1 00:00:00,150 --> 00:00:06,750 Right. But let's just remember that one reason for this talk today is this is Alan Turing centenary year. 2 00:00:06,750 --> 00:00:11,250 So we're marking the 100th anniversary will be on June the 23rd this year, 3 00:00:11,250 --> 00:00:17,040 and there are a number of events around the world marking this this special year. 4 00:00:17,040 --> 00:00:24,390 So thank you very much for the invitation to speak here on this fascinating subject. 5 00:00:24,390 --> 00:00:32,940 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. 6 00:00:32,940 --> 00:00:40,470 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. 7 00:00:40,470 --> 00:00:45,390 So I'm very grateful for that. But let's just think about who who Alan's hearing was. 8 00:00:45,390 --> 00:00:54,570 Indeed, he was a mathematician and he was the founder of Computer Science, and he was essentially the inventor of the computer. 9 00:00:54,570 --> 00:01:01,890 And besides that, he was the chief scientific figure in the Anglo-American code breaking effort of the 10 00:01:01,890 --> 00:01:07,500 Second World War centred on the now famous but then deadly secret Bletchley Park. 11 00:01:07,500 --> 00:01:11,910 And as such, he is simply one of the key figures of modern history. 12 00:01:11,910 --> 00:01:24,870 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 13 00:01:24,870 --> 00:01:31,920 has quite happy look there because he just achieved something great in mathematics. 14 00:01:31,920 --> 00:01:42,060 But I would like to think about his time at Bletchley Park to get a picture of the the centre part of his life, 15 00:01:42,060 --> 00:01:46,200 which is, of course, of enormous interest to everyone now. 16 00:01:46,200 --> 00:01:53,400 And here he was, in fact, in the early days of the war established in this cottage yesterday, 17 00:01:53,400 --> 00:01:57,570 and it's in the grounds of Bletchley Park, almost unchanged as it was then. 18 00:01:57,570 --> 00:02:07,620 And this was the point where he did the groundbreaking work on the enigma deciphering which changed everything in the war thereafter. 19 00:02:07,620 --> 00:02:12,960 In fact, it looks a bit unbelievable seeing that picture, but being there at that point, 20 00:02:12,960 --> 00:02:19,320 he and the other colleagues of his other mathematicians particularly were roughly parallel to the leading 21 00:02:19,320 --> 00:02:29,370 physicists who found themselves taken out of pure research in 1939 and drawn into the atomic bomb project. 22 00:02:29,370 --> 00:02:32,520 But there are great differences as well as parallels. 23 00:02:32,520 --> 00:02:39,390 And one is that the code breaking had actually much more impact on the Second World War than the atomic bomb did. 24 00:02:39,390 --> 00:02:46,500 And another is this The atom bomb was immediately famous and physicists became celebrities, 25 00:02:46,500 --> 00:02:51,390 and the exact opposite happened was of the thousands of people who worked at Bletchley. 26 00:02:51,390 --> 00:02:58,620 Everything about what they'd done was a complete secret for 30 years, and no one outside knew a thing. 27 00:02:58,620 --> 00:03:04,380 And that's a very important part of considering who he was and what he did and what I'm going to describe later, 28 00:03:04,380 --> 00:03:09,870 which is the history of how his life came into public consciousness because it 29 00:03:09,870 --> 00:03:16,530 is the historical aspect of it that I want to address in this opportunity. 30 00:03:16,530 --> 00:03:18,510 So what is an interview specifically? 31 00:03:18,510 --> 00:03:29,340 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. 32 00:03:29,340 --> 00:03:37,410 It was based on some potent ideas, far more powerful. This machine was a central part of the enigma deciphering process, 33 00:03:37,410 --> 00:03:41,970 and I'm not absolutely not going to explain how the enigma worked and how the bomb work. 34 00:03:41,970 --> 00:03:49,380 But I'm going to give you a picture of the just full picture of what we're talking about here. 35 00:03:49,380 --> 00:03:56,580 This is Alan Shearer. After the essential invention in 1939 that carried through hundreds of machines of this type, 36 00:03:56,580 --> 00:04:01,800 we built both in this country and in the United States as well later on, 37 00:04:01,800 --> 00:04:15,480 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. 38 00:04:15,480 --> 00:04:20,610 But that was the explosion of wonderful, logical Lupo, which Alan Turing spotted. 39 00:04:20,610 --> 00:04:23,970 They were almost also enormous feats of electrical engineering, 40 00:04:23,970 --> 00:04:34,170 only really just possible with the engineering of the day and an enormous achievement to make it possible at all. 41 00:04:34,170 --> 00:04:41,770 And that was Turing's thing. I mean, with an important input from the engineers and from mathematical colleague, but that the most, 42 00:04:41,770 --> 00:04:51,140 the most wonderful observation going on from that, the group that he had it attained really complete control of Atlantic communications. 43 00:04:51,140 --> 00:04:59,730 Mean he specialised into looking at the naval messages, which were the ones where the greatest security protection, most difficult. 44 00:04:59,730 --> 00:05:05,290 And. Also, the most vital in the and at least in the Western Wall, it was the Atlantic War, 45 00:05:05,290 --> 00:05:13,270 the connexion with the United States that was most vital and it was essential to the invasion of Europe in 1944. 46 00:05:13,270 --> 00:05:17,770 And indeed, it required top level liaison with the United States. 47 00:05:17,770 --> 00:05:22,090 So that theory went on a top level mission in November 1942. 48 00:05:22,090 --> 00:05:31,080 And in that role, he had access and inputs into every other top secret question, of course, and communications between the allies. 49 00:05:31,080 --> 00:05:36,370 I mean, I'm just emphasising that he wasn't someone who just did a bit or wrote a message. 50 00:05:36,370 --> 00:05:43,180 He was the top guy as far as the scientific work in the whole of the Atlantic sphere. 51 00:05:43,180 --> 00:05:54,550 But between 1939 and 1945 now it was only in 1974 where a number of insiders, for different reasons, 52 00:05:54,550 --> 00:06:05,830 began to disclose this colossal scale, this industrial scale, the scale of information factory involving thousands of people. 53 00:06:05,830 --> 00:06:14,260 Only then that is emerge, and only then did Alan Turing name emerge as the chief scientific figure. 54 00:06:14,260 --> 00:06:18,880 And of course, by that time, he had been dead for 20 years. 55 00:06:18,880 --> 00:06:26,800 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 56 00:06:26,800 --> 00:06:32,740 the faintest idea how this machine and the other amazing machines that raised on how they actually work, 57 00:06:32,740 --> 00:06:43,300 what they did, it was unbelievably secret. But this revelation in the 1970s did bring his life into focus for another reason. 58 00:06:43,300 --> 00:06:49,420 A very interesting reason, and that's to do with the computer, which is the other elements of his major achievements. 59 00:06:49,420 --> 00:06:55,150 And most people in the 1930s, when they knew Alan Turing as a Cambridge mathematician, 60 00:06:55,150 --> 00:07:02,320 as a graduate student or a postdoc in modern terms, they would have said, Well, he's a pure mathematician, pure pure. 61 00:07:02,320 --> 00:07:05,140 You know, nothing to do with the real world. 62 00:07:05,140 --> 00:07:11,230 And the last person you would imagine to be involved in military things are indeed official things of any kind. 63 00:07:11,230 --> 00:07:20,530 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, 64 00:07:20,530 --> 00:07:27,730 was turned by the challenge of Nazi Germany into something with a very, very worldly application. 65 00:07:27,730 --> 00:07:38,710 And and that was his story that the Pure turned into the very highly applied through the experience of Bletchley Park. 66 00:07:38,710 --> 00:07:49,720 I mean, he, as a mathematician, had a very wide range, but the central ideas were thought logic, methods, machines, symbols. 67 00:07:49,720 --> 00:07:59,230 And it was that world which he completely revolutionised in the 1930s and then brought forward into the computer world of the 40s. 68 00:07:59,230 --> 00:08:06,190 In 1936, he had published a paper with the incomprehensible title of on computable numbers. 69 00:08:06,190 --> 00:08:11,740 There's an application to the incidence problem, not the most snappy title, 70 00:08:11,740 --> 00:08:19,780 and my advice to young scientists is not to include long German words in their titles. 71 00:08:19,780 --> 00:08:27,220 But in the middle of this was a very prophetic passage indeed. 72 00:08:27,220 --> 00:08:32,350 And you contained these was the universal computing machine. 73 00:08:32,350 --> 00:08:37,270 It is possible to invent a single machine, et cetera, et cetera. 74 00:08:37,270 --> 00:08:42,610 And that is essentially the concept of the computer, an unknown concept. 75 00:08:42,610 --> 00:08:53,560 Then in 1936, only a paper concept, then setting out a mathematical theory, but something which turned into computers that we all use now. 76 00:08:53,560 --> 00:08:58,810 Now, until that period in the 1970s, when these revelations came out, 77 00:08:58,810 --> 00:09:08,620 it was really a complete puzzle as to why this pure theorists of the 1930s had emerged in 1945 78 00:09:08,620 --> 00:09:13,840 as someone who had designed a computer because that's what he did and not only designed it, 79 00:09:13,840 --> 00:09:18,490 but it was built and you can see it in the Science Museum now it's on the ground floor. 80 00:09:18,490 --> 00:09:26,950 This is the ace computer based on Terry's computer design and the Science Museum. 81 00:09:26,950 --> 00:09:37,990 And how the question was, how was it that this strange, pure unworldly person has suddenly become this computer, both in the 1940s? 82 00:09:37,990 --> 00:09:41,650 Well, the Bletchley revelations answer that question. 83 00:09:41,650 --> 00:09:50,410 He had learnt so much and gained so much from the technology of code breaking in those six years of war. 84 00:09:50,410 --> 00:09:55,990 I mean, there were years which were like an experience taken from the future. 85 00:09:55,990 --> 00:09:59,860 This is everything was 20 years ahead, both intellect. 86 00:09:59,860 --> 00:10:09,190 Truly and technologically and socially to this whole ambience and with very, very powerful experience for everyone in it. 87 00:10:09,190 --> 00:10:14,050 This important hearing a very unusual for Alan Turing as a mathematician that he got his hands 88 00:10:14,050 --> 00:10:19,840 dirty with actual machinery is very unusual for a Cambridge mathematician to be like that. 89 00:10:19,840 --> 00:10:21,760 And as an example of that, 90 00:10:21,760 --> 00:10:30,670 he actually built in the latter part of the war a very advanced space scrambler using electronic components and therefore gave 91 00:10:30,670 --> 00:10:37,750 him sort of hands on practise for designing electronic computer images of the end of the war that was built to an engineer, 92 00:10:37,750 --> 00:10:42,280 don very well mentioned later on. 93 00:10:42,280 --> 00:10:49,660 So this brought us to the claim that he was the founder of computer science and essentially the inventor of the computer. 94 00:10:49,660 --> 00:10:54,910 That 1936 paper I showed you is the foundation of modern computer science, 95 00:10:54,910 --> 00:11:01,660 and his 1945 work was to turn that theoretical idea into the practical reality of electronics and 96 00:11:01,660 --> 00:11:07,750 this machine as the symbol of his eagerness to do what he called building a brain as he called. 97 00:11:07,750 --> 00:11:13,030 And that was what you called it, because he was always most interested in what we now call artificial intelligence, 98 00:11:13,030 --> 00:11:18,460 the question of whether a computer can emulate what the human mind does. 99 00:11:18,460 --> 00:11:25,150 Now I'm not giving a talk on computers anymore or mathematics, but I will point out that in the 1970s, 100 00:11:25,150 --> 00:11:31,690 this is really the period when computers began to be something like what Alan Turing had in mind. 101 00:11:31,690 --> 00:11:34,930 I mean, if you look at these weird computers of the forties and fifties, 102 00:11:34,930 --> 00:11:39,130 this sort of thing you see in some of these mass films, that really wasn't his idea. 103 00:11:39,130 --> 00:11:45,550 I mean, just these very expensive, difficult, isolated things. 104 00:11:45,550 --> 00:11:53,590 He had a vision really of where which is really began to take shape in the 1970s with miniaturisation is much, 105 00:11:53,590 --> 00:12:00,280 much closer now that people can use computers and almost throwaway fashion and it becomes the software that's important. 106 00:12:00,280 --> 00:12:04,300 It's software acting on software, it's downloading software. 107 00:12:04,300 --> 00:12:08,710 The fact that you can download software like downloading data, there's no difference. 108 00:12:08,710 --> 00:12:14,320 Software X and other software edits it modifies it and translates it those things. 109 00:12:14,320 --> 00:12:20,680 Those are part of his vision. It wasn't the lumbering engineering that was part of his his core ideas. 110 00:12:20,680 --> 00:12:25,240 It was everything that we associate with the universality of the computer. 111 00:12:25,240 --> 00:12:34,360 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. 112 00:12:34,360 --> 00:12:39,940 Photographs and CDs in the same machine will be used for text processing or indeed 113 00:12:39,940 --> 00:12:45,580 for doing this display of doing climate modelling or playing chess or the, 114 00:12:45,580 --> 00:12:46,960 you know, filing documents. 115 00:12:46,960 --> 00:12:54,580 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. 116 00:12:54,580 --> 00:13:02,200 Even when he explained it. That's his world and is easy, comparatively easy now to see his idea of 1936. 117 00:13:02,200 --> 00:13:11,470 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, 118 00:13:11,470 --> 00:13:17,950 after all doing this with computers and well, I mean, why wasn't he famous? 119 00:13:17,950 --> 00:13:27,640 Well, he had. He has moments of fame and being the this computer project I've mentioned was in the press in 1946. 120 00:13:27,640 --> 00:13:34,330 He was on in the press, 1949 had his bits of film and newsreel and on the radio in 1951. 121 00:13:34,330 --> 00:13:39,040 But one important thing Michel would bring us is that he did not act as a big shot. 122 00:13:39,040 --> 00:13:47,440 He was very, very self-effacing and also true that others were quite willing to face him. 123 00:13:47,440 --> 00:13:52,600 And I'll give an example of that in one piece of computer literature here. 124 00:13:52,600 --> 00:14:00,610 This is the first book on computers written and published in as compiled in 1953 or faster than thought. 125 00:14:00,610 --> 00:14:06,610 And this is the image of Alan Turing, which came out at that period in computer development, 126 00:14:06,610 --> 00:14:13,780 which is absolutely dominated by the engineering of these theories and their very triumphs of engineering. 127 00:14:13,780 --> 00:14:19,090 But they weren't really his his implementing, his vision. 128 00:14:19,090 --> 00:14:27,610 He was seen, as you'll see from those words, is something really quite absurdly intellectual and out of the real world, 129 00:14:27,610 --> 00:14:32,860 something that he'd done in 1936, that it was incomprehensible. 130 00:14:32,860 --> 00:14:45,070 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. 131 00:14:45,070 --> 00:14:53,920 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. 132 00:14:53,920 --> 00:15:01,530 And this is an element of his personality, which is also is part of his life. 133 00:15:01,530 --> 00:15:07,530 In fact, he had a short piece in this book which explain the very ideas I've mentioned the idea of the universal machine, 134 00:15:07,530 --> 00:15:13,020 but no reader of it would ever have realised that they were his ideas and that they were 135 00:15:13,020 --> 00:15:19,650 the ideas out of which the concepts of the computer and everything about it have flowed. 136 00:15:19,650 --> 00:15:24,600 Well, that's a sad thing. And so also is this date 1953. 137 00:15:24,600 --> 00:15:29,700 The next year, 1954, was when he died. 138 00:15:29,700 --> 00:15:36,270 And as you would have noticed already, the 1912 to 1954, this was a very short life. 139 00:15:36,270 --> 00:15:42,600 I mean, he died when he was 41, and he faced himself for reasons. 140 00:15:42,600 --> 00:15:51,330 The big story, which I'll come to you later and at at the time, this was not a major events in the world. 141 00:15:51,330 --> 00:15:56,460 Essentially, the waters closed over him. He was not. 142 00:15:56,460 --> 00:16:00,690 There was not marked as a great event, except very shocking to the people who knew him. 143 00:16:00,690 --> 00:16:03,660 But this was not a puppet. He was not a public figure. 144 00:16:03,660 --> 00:16:11,700 This did not come as a huge event at the time, but it was never completely forgotten because mathematicians, 145 00:16:11,700 --> 00:16:20,100 they knew about these incomprehensible Turing machines, and he kept going on as mathematics does in its quiet way. 146 00:16:20,100 --> 00:16:26,340 His various is certainly not forgotten, just for this practical world. 147 00:16:26,340 --> 00:16:30,900 He seems in the fifties and sixties, somewhat irrelevant figure. 148 00:16:30,900 --> 00:16:34,860 And that's therefore the situation when it began to change, 149 00:16:34,860 --> 00:16:42,030 and the revelations about the work at Bletchley Park very much changed the picture because it turned 150 00:16:42,030 --> 00:16:48,360 out that he far from being in this impractical person who knew nothing about the real world. 151 00:16:48,360 --> 00:16:53,400 He had been in charge of this Department of Bletchley hands-on experience, 152 00:16:53,400 --> 00:17:01,740 which had day by day cracked the U-boat messages and essentially saved the Atlantic war. 153 00:17:01,740 --> 00:17:11,550 So from that period on, there's been a great period of uncovering hidden history and in several ways, 154 00:17:11,550 --> 00:17:14,670 a fascinating business the three hidden histories. 155 00:17:14,670 --> 00:17:25,320 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. 156 00:17:25,320 --> 00:17:31,710 The second actually was the true story of how the computer emerged and because that also had been falsified, 157 00:17:31,710 --> 00:17:40,680 essentially by not knowing this great bridge of events between the theory and the practise between the 1930s and the 1950s. 158 00:17:40,680 --> 00:17:48,810 And the third was that about interfering as a gay man, and of course, only in the 1970s is ready to be talked about. 159 00:17:48,810 --> 00:17:53,310 And I'll be saying something now and I'll concentrate on that third hidden history. 160 00:17:53,310 --> 00:17:57,630 After all, this is LGBT History Month. And that's why I'm invited. 161 00:17:57,630 --> 00:18:04,440 But I'd invite users to see if there is a larger picture here of uncovering truth and seeing 162 00:18:04,440 --> 00:18:08,550 beneath and not believing everything that you're told and knowing that there are many, 163 00:18:08,550 --> 00:18:13,650 many fascinating things that are there to be discovered. 164 00:18:13,650 --> 00:18:18,210 And in fact, these three hidden histories are linked through that one figure. 165 00:18:18,210 --> 00:18:23,220 Alan Turing because his character and motivation achievements were the key 166 00:18:23,220 --> 00:18:31,110 thing in all of this and someone who had essentially been disappeared in 1954. 167 00:18:31,110 --> 00:18:36,630 Well, how did this uncovering of hidden history take place? 168 00:18:36,630 --> 00:18:40,560 Well, I think this brings to me because I find that I'm gay history now. 169 00:18:40,560 --> 00:18:46,560 Should I find a slightly disconcerting fact? It's a bit worrying this. 170 00:18:46,560 --> 00:18:58,170 But anyway, let me go back back back to 1971, and the uncovering process began through the London Gay Liberation Front of that period. 171 00:18:58,170 --> 00:19:05,340 And it's in those circumstances that I had a story about Alan Turing and as a mess students. 172 00:19:05,340 --> 00:19:13,590 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, 173 00:19:13,590 --> 00:19:16,560 unworldly mass that he did. 174 00:19:16,560 --> 00:19:26,760 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. 175 00:19:26,760 --> 00:19:39,360 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, 176 00:19:39,360 --> 00:19:49,050 and he had been obliged to take oestrogen implant treatment and essentially chemical castration, 177 00:19:49,050 --> 00:19:57,660 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. 178 00:19:57,660 --> 00:20:02,590 It was an extremely shocking humiliation. The facts and this was the background to his death. 179 00:20:02,590 --> 00:20:06,220 Two years later, in 1954. Well, 180 00:20:06,220 --> 00:20:13,420 we included this story in Little Pamphlet that we and the Left wrote his pamphlet about the then 181 00:20:13,420 --> 00:20:19,530 dominant psychiatric picture of how being gay was a major personality disorder and so forth, 182 00:20:19,530 --> 00:20:26,650 which was the prevailing view in those days. I mean, it was a supreme example of psychiatric oppression. 183 00:20:26,650 --> 00:20:31,090 And we published it, but I must say no one took the slightest notice of it in those days, 184 00:20:31,090 --> 00:20:36,130 and I can't recall the slightest reaction to this revelation. 185 00:20:36,130 --> 00:20:45,970 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. 186 00:20:45,970 --> 00:20:52,480 But I had some extra Oxford mathematics input, which told me that I'm a bit more, 187 00:20:52,480 --> 00:21:00,610 but it was actually Alan Turing who had been the most important person, and I was astonished and fascinated by this as well. 188 00:21:00,610 --> 00:21:07,870 And I realised that the Algerians death in 1954 might very well have involved something extra. 189 00:21:07,870 --> 00:21:18,460 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. 190 00:21:18,460 --> 00:21:28,750 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. 191 00:21:28,750 --> 00:21:31,840 It was knowledge both British and American, 192 00:21:31,840 --> 00:21:41,500 and I certainly wanted to find out more about this and that these stories described these hidden histories has connexions as what I sensed. 193 00:21:41,500 --> 00:21:46,120 In fact, what I really had was the idea of trying to tell that story from a point of 194 00:21:46,120 --> 00:21:51,940 view in which Alan's Turing own experience and consciousness would prevail. 195 00:21:51,940 --> 00:21:53,320 That was not the original to me. 196 00:21:53,320 --> 00:22:04,330 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. 197 00:22:04,330 --> 00:22:11,380 All sorts of fascinating things about the past, which had to come out it through through Gaelic Gay Liberation thought, 198 00:22:11,380 --> 00:22:18,400 but it was a new thing, I think, to try and combine this with science and indeed military history. 199 00:22:18,400 --> 00:22:24,370 Now, there was no help to me from published sources for the simple reason that everyone had written about. 200 00:22:24,370 --> 00:22:33,430 Turing had simply admitted everything about his life as a gay man and what had happened in that period, 1952 54. 201 00:22:33,430 --> 00:22:38,050 I mean, everyone just thought that was the proper thing to do. I mean, a here is just did not say anything. 202 00:22:38,050 --> 00:22:44,110 I mean, the whole idea of everyone thought it was proper was just to eliminate the existence of 203 00:22:44,110 --> 00:22:52,270 of lesbians and gay men from the sense of history and ongoing events that was thought. 204 00:22:52,270 --> 00:22:58,600 And it really only changed in the eighties. But as it turned out, Adams hearings Owen. 205 00:22:58,600 --> 00:23:03,460 Well, actually, well, I have to. I disagree with Vice. Sorry, he wasn't so crazy. 206 00:23:03,460 --> 00:23:08,080 It was actually particularly open and to a lot of people. 207 00:23:08,080 --> 00:23:13,900 And for instance, in the Manchester environment, which was a pretty macho engineering type environment, 208 00:23:13,900 --> 00:23:20,530 he was actually particularly open to all and his people didn't call it that. 209 00:23:20,530 --> 00:23:24,880 Then they called it his integrity. That was the worst word that was used. 210 00:23:24,880 --> 00:23:30,260 But those things helped me enormously. I mean, he left an enormous goodwill behind him. 211 00:23:30,260 --> 00:23:36,790 The people who knew that something had gone. Absolutely. There had been some absolutely dreadful injustice that happened in this period. 212 00:23:36,790 --> 00:23:45,760 And by the seventies, I would say that many people had never discussed these things for 20 years since that happened, 213 00:23:45,760 --> 00:23:50,620 or more than 20 years, probably and were at that point were able. 214 00:23:50,620 --> 00:23:59,200 In fact, in many cases when I was researching it, it was like a kind of therapy actually to go through these these questions. 215 00:23:59,200 --> 00:24:04,630 Well, there were the few records, no letters, no diaries, unfortunately. 216 00:24:04,630 --> 00:24:15,640 But the thing was that his friends had saved from destruction the things which otherwise, I would generally say, tend to get eliminated. 217 00:24:15,640 --> 00:24:25,630 And they remembered magic lines that he had spoken, which showed me the way that a new kind of history could go. 218 00:24:25,630 --> 00:24:35,080 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, 219 00:24:35,080 --> 00:24:40,600 and I don't have a go at telling some of the epochs of history in that light was rather a 220 00:24:40,600 --> 00:24:49,210 different light from the technical and military and world history that I've given so far. 221 00:24:49,210 --> 00:24:59,280 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. 222 00:24:59,280 --> 00:25:05,880 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 223 00:25:05,880 --> 00:25:09,930 Alan Turing who did the science things and there was another one who was gay. 224 00:25:09,930 --> 00:25:19,230 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, 225 00:25:19,230 --> 00:25:24,030 that these things are of a to do with the unity of the personality. 226 00:25:24,030 --> 00:25:25,860 They can't be separated off. 227 00:25:25,860 --> 00:25:33,330 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. 228 00:25:33,330 --> 00:25:38,800 This is Alan Turing at school 1929 answering on the left and his other lines. 229 00:25:38,800 --> 00:25:42,990 Christopher Malcolm on the Rise and Christopher was certainly the first. 230 00:25:42,990 --> 00:25:51,720 He was the first great love. Unrequited, I'm sure, but another but a very important, well, several important things. 231 00:25:51,720 --> 00:25:57,480 Christopher suddenly died in 1930. It was extremely traumatic. 232 00:25:57,480 --> 00:25:58,800 But before he died, 233 00:25:58,800 --> 00:26:09,060 he was the person who really brought Alan Turing out of intellectual isolation into a world of science and communication rather than of solitude, 234 00:26:09,060 --> 00:26:11,580 because he very isolated as a as a boy. 235 00:26:11,580 --> 00:26:21,370 So a very important part to play as and to advance things relativity and quantum mechanics, as well as chemistry experiments. 236 00:26:21,370 --> 00:26:26,610 And this is the picture on the right that I think Alan's here and kept in his rooms throughout his life. 237 00:26:26,610 --> 00:26:37,440 And thoughts about the events of his death played a very important part in Turing's early philosophical explorations. 238 00:26:37,440 --> 00:26:44,790 When he was a student at Cambridge is the questions he wrote about the question of what is the nature of mind? 239 00:26:44,790 --> 00:26:49,200 How can it be embodied in the brain? This quantum mechanics make any difference. 240 00:26:49,200 --> 00:26:53,310 What is the nature of freewill, determinism and how so forth? 241 00:26:53,310 --> 00:26:55,980 Those are questions which you didn't answer directly in his work, 242 00:26:55,980 --> 00:27:03,660 but came back again in his thinking about artificial intelligence and stimulated his questioning of what logic, 243 00:27:03,660 --> 00:27:10,200 what science can tell you about mental operations, which is that really the subject of his 1936 work, 244 00:27:10,200 --> 00:27:17,880 which, as explained, actually gives rise to the computer? That's a that's a sad story. 245 00:27:17,880 --> 00:27:23,220 There's a happy one coming up. That's my favourite picture of A. 246 00:27:23,220 --> 00:27:32,760 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. 247 00:27:32,760 --> 00:27:36,510 I mean, certainly, I think what he would like to see and like to see quite a lot also, 248 00:27:36,510 --> 00:27:42,360 I think, is quite quite a good picture of his of his romantic imagination. 249 00:27:42,360 --> 00:27:49,770 And there was a rather yeah, than a rather similar at Cambridge. 250 00:27:49,770 --> 00:27:57,840 His next relationship was with another mathematics students at King's College, James Atkin's. 251 00:27:57,840 --> 00:28:03,630 And then somewhat like this event happened on the Lake District when they were walking on the hills there, 252 00:28:03,630 --> 00:28:09,990 and James became a first boyfriend, which lasted several years on and off. 253 00:28:09,990 --> 00:28:18,570 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. 254 00:28:18,570 --> 00:28:22,830 And so this early part of an intelligence Larry King's College, 255 00:28:22,830 --> 00:28:29,910 where by chance really Turing had gone to study mathematics was, of course, peculiarly sort of gay tolerance. 256 00:28:29,910 --> 00:28:39,630 Bloomsbury Group. Maynard Keynes, all those people. So it was a very supporting environment. 257 00:28:39,630 --> 00:28:43,530 Alan had his sort of Brideshead moments. 258 00:28:43,530 --> 00:28:47,570 He had a he had a teddy bear, which they all did in this way. 259 00:28:47,570 --> 00:28:52,440 But that wasn't really his thing. He it was much more at his. 260 00:28:52,440 --> 00:29:01,530 Unusually for that, he really fought against this aesthetes athlete distinction and was actually more on the athlete side. 261 00:29:01,530 --> 00:29:05,280 He was very keen on rowing and cycling and running and boating. 262 00:29:05,280 --> 00:29:13,110 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 263 00:29:13,110 --> 00:29:19,110 stereotyping of gay men as being intellectual revenge as being of an aesthete sort of I. 264 00:29:19,110 --> 00:29:23,430 I don't really know, but he certainly he did rather take against that. 265 00:29:23,430 --> 00:29:30,840 For that reason. He wasn't a completely at King's College sort of person, but he was in other ways because, 266 00:29:30,840 --> 00:29:36,960 I mean, he vaguely leftish in the antiwar movement of 1933 and, like other people, 267 00:29:36,960 --> 00:29:45,240 progressed through the thirties into through the anti-fascist importance of understanding 268 00:29:45,240 --> 00:29:53,910 the challenge facing the West from Nazi Germany and to such a position that he would, 269 00:29:53,910 --> 00:30:00,840 instead of being anti militarist as he had been in 1933, felt compelled to take part in the war. 270 00:30:00,840 --> 00:30:09,810 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, 271 00:30:09,810 --> 00:30:20,610 1933 1934, not a picture of him, so I'm showing that her rice is the picture just caught in this snapshot. 272 00:30:20,610 --> 00:30:25,260 The slight sideways out of the frame look and actually is, I think, quite appropriate for it. 273 00:30:25,260 --> 00:30:29,070 And it's not the of person who was at the centre of social events. 274 00:30:29,070 --> 00:30:37,950 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, 275 00:30:37,950 --> 00:30:45,390 which I described here, rather a desert as far as the love interest is concerned. 276 00:30:45,390 --> 00:30:54,750 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. 277 00:30:54,750 --> 00:31:03,060 So he was the most effective anti-fascist where his friends were mostly concerned with exhortations. 278 00:31:03,060 --> 00:31:11,280 He was actually doing something very useful preparation and back to England and King's College in 279 00:31:11,280 --> 00:31:17,220 1938 with his cipher machine and actually a lot of interest in a young engineer who helped women. 280 00:31:17,220 --> 00:31:24,840 And that's that's again, part of the story that he actually certainly develops a romantic interest in his 281 00:31:24,840 --> 00:31:31,590 collaboration of his ideas and the and the practical abilities of other young men. 282 00:31:31,590 --> 00:31:36,950 That's part of the erotic area, which he seems to thrive. 283 00:31:36,950 --> 00:31:44,640 And at King's, it was probably Maynard Keynes who who knew Turing well, who put him onto the code breaking establishment, 284 00:31:44,640 --> 00:31:55,860 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. 285 00:31:55,860 --> 00:32:04,560 It may actually be in Kansas is connexions with the echelon of people who had done code breaking work in the First World War. 286 00:32:04,560 --> 00:32:09,630 That actually brought about that as a hitherto hidden history there, 287 00:32:09,630 --> 00:32:16,830 which should be interesting to know more about the, meanwhile, actually sponsored. 288 00:32:16,830 --> 00:32:20,040 Oh yes, he has. But this is not a very clear snapshot of race. 289 00:32:20,040 --> 00:32:27,490 This is only at bottom on the south coast of England, where this is right in August 1939. 290 00:32:27,490 --> 00:32:33,360 So the critical points of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact were all just waiting to see what would happen next. 291 00:32:33,360 --> 00:32:41,850 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. 292 00:32:41,850 --> 00:32:47,040 And the rabbit didn't pay for it completely, but helped to come over to England. 293 00:32:47,040 --> 00:32:52,620 So again, that was a little bit of practical, as if anti-fascism at that point. 294 00:32:52,620 --> 00:33:03,660 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, 295 00:33:03,660 --> 00:33:08,610 as Bob, who was there, told me he was there and in the room. 296 00:33:08,610 --> 00:33:14,040 And that's how everything changed. And so that's the that's the setting. 297 00:33:14,040 --> 00:33:22,290 That's a nice picture of the informality out of which this whole world of the code breaking then 298 00:33:22,290 --> 00:33:31,190 developed so well at the same time as saving the Atlantic and all the other things that he was doing. 299 00:33:31,190 --> 00:33:39,180 Of course, Alan Turing had his own personal life going as well. Not an easy one to carry through for a gay man, really. 300 00:33:39,180 --> 00:33:44,970 And in fact, there was a point where a remarkable thing happened because he he could very well have 301 00:33:44,970 --> 00:33:48,780 been tempted at this point to follow the kind of conventional line that other people did, 302 00:33:48,780 --> 00:33:55,980 including the of the Fellow of Kings in the picture there and who who got married. 303 00:33:55,980 --> 00:34:02,430 And the main arc ends who was married to. And this is a very common conventional pattern that people do. 304 00:34:02,430 --> 00:34:14,910 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, 305 00:34:14,910 --> 00:34:18,510 Joan Clarke, and they had got on extremely well. I mean, they were buddies. 306 00:34:18,510 --> 00:34:25,740 But as Joan put it, they didn't have a lot of physical contact, but it's something that could have worked. 307 00:34:25,740 --> 00:34:30,660 But this is a striking thing that he decided this was not for him. 308 00:34:30,660 --> 00:34:35,610 This this, this, this kind of a sort of pretend marriage. 309 00:34:35,610 --> 00:34:41,310 This was not on. He told her specifically why this was. 310 00:34:41,310 --> 00:34:46,950 And it was very upsetting. In fact, when he broke it off because he was actually get engaged, but when he broke it off, 311 00:34:46,950 --> 00:34:52,710 he actually quoted Oscar Wilde for each man kills the thing he loves. 312 00:34:52,710 --> 00:34:59,280 And of course, every game I knew I was hanging over the whole era was the fate of the wild. 313 00:34:59,280 --> 00:35:11,240 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, 314 00:35:11,240 --> 00:35:21,270 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. 315 00:35:21,270 --> 00:35:24,780 And that's I think it may indicate quite a shift. 316 00:35:24,780 --> 00:35:33,540 Before this point, he had certainly been very full of need and response and and and desire for young men, 317 00:35:33,540 --> 00:35:37,980 but probably hadn't really accepted his identity as such. 318 00:35:37,980 --> 00:35:41,340 But after this period in the war and thereafter, 319 00:35:41,340 --> 00:35:50,010 he was much more clear and open and certainly determined to be more honest and working on the denial of speech scrambled, 320 00:35:50,010 --> 00:35:56,790 which I described with a young man young engineer from the Midlands is absolutely astounded. 321 00:35:56,790 --> 00:36:03,540 Really, I never met anything like this before. Alan Turing was very open with him and told him all about his being gay, 322 00:36:03,540 --> 00:36:10,260 and it was a remarkable thing that is not what you're supposed to be doing in 1944. 323 00:36:10,260 --> 00:36:15,390 But he got away with it. I think essentially because of this, in fact, what people call integrity. 324 00:36:15,390 --> 00:36:25,260 I mean, it was just it was so natural for him to say openly and honestly that it was accepted. 325 00:36:25,260 --> 00:36:32,190 And certainly, Donald Bailey was very amazed that someone should tell them that they had these feelings and that they were, 326 00:36:32,190 --> 00:36:35,820 as Donald Bailey told me, almost proud of it. 327 00:36:35,820 --> 00:36:43,830 And that's the fact the earliest reference I've had to the concept of gay pride in a very surprising context. 328 00:36:43,830 --> 00:36:50,260 The context, incidentally, where Alan Turing conceived of the idea of the electronic computer. 329 00:36:50,260 --> 00:36:53,250 I mean, this is where the computer came from. 330 00:36:53,250 --> 00:37:04,110 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. 331 00:37:04,110 --> 00:37:08,910 Well, I must run on a bit more, but this gives you some flavour of what sort of gay man he was. 332 00:37:08,910 --> 00:37:15,720 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. 333 00:37:15,720 --> 00:37:19,110 But he was a real person. I want to put that over in this talk. 334 00:37:19,110 --> 00:37:26,670 This is one opportunity to do that. Real person did all these mathematical, technical, philosophical things. 335 00:37:26,670 --> 00:37:34,800 But I also had a very complex and and quite sweet life and his own lots of other things he did. 336 00:37:34,800 --> 00:37:39,720 He was very keen on running and after the war, when based on their computer, 337 00:37:39,720 --> 00:37:45,240 I see developments joined the local Athletic Club that's monitoring all the steps of the bus. 338 00:37:45,240 --> 00:37:49,440 There is the after meeting there and then there's another picture of him running. 339 00:37:49,440 --> 00:37:57,240 There was extremely, actually trained, very hard, actually did marathons as well as other long distance was actually nearly on the 340 00:37:57,240 --> 00:38:04,390 Olympic team in 1948 and reasons you are not going to go and say he didn't. 341 00:38:04,390 --> 00:38:10,770 He was impatient with the computer development at the National Physical Laboratory and he went off to Manchester. 342 00:38:10,770 --> 00:38:14,310 But meanwhile, had a bit of time at Cambridge in 1948, 343 00:38:14,310 --> 00:38:26,590 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. 344 00:38:26,590 --> 00:38:30,750 I think he might have kept up very well, but it was just impossible separation, 345 00:38:30,750 --> 00:38:37,020 long distance separation of their jobs and it was not able to keep it up. 346 00:38:37,020 --> 00:38:40,650 That's that was a great shame. 347 00:38:40,650 --> 00:38:49,770 And so I'm hearing less of this comparatively protected elite Cambridge environment for Manchester, which of course, is extremely different, 348 00:38:49,770 --> 00:39:02,040 is a very grimy industrial city of the late and the late forties and a very comparatively macho engineering kind of ambience there. 349 00:39:02,040 --> 00:39:11,940 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, 350 00:39:11,940 --> 00:39:17,040 absolutely unique and so forth that actually he liked ordinary things and a lot of ways, 351 00:39:17,040 --> 00:39:25,530 and he didn't actually want to be treated as a very special person as in Manchester. 352 00:39:25,530 --> 00:39:29,610 Well, the computer, his role in the cathedral didn't really work out very well, 353 00:39:29,610 --> 00:39:35,640 but he did write one very famous thing his his paper about artificial intelligence written in that period, 354 00:39:35,640 --> 00:39:40,560 very famous of the Turing test, was written in that atmosphere. 355 00:39:40,560 --> 00:39:45,240 And that's a fascinating paper to read just in this from this side of his life 356 00:39:45,240 --> 00:39:50,310 and this story's point of view because it's full of comments about human life. 357 00:39:50,310 --> 00:39:54,420 Although it's about what machines can do, it's comparing machines with human beings. 358 00:39:54,420 --> 00:39:59,310 And unlike almost any Roger Federer computer writer, that. 359 00:39:59,310 --> 00:40:09,580 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, 360 00:40:09,580 --> 00:40:16,180 own sense of progression through life is most important and full of thought innuendo 361 00:40:16,180 --> 00:40:23,320 type remarks as well as that was really like like is full of full of jokes. 362 00:40:23,320 --> 00:40:28,480 One person who is this is answering on the right at the console of the Manchester computer, 363 00:40:28,480 --> 00:40:35,500 and you can see not exactly fitting in very well into the into the obviously the ambience there. 364 00:40:35,500 --> 00:40:42,460 He's not in it, but not of it. He had an interesting colleague there, Christopher Street. 365 00:40:42,460 --> 00:40:50,260 She had a very similar mentality. Christopher Strange may be known to some people here because he headed the computer laboratory 366 00:40:50,260 --> 00:40:59,380 here and in fact was an organiser of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality here in the early 70s. 367 00:40:59,380 --> 00:41:08,830 So that's a nice Oxford connexion. But at Manchester, they had this slightly nice camp take on artificial intelligence and Christopher Street, 368 00:41:08,830 --> 00:41:16,540 who wrote machines to make this machine as programmes to make this machine write love letters. 369 00:41:16,540 --> 00:41:24,460 Which is that that shows that that's the kind of fun and mentality which Turing was able to put into this environment. 370 00:41:24,460 --> 00:41:31,840 It was a serious beginnings of artificial intelligence programming idea, but made made fun. 371 00:41:31,840 --> 00:41:41,200 And he also got it to play Jingle Bells, the first computer music, which was played on BBC Radio at Christmas 1951. 372 00:41:41,200 --> 00:41:49,030 Now talking of Christmas 1951 and speaking of Oxford, Alan Turing didn't have any direct connexion with Oxford at all. 373 00:41:49,030 --> 00:41:55,450 But he did with the Oxford Road, which is the main road which leads south out of Manchester centre past university. 374 00:41:55,450 --> 00:42:02,560 And that's the place where the railway bridge is, where it was the centre of the working class gay scene in the. 375 00:42:02,560 --> 00:42:09,190 And then as indeed it is now. And there's that by the milk bar. 376 00:42:09,190 --> 00:42:19,780 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. 377 00:42:19,780 --> 00:42:27,310 Breaking the code have seen a reasonably accurate depiction of the events that that took place. 378 00:42:27,310 --> 00:42:38,560 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. 379 00:42:38,560 --> 00:42:41,980 But what happened was that of Murray, 380 00:42:41,980 --> 00:42:53,350 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, 381 00:42:53,350 --> 00:42:59,410 and the friend burgled Alan's house and then took it as a form of blackmail, which indeed it was. 382 00:42:59,410 --> 00:43:05,530 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. 383 00:43:05,530 --> 00:43:17,500 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, 384 00:43:17,500 --> 00:43:26,140 which you may notice was 60 years ago yesterday, and therefore one of the first acts of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. 385 00:43:26,140 --> 00:43:33,380 The second is an unfortunate start to me. 386 00:43:33,380 --> 00:43:42,100 ERA was to arrest a man who had done so much to save Old Blighty and then in the war. 387 00:43:42,100 --> 00:43:49,140 But they are. That's what happened, and it is often said to be very naive for doing this. 388 00:43:49,140 --> 00:43:58,660 So they were going to the police. And but he I mean, it was exactly this naivete and lack of cunning, 389 00:43:58,660 --> 00:44:09,760 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, 390 00:44:09,760 --> 00:44:14,340 which has really made all the difference. So I don't really follow this point of view. 391 00:44:14,340 --> 00:44:21,160 It's been in the end, it's been a greater strategy, so to to push things on of it. 392 00:44:21,160 --> 00:44:28,090 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. 393 00:44:28,090 --> 00:44:31,700 I mean, that was his view, and the police were very amazed by this. 394 00:44:31,700 --> 00:44:38,530 They had never met anyone who stood up to the questioning, and they took this line that he'd done. 395 00:44:38,530 --> 00:44:44,320 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. 396 00:44:44,320 --> 00:44:51,640 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 397 00:44:51,640 --> 00:44:56,480 politician saying the law was so wrong and there was a politician who's his son, 398 00:44:56,480 --> 00:45:01,240 this guy. Well, I mean, I don't know who this was, actually, but that's how it shows it here. 399 00:45:01,240 --> 00:45:05,500 He had an attitude. It wasn't just a passive victim of events. 400 00:45:05,500 --> 00:45:13,690 This was someone who's who's standing and showing would like to have shaped events, but of course, was completely powerless. 401 00:45:13,690 --> 00:45:22,660 And he also wrote a short story, which really was a justice disguised form of the events that had taken place. 402 00:45:22,660 --> 00:45:27,430 It was just for himself. I don't think he's trying to publish it or anything. And it's interesting. 403 00:45:27,430 --> 00:45:34,690 The thing about it is that you actually use the expression gay man, which is a new expression for those days. 404 00:45:34,690 --> 00:45:44,740 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, 405 00:45:44,740 --> 00:45:54,220 and that's rather typical of everything was happening in this period that the 19th 1951 52 period saw enormous increase in the 406 00:45:54,220 --> 00:46:02,500 number of prosecutions and also meant that it became a public issue for the first time instead of being completely unmentionable. 407 00:46:02,500 --> 00:46:09,880 And it was that increase in the number of events which led to the public discussion and therefore to the wolf from the commission, 408 00:46:09,880 --> 00:46:15,010 which was set up later in just after Terry died in 1954. 409 00:46:15,010 --> 00:46:24,670 So in that? Consciousness as a reaction to increased persecution and in turn, was very much part of the process. 410 00:46:24,670 --> 00:46:32,590 That is the news local newspaper account of what happens is his trial on March 31st, 1952, 411 00:46:32,590 --> 00:46:43,360 and you will see those words or going to therapy treatment, which is indeed the oestrogen implant and which I described before. 412 00:46:43,360 --> 00:46:51,640 This is indeed what happens. And his wish he endures. 413 00:46:51,640 --> 00:46:59,470 I mean, his solutions were, as I've described this, this amount of increased consciousness also a greater contact with his friends. 414 00:46:59,470 --> 00:47:08,620 The great support of OK Here network was most important there, and he had a mechanism as well. 415 00:47:08,620 --> 00:47:13,990 He started seeing a young man, psychoanalyst Franz Greenbaum. 416 00:47:13,990 --> 00:47:22,040 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. 417 00:47:22,040 --> 00:47:28,660 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. 418 00:47:28,660 --> 00:47:33,640 And but as he says, Robin Gandy would be so boring. 419 00:47:33,640 --> 00:47:40,810 And as he said to Len Newman, who is the wife of Max Newman, mathematician who is very friendly and intimate with, 420 00:47:40,810 --> 00:47:46,090 said, I just can't believe it's as nice to go to bed with a girl as with a boy. 421 00:47:46,090 --> 00:47:51,850 And it was young men. This is the question they thought about, and the only way for that now is to go abroad. 422 00:47:51,850 --> 00:48:02,770 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. 423 00:48:02,770 --> 00:48:09,910 I may well have seen this. I mean, may quite possibly you see these magazine pictures from Denmark in 1951, 424 00:48:09,910 --> 00:48:15,650 because then I was I'm sure he had left it and he actually learnt Danish and Norwegian. 425 00:48:15,650 --> 00:48:28,330 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. 426 00:48:28,330 --> 00:48:37,000 And indeed, his programming was influenced by his experience in Norway because he may just be able to see this. 427 00:48:37,000 --> 00:48:47,320 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. 428 00:48:47,320 --> 00:48:53,500 And this is not a very serious connexion with his work here, but a nice picture of what he did. 429 00:48:53,500 --> 00:49:01,810 But this led to further crisis, which from what he said was a crisis as full of incident as the Enmore story. 430 00:49:01,810 --> 00:49:10,950 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. 431 00:49:10,950 --> 00:49:13,300 Prof includes little clues, 432 00:49:13,300 --> 00:49:21,170 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, 433 00:49:21,170 --> 00:49:25,510 it was like a sort of email when you haven't got email, very sort of nerdy thing to do. 434 00:49:25,510 --> 00:49:33,310 Nothing quite like that sometimes. And you see it constantly works of crisis about the North. 435 00:49:33,310 --> 00:49:43,060 But it is actually the crisis about the Norwegian boy who visited in 1953 or rather tried to visit him in his home, 436 00:49:43,060 --> 00:49:50,320 but failed and was turned back by police, who then he found her washing him the entire time. 437 00:49:50,320 --> 00:49:54,250 And this was something serious. 438 00:49:54,250 --> 00:50:01,910 It happened. And did. He is really a question of whether he realised why he was being watched so, so closely. 439 00:50:01,910 --> 00:50:13,060 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. 440 00:50:13,060 --> 00:50:18,820 He was the top person in Anglo-American Secret Communications. 441 00:50:18,820 --> 00:50:24,700 And this, I think, is probably in a somewhat state of denial about the the significance of this fact. 442 00:50:24,700 --> 00:50:30,970 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. 443 00:50:30,970 --> 00:50:37,000 But he would just like to have been sort of just normal carrying on. But at the same time, he wasn't ordinary. 444 00:50:37,000 --> 00:50:44,260 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, 445 00:50:44,260 --> 00:50:51,280 and which also shared with the United States, which was in the middle of the McCarthy crisis and general paranoia. 446 00:50:51,280 --> 00:50:58,000 So the really surprise is that things went on as long as they did. Rather, they led to a crisis in 1954. 447 00:50:58,000 --> 00:51:01,390 Well, he didn't let them this stop him. 448 00:51:01,390 --> 00:51:09,670 He actually went to Greece, went to Corfu, Athens in Paris in the summer of 1953. 449 00:51:09,670 --> 00:51:15,880 I know he brought back a whole page of names from he'd met in Athens and. 450 00:51:15,880 --> 00:51:23,050 I know this because I saw it in of all places, the atomic weapons research establishment or hold in Austin, 451 00:51:23,050 --> 00:51:27,160 where it got muddled up with a stack of his papers. Hmm. 452 00:51:27,160 --> 00:51:35,290 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. 453 00:51:35,290 --> 00:51:41,200 What sort of person that in theory was, and that is that is the history that we have to try. 454 00:51:41,200 --> 00:51:47,950 I mean, that is the destruction of history that we have to try and recover our way out of. 455 00:51:47,950 --> 00:51:53,200 Well, I think you can see that this gives the whole background is that in 1954, 456 00:51:53,200 --> 00:52:00,670 which is not just a simple question of collapsing because of exposure or being ousted in 1952, 457 00:52:00,670 --> 00:52:05,320 he was in a very, very special position and we don't know what happened that time. 458 00:52:05,320 --> 00:52:15,470 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. 459 00:52:15,470 --> 00:52:24,040 He comments This is the final and it's a very well-known symbol now. 460 00:52:24,040 --> 00:52:28,210 It's the person Apple who used the device. 461 00:52:28,210 --> 00:52:34,870 I've taken cyanide but left this theatrical prop of an apple in which those who wanted to believe 462 00:52:34,870 --> 00:52:42,100 could believe he had eaten with cyanide on it by mistake as part of the chemistry experiment. 463 00:52:42,100 --> 00:52:48,010 I mean, basically, that was a kind thing to do is suicide hurts other people so much, 464 00:52:48,010 --> 00:52:55,840 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. 465 00:52:55,840 --> 00:53:00,580 If you like something his mother had always nagged him about since he was a boy. 466 00:53:00,580 --> 00:53:01,600 All those things. 467 00:53:01,600 --> 00:53:13,270 But of course, the wonderful symbolism as well, because this is one of several things and it's certainly the expulsion from innocence. 468 00:53:13,270 --> 00:53:19,750 I mean, he had given up his life as a pure mathematician for the sake of the war against Nazi Germany. 469 00:53:19,750 --> 00:53:23,440 It was in 1938 that he made that switch to the very point, actually, 470 00:53:23,440 --> 00:53:29,170 when he'd seen the famous Disney Snow White film, which he certainly like very much aware. 471 00:53:29,170 --> 00:53:38,470 And he often remarked upon where Snow White dipping the apple in the brew. 472 00:53:38,470 --> 00:53:50,440 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. 473 00:53:50,440 --> 00:54:00,610 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. 474 00:54:00,610 --> 00:54:07,650 But on the other hand, you see that very willingness to lose that innocence for doing practical, worldly things was the excitement. 475 00:54:07,650 --> 00:54:16,570 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. 476 00:54:16,570 --> 00:54:25,690 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. 477 00:54:25,690 --> 00:54:30,310 That was a great excitement of starting that revolution, and it's something he couldn't resist. 478 00:54:30,310 --> 00:54:35,370 The whole longing for practical action was, I think, bound up with his own sexuality as well. 479 00:54:35,370 --> 00:54:40,420 It was indeed indeed his fatal chemistry experiment. 480 00:54:40,420 --> 00:54:44,870 So these hidden stories are actually very closely connected and a lot more. 481 00:54:44,870 --> 00:54:51,170 Of course, the show might interest you to find out about. But I think that's just one very simple thing to end with. 482 00:54:51,170 --> 00:54:56,980 It was just six years ago. Alan Turing just wanted to be free. 483 00:54:56,980 --> 00:55:06,290 Ordinary guy honest. And it seems to have taken a very, very long time for the world to catch up with this. 484 00:55:06,290 --> 00:55:09,785 Oh, thank you very much.