgled.
Even though the finger of suspicion pointed at Murray and his seedy friends, Turing spent the night with him one more time. In the morning he led Murray to the local police station. Turing went in, but not Murray. In the course of reporting the burglary he gave the police a wrong description and this, as the newspaper reporter covering his subsequent trial wrote luridly, “proved to be his undoing.”
During questioning, Turing admitted to having had sex with Murray three times. The burglary dropped out of the picture, eclipsed by this sensational new information.
As the police knew all too well, each of the three occasions counted as two separate crimes under the antique 1885 legislation still in force — the commission of an act of gross indecency with another male person, and the reciprocal crime of being party to the commission of an act of gross indecency. Six criminal offences.
After Turing made his statement, he said to a police officer: “What is going to happen about all this? Isn’t there a Royal Commission sitting to legalise it?” But not until 1967 was homosexuality decriminalized in the UK.
Three weeks later, at the end of February 1952, Turing and Murray appeared in court. The charges were read out and both men were committed for trial. The court granted Turing bail of £50, but refused to let Murray out of custody. Following a distressing wait of more than four weeks, the trial was held in the quiet Cheshire town of Knutsford at the end of March. Turing pleaded guilty on all six counts, as did Murray. The mathematician Max Newman, Turing’s long-time friend, was called as a character witness. “He is completely absorbed in his work, and is one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation,” Newman said. It must have been good to hear these words, even on such a black day.
Murray’s counsel attempted to shift the blame onto Turing, saying that Turing had approached Murray. If Murray “had not met Turing he would not have indulged in that practice or stolen the £8,” the barrister argued crassly. But his tactics worked: despite a previous conviction for larceny, Murray got off with 12 months’ good behaviour.
Turing’s own counsel hoped to steer the court away from a prison sentence, and alluded to the possibility of organotherapy: “There is treatment which could be given him. I ask you to think that the public interest would not be well served if this man is taken away from the very important work he is doing.” The judge followed the barrister’s lead, sentencing Turing to 12 months’ probation and ordering him to “submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Infirmary.” It was not exactly the eulogy he deserved from the nation he had saved. Turing wrote in a letter, “No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.” He signed the letter “Yours in distress.”
The alternative of prison would probably have cost him his job, and with it his access to a computer. Already his arrest had cost him something else that mattered to him: as he told a friend, he would never be able to work for GCHQ again. One of his Bletchley Park colleagues, Joan Clarke, who stayed on as a peacetime codebreaker, confirmed that Turing visited GCHQ’s Eastcote site after the war as a consultant. But now Turing, the perfect patriot, had unwittingly become a security risk.
Jack Copeland FRS NZ is Distinguished Professor in Arts at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he is Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing. He has been script advisor and scientific consultant for a number of recent documentaries about Turing. Copeland is the author of a number of books about Alan Turing, including The Turing Guide (OUP, 2017).
