|
Code comfort
At last, an apology
for Alan Turing, the wartime code breaker –
but is it too little, too late?
Andy
Armitage reports.
The name Turing seemed to
be on everyone’s lips in September, when
this gay mathematical genius and code
breaker received due recognition for his
wartime work, which is widely thought to
have shortened the potential duration of
World War Two.
Yet an apology from Prime
Minister Gordon Brown, welcome though it is,
may come as cold comfort to those who
maintain that Turing should receive greater
honour for his invaluable work for the war
effort.
Much of the credit for
getting the apology goes to
John Graham-Cumming, a leading British
computer expert and author of The Geek
Atlas, who launched a campaign and
organised a Downing Street petition.
Graham-Cumming wrote on
his blog:
Turing’s work has
affected us all. He’s best known for his
involvement in Second World War code
breaking (especially for helping to
break Enigma) and if all he had done was
that we would be grateful.
But Turing was also a
critical pioneer of computer science. He
defined a theoretical model of computers
(at a time when “computer” meant a
person, often a woman, who computed
numbers) that holds true today. He
suggested how we might determine whether
a computer was sentient (with the
Turing Test).
Turing’s death should
remind us how prejudice ruins and
degrades.
Alan Turing was gay.
And he was prosecuted for “indecent
acts” and eventually took his own life
aged 41. This man, younger than me,
killed himself because at the time
homosexuality was illegal and having
been prosecuted he was chemically
castrated in an attempt to “cure” him.
He had been stripped of his security
clearance.
For years, his legacy
was largely ignored outside the computer
community.
Graham-Cumming’s petition
reads: “We the undersigned petition the
Prime Minister to apologize for the
prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his
untimely death.” Although, as we shall see
in a moment, the Prime Minister did issue an
apology to Turing, the petition is still
open for signatures, and you can access it
here.
Word soon spread after
Graham-Cumming had launched the petition,
and the number of signatories had shot up to
around 32,000.
Professor Richard
Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, author
and prominent atheist, threw his
considerable weight behind the campaign,
saying that an apology would “send a signal
to the world which needs to be sent”, and
that Turing would still be alive today if it
were not for the repressive,
religion-influenced laws that drove him to
despair.
This moved the Pink
Triangle Trust to issue a press release, in
which it said of Dawkins, “The author of
The God Delusion [. . .] said the impact
of the mathematician’s war work could not be
overstated. ‘Turing arguably made a greater
contribution to defeating the Nazis than
Eisenhower or Churchill. Thanks to Turing
and his “Ultra” colleagues at Bletchley
Park, Allied generals in the field were
consistently, over long periods of the war,
privy to detailed German plans before the
German generals had time to implement
them.’ ”
|
Alan Turing
“should have been knighted”. |
.jpg) |
The press release went on
to quote Dawkins as saying that Turing
“should have been knighted and fêted as a
saviour of his nation. Instead, this gentle,
stammering, eccentric genius was destroyed,
for a ‘crime’, committed in private, which
harmed nobody.”
Dawkins also called for a
permanent financial endowment to support
Bletchley Park, where Turing helped break
the Nazi Enigma code.
Long overdue
The PTT secretary George
Broadhead commented, “It is great to have
such a prominent atheist and humanist as
Richard Dawkins add his weight to the
campaign. As a gay atheist himself, Alan
Turing is a humanist hero and an apology for
the appalling way he was treated for being
gay is long overdue.”
Prime Minister Gordon
Brown was quick to issue that apology, and
it has even been placed on the petition
website, although the petition itself is
open till 20 January 2010.
This sparked another PTT
press release warmly welcoming Brown’s
comments.
|
.jpg) |
|
Alan Turing: his
relaxed and happy bearing
belies inner turmoil |
“It’s certainly not
before time that this apology has been
issued,” said PTT secretary George Broadhead
in the release. “It’s extremely sad that
Turing was treated in such a manner back
then, resulting in his suicide in 1954, but
that it’s taken so long for the British
government to issue an apology and to
recognise the invaluable work Turing did in
altering the possible course of the Second
World War is inexcusable.
“At least Gordon Brown
has gone some way towards putting that
right, and, of course, we welcome his
message. It’s particularly apt coming so
close to the seventieth anniversary of the
outbreak of the Second World War.”
.jpg) |
The Blue
Plaque placed outside Turing’s home,
Hollymeade, Wilmslow, Cheshire,
in 2004. |
This magazine’s editor,
Mike Foxwell, added, “Welcome as they are,
Gordon Brown’s words of regret are just
that. The only act that the British state
could perform is to give Alan Turing the
posthumous knighthood he deserved in life
for his service to Britain and the world in
helping to ensure the defeat of Nazism.
Ironic
How very ironic that a
man who helped ensure the demise of Nazism
was meted out such fascistic treatment by
his own country.”
Brown wrote of Turing in
a Daily Telegraph article, which bore
the same sentiments as can now be found on
the Downing Street petitions website. Under
an introduction thanking people for signing
the petition is the PM’s message:
2009 has been a year
of deep reflection – a chance for
Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the
profound debts we owe to those who came
before. A unique combination of
anniversaries and events have stirred in
us that sense of pride and gratitude
which characterise the British
experience. Earlier this year I stood
with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to
honour the service and the sacrifice of
the heroes who stormed the beaches of
Normandy 65 years ago. And just last
week, we marked the 70 years which have
passed since the British government
declared its willingness to take up arms
against Fascism and declared the
outbreak of World War Two. So I am both
pleased and proud that, thanks to a
coalition of computer scientists,
historians and LGBT activists, we have
this year a chance to mark and celebrate
another contribution to Britain’s fight
against the darkness of dictatorship;
that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite
brilliant mathematician, most famous for
his work on breaking the German Enigma
codes. It is no exaggeration to say
that, without his outstanding
contribution, the history of World War
Two could well have been very different.
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. In 1952, he was
convicted of “gross indecency” – in
effect, tried for being gay. His
sentence – and he was faced with the
miserable choice of this or prison – was
chemical castration by a series of
injections of female hormones. He took
his own life just two years later.
Thousands of people
have come together to demand justice for
Alan Turing and recognition of the
appalling way he was treated. 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.
Alan and the many thousands of other gay
men who were convicted as he was
convicted under homophobic laws were
treated terribly. Over the years
millions more lived in fear of
conviction.
I am proud that those
days are gone and that in the last 12
years this government has done so much
to make life fairer and more equal for
our LGBT community. This recognition of
Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most
famous victims of homophobia is another
step towards equality and long overdue.
But even more than
that, Alan deserves recognition for his
contribution to humankind. For those of
us born after 1945, into a Europe which
is united, democratic and at peace, it
is hard to imagine that our continent
was once the theatre of mankind’s
darkest hour. It is difficult to believe
that in living memory, people could
become so consumed by hate – by
anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by
xenophobia and other murderous
prejudices – that the gas chambers and
crematoria became a piece of the
European landscape as surely as the
galleries and universities and concert
halls which had marked out the European
civilisation for hundreds of years. It
is thanks to men and women who were
totally committed to fighting fascism,
people like Alan Turing, that the
horrors of the Holocaust and of total
war are part of Europe’s history and not
Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the
British government, and all those who
live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am
very proud to say: we’re sorry, you
deserved so much better.
.jpg) |
A
slate statue of Alan Turing with the
famous Enigma machine. |
Alan Turing committed
suicide in 1954 by swallowing poison. To
mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death,
on 7 June 2004, a commemorative blue plaque
was unveiled by the British mathematician
and politician Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw,
during a ceremony at the house in Wilmslow
where he had lived during the last four
years of his life.
Also to commemorate the
fiftieth anniversary of Turing’s untimely
death, the
Summer 2004 issue of Gay & Lesbian
Humanist carried a special three-article
feature. Turing – mathematician, codebreaker,
engineer, philosopher, and freethinker par
excellence – is one of Britain’s most
celebrated gay atheists.
Those
wishing to help preserve Alan Turing’s
memory for future generations can
make a donation
here.
|
