Right. But let's just remember that one reason for this talk today is this is Alan Turing centenary year.
So we're marking the 100th anniversary will be on June the 23rd this year,
and there are a number of events around the world marking this this special year.
So thank you very much for the invitation to speak here on this fascinating subject.
Now, I'm not going to give a talk about mathematics, and in fact, I'm going to take the opportunity to give a rather unusual talk.
And it's a wonderful chance to talk at an LGBT political history way and something I don't often get the opportunity to do.
So I'm very grateful for that. But let's just think about who who Alan's hearing was.
Indeed, he was a mathematician and he was the founder of Computer Science, and he was essentially the inventor of the computer.
And besides that, he was the chief scientific figure in the Anglo-American code breaking effort of the
Second World War centred on the now famous but then deadly secret Bletchley Park.
And as such, he is simply one of the key figures of modern history.
So let's let's begin with Bletchley Park, and let let's begin with an enduring ActionScript massive picture of him in 1936 24 and
has quite happy look there because he just achieved something great in mathematics.
But I would like to think about his time at Bletchley Park to get a picture of the the centre part of his life,
which is, of course, of enormous interest to everyone now.
And here he was, in fact, in the early days of the war established in this cottage yesterday,
and it's in the grounds of Bletchley Park, almost unchanged as it was then.
And this was the point where he did the groundbreaking work on the enigma deciphering which changed everything in the war thereafter.
In fact, it looks a bit unbelievable seeing that picture, but being there at that point,
he and the other colleagues of his other mathematicians particularly were roughly parallel to the leading
physicists who found themselves taken out of pure research in 1939 and drawn into the atomic bomb project.
But there are great differences as well as parallels.
And one is that the code breaking had actually much more impact on the Second World War than the atomic bomb did.
And another is this The atom bomb was immediately famous and physicists became celebrities,
and the exact opposite happened was of the thousands of people who worked at Bletchley.
Everything about what they'd done was a complete secret for 30 years, and no one outside knew a thing.
And that's a very important part of considering who he was and what he did and what I'm going to describe later,
which is the history of how his life came into public consciousness because it
is the historical aspect of it that I want to address in this opportunity.
So what is an interview specifically?
Well, he did one wonderful observation to do with the logic of the enigma, which meant that he was able to design a machine called the bomb.
It was based on some potent ideas, far more powerful. This machine was a central part of the enigma deciphering process,
and I'm not absolutely not going to explain how the enigma worked and how the bomb work.
But I'm going to give you a picture of the just full picture of what we're talking about here.
This is Alan Shearer. After the essential invention in 1939 that carried through hundreds of machines of this type,
we built both in this country and in the United States as well later on,
and they worked away on all the military and naval messages of the German war machine, and they were going to the whole story by any means.
But that was the explosion of wonderful, logical Lupo, which Alan Turing spotted.
They were almost also enormous feats of electrical engineering,
only really just possible with the engineering of the day and an enormous achievement to make it possible at all.
And that was Turing's thing. I mean, with an important input from the engineers and from mathematical colleague, but that the most,
the most wonderful observation going on from that, the group that he had it attained really complete control of Atlantic communications.
Mean he specialised into looking at the naval messages, which were the ones where the greatest security protection, most difficult.
And. Also, the most vital in the and at least in the Western Wall, it was the Atlantic War,
the connexion with the United States that was most vital and it was essential to the invasion of Europe in 1944.
And indeed, it required top level liaison with the United States.
So that theory went on a top level mission in November 1942.
And in that role, he had access and inputs into every other top secret question, of course, and communications between the allies.
I mean, I'm just emphasising that he wasn't someone who just did a bit or wrote a message.
He was the top guy as far as the scientific work in the whole of the Atlantic sphere.
But between 1939 and 1945 now it was only in 1974 where a number of insiders, for different reasons,
began to disclose this colossal scale, this industrial scale, the scale of information factory involving thousands of people.
Only then that is emerge, and only then did Alan Turing name emerge as the chief scientific figure.
And of course, by that time, he had been dead for 20 years.
And in his lifetime, the public and the faintest idea that he had done any of this and only a handful of people in the world had
the faintest idea how this machine and the other amazing machines that raised on how they actually work,
what they did, it was unbelievably secret. But this revelation in the 1970s did bring his life into focus for another reason.
A very interesting reason, and that's to do with the computer, which is the other elements of his major achievements.
And most people in the 1930s, when they knew Alan Turing as a Cambridge mathematician,
as a graduate student or a postdoc in modern terms, they would have said, Well, he's a pure mathematician, pure pure.
You know, nothing to do with the real world.
And the last person you would imagine to be involved in military things are indeed official things of any kind.
Just didn't wouldn't have seemed to be him at all. But that pure mathematics, rather like the pure physics of the atomic physicist,
was turned by the challenge of Nazi Germany into something with a very, very worldly application.
And and that was his story that the Pure turned into the very highly applied through the experience of Bletchley Park.
I mean, he, as a mathematician, had a very wide range, but the central ideas were thought logic, methods, machines, symbols.
And it was that world which he completely revolutionised in the 1930s and then brought forward into the computer world of the 40s.
In 1936, he had published a paper with the incomprehensible title of on computable numbers.
There's an application to the incidence problem, not the most snappy title,
and my advice to young scientists is not to include long German words in their titles.
But in the middle of this was a very prophetic passage indeed.
And you contained these was the universal computing machine.
It is possible to invent a single machine, et cetera, et cetera.
And that is essentially the concept of the computer, an unknown concept.
Then in 1936, only a paper concept, then setting out a mathematical theory, but something which turned into computers that we all use now.
Now, until that period in the 1970s, when these revelations came out,
it was really a complete puzzle as to why this pure theorists of the 1930s had emerged in 1945
as someone who had designed a computer because that's what he did and not only designed it,
but it was built and you can see it in the Science Museum now it's on the ground floor.
This is the ace computer based on Terry's computer design and the Science Museum.
And how the question was, how was it that this strange, pure unworldly person has suddenly become this computer, both in the 1940s?
Well, the Bletchley revelations answer that question.
He had learnt so much and gained so much from the technology of code breaking in those six years of war.
I mean, there were years which were like an experience taken from the future.
This is everything was 20 years ahead, both intellect.
Truly and technologically and socially to this whole ambience and with very, very powerful experience for everyone in it.
This important hearing a very unusual for Alan Turing as a mathematician that he got his hands
dirty with actual machinery is very unusual for a Cambridge mathematician to be like that.
And as an example of that,
he actually built in the latter part of the war a very advanced space scrambler using electronic components and therefore gave
him sort of hands on practise for designing electronic computer images of the end of the war that was built to an engineer,
don very well mentioned later on.
So this brought us to the claim that he was the founder of computer science and essentially the inventor of the computer.
That 1936 paper I showed you is the foundation of modern computer science,
and his 1945 work was to turn that theoretical idea into the practical reality of electronics and
this machine as the symbol of his eagerness to do what he called building a brain as he called.
And that was what you called it, because he was always most interested in what we now call artificial intelligence,
the question of whether a computer can emulate what the human mind does.
Now I'm not giving a talk on computers anymore or mathematics, but I will point out that in the 1970s,
this is really the period when computers began to be something like what Alan Turing had in mind.
I mean, if you look at these weird computers of the forties and fifties,
this sort of thing you see in some of these mass films, that really wasn't his idea.
I mean, just these very expensive, difficult, isolated things.
He had a vision really of where which is really began to take shape in the 1970s with miniaturisation is much,
much closer now that people can use computers and almost throwaway fashion and it becomes the software that's important.
It's software acting on software, it's downloading software.
The fact that you can download software like downloading data, there's no difference.
Software X and other software edits it modifies it and translates it those things.
Those are part of his vision. It wasn't the lumbering engineering that was part of his his core ideas.
It was everything that we associate with the universality of the computer.
Now is the fact that software you can use all the different things that a computer does is the made it the universal machine that they handle.
Photographs and CDs in the same machine will be used for text processing or indeed
for doing this display of doing climate modelling or playing chess or the,
you know, filing documents.
That is essentially the idea of universality, which was completely foreign to the world in the 1930s and took a very long time to catch on.
Even when he explained it. That's his world and is easy, comparatively easy now to see his idea of 1936.
It wasn't then. Now, having said that, you may say why in that case, I mean, was sure he was famous for this after the wartime after,
after all doing this with computers and well, I mean, why wasn't he famous?
Well, he had. He has moments of fame and being the this computer project I've mentioned was in the press in 1946.
He was on in the press, 1949 had his bits of film and newsreel and on the radio in 1951.
But one important thing Michel would bring us is that he did not act as a big shot.
He was very, very self-effacing and also true that others were quite willing to face him.
And I'll give an example of that in one piece of computer literature here.
This is the first book on computers written and published in as compiled in 1953 or faster than thought.
And this is the image of Alan Turing, which came out at that period in computer development,
which is absolutely dominated by the engineering of these theories and their very triumphs of engineering.
But they weren't really his his implementing, his vision.
He was seen, as you'll see from those words, is something really quite absurdly intellectual and out of the real world,
something that he'd done in 1936, that it was incomprehensible.
This was the way that the computer engineering world of his time rather well pushed him out and said, and in a way, Alan Turing connived in this.
He did not fight back. He didn't do the kind of things you should have done to make himself well known and important the figure.
And this is an element of his personality, which is also is part of his life.
In fact, he had a short piece in this book which explain the very ideas I've mentioned the idea of the universal machine,
but no reader of it would ever have realised that they were his ideas and that they were
the ideas out of which the concepts of the computer and everything about it have flowed.
Well, that's a sad thing. And so also is this date 1953.
The next year, 1954, was when he died.
And as you would have noticed already, the 1912 to 1954, this was a very short life.
I mean, he died when he was 41, and he faced himself for reasons.
The big story, which I'll come to you later and at at the time, this was not a major events in the world.
Essentially, the waters closed over him. He was not.
There was not marked as a great event, except very shocking to the people who knew him.
But this was not a puppet. He was not a public figure.
This did not come as a huge event at the time, but it was never completely forgotten because mathematicians,
they knew about these incomprehensible Turing machines, and he kept going on as mathematics does in its quiet way.
His various is certainly not forgotten, just for this practical world.
He seems in the fifties and sixties, somewhat irrelevant figure.
And that's therefore the situation when it began to change,
and the revelations about the work at Bletchley Park very much changed the picture because it turned
out that he far from being in this impractical person who knew nothing about the real world.
He had been in charge of this Department of Bletchley hands-on experience,
which had day by day cracked the U-boat messages and essentially saved the Atlantic war.
So from that period on, there's been a great period of uncovering hidden history and in several ways,
a fascinating business the three hidden histories.
One is the story of the Bletchley Park and its part in the history of the war, which had been kept concealed by by Anglo-American policy.
The second actually was the true story of how the computer emerged and because that also had been falsified,
essentially by not knowing this great bridge of events between the theory and the practise between the 1930s and the 1950s.
And the third was that about interfering as a gay man, and of course, only in the 1970s is ready to be talked about.
And I'll be saying something now and I'll concentrate on that third hidden history.
After all, this is LGBT History Month. And that's why I'm invited.
But I'd invite users to see if there is a larger picture here of uncovering truth and seeing
beneath and not believing everything that you're told and knowing that there are many,
many fascinating things that are there to be discovered.
And in fact, these three hidden histories are linked through that one figure.
Alan Turing because his character and motivation achievements were the key
thing in all of this and someone who had essentially been disappeared in 1954.
Well, how did this uncovering of hidden history take place?
Well, I think this brings to me because I find that I'm gay history now.
Should I find a slightly disconcerting fact? It's a bit worrying this.
But anyway, let me go back back back to 1971, and the uncovering process began through the London Gay Liberation Front of that period.
And it's in those circumstances that I had a story about Alan Turing and as a mess students.
At that point, it meant a lot more to me than it was to other people because I had heard of him as a logician as this pure the strange,
unworldly mass that he did.
And the story came to me through these new gay activist channels, but actually through specific people who had known him as a gay man.
And it was an amazing story. Actually, we already know the outline of he had been arrested in 1952 for an affair with a young man,
and he had been obliged to take oestrogen implant treatment and essentially chemical castration,
as the would have essentially the alternative to prison that he refused. It would have gone to prison and that had done him no good at all.
It was an extremely shocking humiliation. The facts and this was the background to his death.
Two years later, in 1954. Well,
we included this story in Little Pamphlet that we and the Left wrote his pamphlet about the then
dominant psychiatric picture of how being gay was a major personality disorder and so forth,
which was the prevailing view in those days. I mean, it was a supreme example of psychiatric oppression.
And we published it, but I must say no one took the slightest notice of it in those days,
and I can't recall the slightest reaction to this revelation.
But then in 1977, that's when I learnt about the Bletchley Park story, and quite normal way just in the BBC television series is that of that point.
But I had some extra Oxford mathematics input, which told me that I'm a bit more,
but it was actually Alan Turing who had been the most important person, and I was astonished and fascinated by this as well.
And I realised that the Algerians death in 1954 might very well have involved something extra.
A very intense, very frightening issue. Not just a typical case, though the way he'd been arrested was actually extremely typical of 1950s events.
But there was something extra. There was the issue of gay men as security risk, and he was the top expert in these unbelievably secret events.
It was knowledge both British and American,
and I certainly wanted to find out more about this and that these stories described these hidden histories has connexions as what I sensed.
In fact, what I really had was the idea of trying to tell that story from a point of
view in which Alan's Turing own experience and consciousness would prevail.
That was not the original to me.
That idea, because the whole idea of writing gay history of the history from underneath the unwritten history had already started in the early 1970s.
All sorts of fascinating things about the past, which had to come out it through through Gaelic Gay Liberation thought,
but it was a new thing, I think, to try and combine this with science and indeed military history.
Now, there was no help to me from published sources for the simple reason that everyone had written about.
Turing had simply admitted everything about his life as a gay man and what had happened in that period, 1952 54.
I mean, everyone just thought that was the proper thing to do. I mean, a here is just did not say anything.
I mean, the whole idea of everyone thought it was proper was just to eliminate the existence of
of lesbians and gay men from the sense of history and ongoing events that was thought.
And it really only changed in the eighties. But as it turned out, Adams hearings Owen.
Well, actually, well, I have to. I disagree with Vice. Sorry, he wasn't so crazy.
It was actually particularly open and to a lot of people.
And for instance, in the Manchester environment, which was a pretty macho engineering type environment,
he was actually particularly open to all and his people didn't call it that.
Then they called it his integrity. That was the worst word that was used.
But those things helped me enormously. I mean, he left an enormous goodwill behind him.
The people who knew that something had gone. Absolutely. There had been some absolutely dreadful injustice that happened in this period.
And by the seventies, I would say that many people had never discussed these things for 20 years since that happened,
or more than 20 years, probably and were at that point were able.
In fact, in many cases when I was researching it, it was like a kind of therapy actually to go through these these questions.
Well, there were the few records, no letters, no diaries, unfortunately.
But the thing was that his friends had saved from destruction the things which otherwise, I would generally say, tend to get eliminated.
And they remembered magic lines that he had spoken, which showed me the way that a new kind of history could go.
When I think back to some past epoch, Alan Turing would say in conversation, I think of who I was in love with at the time,
and I don't have a go at telling some of the epochs of history in that light was rather a
different light from the technical and military and world history that I've given so far.
All right. So the first let's let's have a look at the mark of another story about A. From a different it's the same story for lots and.
From the other side, I mean, the whole point of what I'd say is the unity of the mind here is not the one
Alan Turing who did the science things and there was another one who was gay.
The point was it was the same person. And that's so much part of what we have to say in the equality movement to which we are,
that these things are of a to do with the unity of the personality.
They can't be separated off.
And I'll try and bring out some things which are in his work, which which show that unity and this is the first thing, really.
This is Alan Turing at school 1929 answering on the left and his other lines.
Christopher Malcolm on the Rise and Christopher was certainly the first.
He was the first great love. Unrequited, I'm sure, but another but a very important, well, several important things.
Christopher suddenly died in 1930. It was extremely traumatic.
But before he died,
he was the person who really brought Alan Turing out of intellectual isolation into a world of science and communication rather than of solitude,
because he very isolated as a as a boy.
So a very important part to play as and to advance things relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as chemistry experiments.
And this is the picture on the right that I think Alan's here and kept in his rooms throughout his life.
And thoughts about the events of his death played a very important part in Turing's early philosophical explorations.
When he was a student at Cambridge is the questions he wrote about the question of what is the nature of mind?
How can it be embodied in the brain? This quantum mechanics make any difference.
What is the nature of freewill, determinism and how so forth?
Those are questions which you didn't answer directly in his work,
but came back again in his thinking about artificial intelligence and stimulated his questioning of what logic,
what science can tell you about mental operations, which is that really the subject of his 1936 work,
which, as explained, actually gives rise to the computer? That's a that's a sad story.
There's a happy one coming up. That's my favourite picture of A.
I think it is. It is 19 and at the island of Sark, and I think that's really rather how he would like to be remembered in himself.
I mean, certainly, I think what he would like to see and like to see quite a lot also,
I think, is quite quite a good picture of his of his romantic imagination.
And there was a rather yeah, than a rather similar at Cambridge.
His next relationship was with another mathematics students at King's College, James Atkin's.
And then somewhat like this event happened on the Lake District when they were walking on the hills there,
and James became a first boyfriend, which lasted several years on and off.
And in the thirties, it was actually James who I met in the 1970s, so that gave me a lot of very, very curious channel.
And so this early part of an intelligence Larry King's College,
where by chance really Turing had gone to study mathematics was, of course, peculiarly sort of gay tolerance.
Bloomsbury Group. Maynard Keynes, all those people. So it was a very supporting environment.
Alan had his sort of Brideshead moments.
He had a he had a teddy bear, which they all did in this way.
But that wasn't really his thing. He it was much more at his.
Unusually for that, he really fought against this aesthetes athlete distinction and was actually more on the athlete side.
He was very keen on rowing and cycling and running and boating.
He liked a lot as well. It's interesting question, which I don't know the answer to how much consciously he fought against the kind of
stereotyping of gay men as being intellectual revenge as being of an aesthete sort of I.
I don't really know, but he certainly he did rather take against that.
For that reason. He wasn't a completely at King's College sort of person, but he was in other ways because,
I mean, he vaguely leftish in the antiwar movement of 1933 and, like other people,
progressed through the thirties into through the anti-fascist importance of understanding
the challenge facing the West from Nazi Germany and to such a position that he would,
instead of being anti militarist as he had been in 1933, felt compelled to take part in the war.
Now, a couple of photos are in the middle of the rowing team while sitting right in the middle, they're not regular picture another little snapshot,
1933 1934, not a picture of him, so I'm showing that her rice is the picture just caught in this snapshot.
The slight sideways out of the frame look and actually is, I think, quite appropriate for it.
And it's not the of person who was at the centre of social events.
He was there at the edge. And this is at Princeton, where he went for two years after the mathematical success of the paper in 1936,
which I described here, rather a desert as far as the love interest is concerned.
But he was doing all sorts of things. One of them was thinking about sci fi machines, specifically with the war with Germany in the offing.
So he was the most effective anti-fascist where his friends were mostly concerned with exhortations.
He was actually doing something very useful preparation and back to England and King's College in
1938 with his cipher machine and actually a lot of interest in a young engineer who helped women.
And that's that's again, part of the story that he actually certainly develops a romantic interest in his
collaboration of his ideas and the and the practical abilities of other young men.
That's part of the erotic area, which he seems to thrive.
And at King's, it was probably Maynard Keynes who who knew Turing well, who put him onto the code breaking establishment,
the government code and Cypher School, as it was then, because Turing was taken on very rapidly at the time of the Munich crisis in an autumn 1938.
It may actually be in Kansas is connexions with the echelon of people who had done code breaking work in the First World War.
That actually brought about that as a hitherto hidden history there,
which should be interesting to know more about the, meanwhile, actually sponsored.
Oh yes, he has. But this is not a very clear snapshot of race.
This is only at bottom on the south coast of England, where this is right in August 1939.
So the critical points of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact were all just waiting to see what would happen next.
He was voting and he has another fellow king's friend, Clayton, on there, and there are two boys who they'd rescued from Austria and sponsored.
And the rabbit didn't pay for it completely, but helped to come over to England.
So again, that was a little bit of practical, as if anti-fascism at that point.
And it was. Bob is one of those boys that he when Chamberlain announced the outbreak of war on a Sunday morning in September 1939,
as Bob, who was there, told me he was there and in the room.
And that's how everything changed. And so that's the that's the setting.
That's a nice picture of the informality out of which this whole world of the code breaking then
developed so well at the same time as saving the Atlantic and all the other things that he was doing.
Of course, Alan Turing had his own personal life going as well. Not an easy one to carry through for a gay man, really.
And in fact, there was a point where a remarkable thing happened because he he could very well have
been tempted at this point to follow the kind of conventional line that other people did,
including the of the Fellow of Kings in the picture there and who who got married.
And the main arc ends who was married to. And this is a very common conventional pattern that people do.
It is made life a lot simpler. One of the top mathematicians who became a code breaker in the Alan Turing naval enigma section was indeed a woman,
Joan Clarke, and they had got on extremely well. I mean, they were buddies.
But as Joan put it, they didn't have a lot of physical contact, but it's something that could have worked.
But this is a striking thing that he decided this was not for him.
This this, this, this kind of a sort of pretend marriage.
This was not on. He told her specifically why this was.
And it was very upsetting. In fact, when he broke it off because he was actually get engaged, but when he broke it off,
he actually quoted Oscar Wilde for each man kills the thing he loves.
And of course, every game I knew I was hanging over the whole era was the fate of the wild.
Which in a way, of course, it was exactly the fate which came back for him later on on that top level lays on the United States in 1942 43,
it seems this is, he reported. Anyway, he discovered some gay life in New York and had been on pretty well on the way back.
And that's I think it may indicate quite a shift.
Before this point, he had certainly been very full of need and response and and and desire for young men,
but probably hadn't really accepted his identity as such.
But after this period in the war and thereafter,
he was much more clear and open and certainly determined to be more honest and working on the denial of speech scrambled,
which I described with a young man young engineer from the Midlands is absolutely astounded.
Really, I never met anything like this before. Alan Turing was very open with him and told him all about his being gay,
and it was a remarkable thing that is not what you're supposed to be doing in 1944.
But he got away with it. I think essentially because of this, in fact, what people call integrity.
I mean, it was just it was so natural for him to say openly and honestly that it was accepted.
And certainly, Donald Bailey was very amazed that someone should tell them that they had these feelings and that they were,
as Donald Bailey told me, almost proud of it.
And that's the fact the earliest reference I've had to the concept of gay pride in a very surprising context.
The context, incidentally, where Alan Turing conceived of the idea of the electronic computer.
I mean, this is where the computer came from.
It was this and is based in northern Buckinghamshire, where he was working on the speech scrambler and this funny set up in the Midlands engineer.
Well, I must run on a bit more, but this gives you some flavour of what sort of gay man he was.
I mean, to present him as a victim and so forth. His only part is that this is a very important part of the picture.
But he was a real person. I want to put that over in this talk.
This is one opportunity to do that. Real person did all these mathematical, technical, philosophical things.
But I also had a very complex and and quite sweet life and his own lots of other things he did.
He was very keen on running and after the war, when based on their computer,
I see developments joined the local Athletic Club that's monitoring all the steps of the bus.
There is the after meeting there and then there's another picture of him running.
There was extremely, actually trained, very hard, actually did marathons as well as other long distance was actually nearly on the
Olympic team in 1948 and reasons you are not going to go and say he didn't.
He was impatient with the computer development at the National Physical Laboratory and he went off to Manchester.
But meanwhile, had a bit of time at Cambridge in 1948,
and then he met actually what was the most steady boyfriend that he had as Neville Johnson, who was a Geordie student and his difficulty there.
I think he might have kept up very well, but it was just impossible separation,
long distance separation of their jobs and it was not able to keep it up.
That's that was a great shame.
And so I'm hearing less of this comparatively protected elite Cambridge environment for Manchester, which of course, is extremely different,
is a very grimy industrial city of the late and the late forties and a very comparatively macho engineering kind of ambience there.
But he seemed to actually like being in the more ordinary world is a very strange paradox of him, really, that he was very individual, very peculiar,
absolutely unique and so forth that actually he liked ordinary things and a lot of ways,
and he didn't actually want to be treated as a very special person as in Manchester.
Well, the computer, his role in the cathedral didn't really work out very well,
but he did write one very famous thing his his paper about artificial intelligence written in that period,
very famous of the Turing test, was written in that atmosphere.
And that's a fascinating paper to read just in this from this side of his life
and this story's point of view because it's full of comments about human life.
Although it's about what machines can do, it's comparing machines with human beings.
And unlike almost any Roger Federer computer writer, that.
Period, it's full of remarks about human life, about his love and feelings, and he's clearly his own feelings in his own life,
own sense of progression through life is most important and full of thought innuendo
type remarks as well as that was really like like is full of full of jokes.
One person who is this is answering on the right at the console of the Manchester computer,
and you can see not exactly fitting in very well into the into the obviously the ambience there.
He's not in it, but not of it. He had an interesting colleague there, Christopher Street.
She had a very similar mentality. Christopher Strange may be known to some people here because he headed the computer laboratory
here and in fact was an organiser of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality here in the early 70s.
So that's a nice Oxford connexion. But at Manchester, they had this slightly nice camp take on artificial intelligence and Christopher Street,
who wrote machines to make this machine as programmes to make this machine write love letters.
Which is that that shows that that's the kind of fun and mentality which Turing was able to put into this environment.
It was a serious beginnings of artificial intelligence programming idea, but made made fun.
And he also got it to play Jingle Bells, the first computer music, which was played on BBC Radio at Christmas 1951.
Now talking of Christmas 1951 and speaking of Oxford, Alan Turing didn't have any direct connexion with Oxford at all.
But he did with the Oxford Road, which is the main road which leads south out of Manchester centre past university.
And that's the place where the railway bridge is, where it was the centre of the working class gay scene in the.
And then as indeed it is now. And there's that by the milk bar.
Well, that's where he met a young man who caused the events, which had became so traumatic and that so those people have seen the play.
Breaking the code have seen a reasonably accurate depiction of the events that that took place.
So I won't go into the details in that, but it was a classic story of the 1950s and nothing special about it at all.
But what happened was that of Murray,
who was the young man of 19 that met a somewhat boasted of his making this connexion with a professor to a friend of his in the milk bar,
and the friend burgled Alan's house and then took it as a form of blackmail, which indeed it was.
I mean, it was this assumption that you couldn't go to the police about it, because if you did, you would be found out.
Well, he did go to the police making up some sort of story about how he knew who had done it, and he was arrested on the 7th of February 1952,
which you may notice was 60 years ago yesterday, and therefore one of the first acts of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth.
The second is an unfortunate start to me.
ERA was to arrest a man who had done so much to save Old Blighty and then in the war.
But they are. That's what happened, and it is often said to be very naive for doing this.
So they were going to the police. And but he I mean, it was exactly this naivete and lack of cunning,
which actually has been the great motor of change in the end is this willingness to be honest and to stand up to things and not just cringe,
which has really made all the difference. So I don't really follow this point of view.
It's been in the end, it's been a greater strategy, so to to push things on of it.
He told the police when he was arrested that he thought there was a royal commission sitting to legalise it, and it shouldn't be illegal at all.
I mean, that was his view, and the police were very amazed by this.
They had never met anyone who stood up to the questioning, and they took this line that he'd done.
He'd done, and there's nothing wrong with it. Everyone was supposed to cringe and say, I don't know what came over me in this kind of thing.
That's but he didn't do. And he also told Donald Bailey, who I describe choose to do with a speech scrambler that he'd written to a
politician saying the law was so wrong and there was a politician who's his son,
this guy. Well, I mean, I don't know who this was, actually, but that's how it shows it here.
He had an attitude. It wasn't just a passive victim of events.
This was someone who's who's standing and showing would like to have shaped events, but of course, was completely powerless.
And he also wrote a short story, which really was a justice disguised form of the events that had taken place.
It was just for himself. I don't think he's trying to publish it or anything. And it's interesting.
The thing about it is that you actually use the expression gay man, which is a new expression for those days.
I mean, normally they would all use the word queer. But he had since this new American word, which is coming into use and had a more modern flavour,
and that's rather typical of everything was happening in this period that the 19th 1951 52 period saw enormous increase in the
number of prosecutions and also meant that it became a public issue for the first time instead of being completely unmentionable.
And it was that increase in the number of events which led to the public discussion and therefore to the wolf from the commission,
which was set up later in just after Terry died in 1954.
So in that? Consciousness as a reaction to increased persecution and in turn, was very much part of the process.
That is the news local newspaper account of what happens is his trial on March 31st, 1952,
and you will see those words or going to therapy treatment, which is indeed the oestrogen implant and which I described before.
This is indeed what happens. And his wish he endures.
I mean, his solutions were, as I've described this, this amount of increased consciousness also a greater contact with his friends.
The great support of OK Here network was most important there, and he had a mechanism as well.
He started seeing a young man, psychoanalyst Franz Greenbaum.
And of course, we have no idea really how these sessions went. I think in a very theoretical sense, you might have felt it would.
Life would be a lot easier if he was bisexual. I mean, if he could have done the kind of thing that other people did.
And but as he says, Robin Gandy would be so boring.
And as he said to Len Newman, who is the wife of Max Newman, mathematician who is very friendly and intimate with,
said, I just can't believe it's as nice to go to bed with a girl as with a boy.
And it was young men. This is the question they thought about, and the only way for that now is to go abroad.
And when he went to Norway in 1952, it's almost certainly because he was attracted by news of the early Scandinavian gay movement, which I don't.
I may well have seen this. I mean, may quite possibly you see these magazine pictures from Denmark in 1951,
because then I was I'm sure he had left it and he actually learnt Danish and Norwegian.
He was very I think he was probably very attracted to the idea of escaping to Scandinavia, and he went to Norway in 1952 and met a young man.
And indeed, his programming was influenced by his experience in Norway because he may just be able to see this.
And she had a programme where he met this old Ibsen routine and had other routines which are named after Norwegian youth and so on.
And this is not a very serious connexion with his work here, but a nice picture of what he did.
But this led to further crisis, which from what he said was a crisis as full of incident as the Enmore story.
That is to say, something happened in 1953 that was equally traumatic to the arrest and trial in 1952, but he did not tell anyone what it was.
Prof includes little clues,
and this is one of the clues this this these words and the letter that you typed out on the Manchester using the Manchester computers,
it was like a sort of email when you haven't got email, very sort of nerdy thing to do.
Nothing quite like that sometimes. And you see it constantly works of crisis about the North.
But it is actually the crisis about the Norwegian boy who visited in 1953 or rather tried to visit him in his home,
but failed and was turned back by police, who then he found her washing him the entire time.
And this was something serious.
It happened. And did. He is really a question of whether he realised why he was being watched so, so closely.
This is not something that would normally happen. And it seems fairly obvious that this was because he was not any gay man of the 1950s period.
He was the top person in Anglo-American Secret Communications.
And this, I think, is probably in a somewhat state of denial about the the significance of this fact.
It is the paradox in his life. If he wanted to be an ordinary, ordinary gay man, one time you couldn't be a gay man at all, really.
But he would just like to have been sort of just normal carrying on. But at the same time, he wasn't ordinary.
He'd been this most important person you could possibly be. And things which are a deadly secret kept completely secret for another 20 years,
and which also shared with the United States, which was in the middle of the McCarthy crisis and general paranoia.
So the really surprise is that things went on as long as they did. Rather, they led to a crisis in 1954.
Well, he didn't let them this stop him.
He actually went to Greece, went to Corfu, Athens in Paris in the summer of 1953.
I know he brought back a whole page of names from he'd met in Athens and.
I know this because I saw it in of all places, the atomic weapons research establishment or hold in Austin,
where it got muddled up with a stack of his papers. Hmm.
I've seen it, but no one else has, because the the the nuclear scientist who had it destroyed it because it showed such a terrible light on here.
What sort of person that in theory was, and that is that is the history that we have to try.
I mean, that is the destruction of history that we have to try and recover our way out of.
Well, I think you can see that this gives the whole background is that in 1954,
which is not just a simple question of collapsing because of exposure or being ousted in 1952,
he was in a very, very special position and we don't know what happened that time.
But that could very well have been another crisis. If he was unable to go abroad again, that could well very well have been the last straw hit.
He comments This is the final and it's a very well-known symbol now.
It's the person Apple who used the device.
I've taken cyanide but left this theatrical prop of an apple in which those who wanted to believe
could believe he had eaten with cyanide on it by mistake as part of the chemistry experiment.
I mean, basically, that was a kind thing to do is suicide hurts other people so much,
and it was a way to allow people if they wanted to believe it was a joke against his own amateur chemistry experiments and clumsiness.
If you like something his mother had always nagged him about since he was a boy.
All those things.
But of course, the wonderful symbolism as well, because this is one of several things and it's certainly the expulsion from innocence.
I mean, he had given up his life as a pure mathematician for the sake of the war against Nazi Germany.
It was in 1938 that he made that switch to the very point, actually,
when he'd seen the famous Disney Snow White film, which he certainly like very much aware.
And he often remarked upon where Snow White dipping the apple in the brew.
That very point and that very connexion with the wilderness of state secrecy was, I think, probably the most, deepest, most difficult thing in 1954.
That was the very paranoid time is the same week. That is that his counterpart, Robert Oppenheimer, was denounced as a traitor in the American press.
But on the other hand, you see that very willingness to lose that innocence for doing practical, worldly things was the excitement.
I mean, it was also, you know, it's a sexual thing, too, because it was what it drove a lot of his feelings and needs.
And it was the thing which led to the embodiment of the computer and took it away from being something that was purely paper theoretical thing.
That was a great excitement of starting that revolution, and it's something he couldn't resist.
The whole longing for practical action was, I think, bound up with his own sexuality as well.
It was indeed indeed his fatal chemistry experiment.
So these hidden stories are actually very closely connected and a lot more.
Of course, the show might interest you to find out about. But I think that's just one very simple thing to end with.
It was just six years ago. Alan Turing just wanted to be free.
Ordinary guy honest. And it seems to have taken a very, very long time for the world to catch up with this.
Oh, thank you very much.