ALAN TURING by Paul Harfleet

Alan Turing

by Paul Harfleet

The more I learn about Alan Turing the more I love him. He was quiet, shy perhaps even introverted. He was eccentrically brilliant and most who knew him testified to this. His work in science and mathematics and philosophical thinking about what we all take for granted is so prescient, it is almost magical; you’re looking at what he was imagining now. A computer.

Alan Turing was thinking about this nearly a hundred years ago. Thinking about the potential and possibility of an ‘electronic brain’. He was involved in designing the first versions of what computers have become. He is often referred to as the forefather of computing and that is what he was.

He was also part of a team that helped reveal the mysteries behind the coded messages that the Germans used to conceal the secrets of battle during the Second World War. Turing and his colleagues probably cut the war short by years. They probably saved thousands if not millions of lives.

Though Alan Turing also happened to be gay. His brother referred to him as a ‘pansy’. His colleagues and friends knew he was a so-called homosexual. That was just part of him. He refused to think of his sexuality as abhorrent or wrong as so many did at the time. He simply was who he was. Something that even now find discombobulating.

When the police caught up with him, the country he had fought for in secret and helped to protect, failed to protect him from the law that criminalised homosexuality. He was found guilty of ‘gross indecency’ by a court in Knutsford. He was given a choice of prison sentence or treatment. He chose what he thought was the least catastrophic to his thinking and research. Hormone treatment was at the time thought to reduce homosexual feelings. And so it was the discipline he had done so much for that was now used against him.

Though this period of two years where Alan Turing was apparently disgraced did not appear to make this man of science bow down to society. He appeared to take most of these absurd challenges in his stride. He apparently laughed off the fact that the hormone treatment made him develop breasts. To quote Andrew Hodges book* “his reaction had been so different from the wilting, disgraced, fearful, hopeless figure expected by fiction and drama”. When Alan Turing apparently took his own life, most were shocked and bewildered. Those that were not close to him assumed that he had been shamed into suicide.

When Turing’s housekeeper found him dead from an apparent cyanide overdose imbibed by eating an apple dipped in poison the authorities quickly assumed that he had chosen to end his life. Though Turing had no real signs that he was struggling or felt this way, there was no suicide note, experiments still bubbled away in his quarters and he’d booked theatre tickets for the following week. Accident or suicide? It’s unlikely we’ll ever be sure.

The complexities of Turing’s legacy and his growing cultural presence are not quite enough to recognise this man’s influence on society. It’s easy to paint this man as yet another tragic figure in gay history though this is not quite the case. He was great and loved and brilliant. He was the forefather of computer science. It’s now almost inconceivable to live without computers, they are so entwined within our daily lives. Alan Turing would be delighted.


Paul Harfleet is an artist and award winning garden designer, perhaps best known for The Pansy Project. Paul's Pansy Project exhibition is showing for the next six months at DoubleTree by Hilton, 1 Piccadilly Place, Manchester.

www.thepansyproject.com


*Alan Turing, The Enigma by Andrew Hodges