Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [135]
In the 1930s, while the theory had been revolutionary, it was difficult to see how the current valve technology could keep pace with such a thing. Come 1943, and the successful operation of the Colossus machine, with its thousands of valves working in unison, and suddenly a whole new realm of possibilities opened up.
King’s was to wait: for the mathematicians and physicists at the National Physical Laboratory in south-west London had – despite the security and secrecy of the last few years – come to hear of Turing’s reputation, and wished to hire him. Turing saw this as a potential avenue for at last realising his vision. The goal was simple: the logical functionings of the mind could surely be replicated inside the electronic pulses of a machine.
In the months and years that were to follow, this work – the construction of a vast room-filling machine, all dials and wires and valves – would eventually take Turing to the University of Manchester. He bought a house in a suburb, made good friends with his next-door neighbours; and began to investigate those areas of the city in which like-minded men and opportunistic youths flashed understanding glances at one another.
Turing became involved with a young man called Arnold Murray, inviting him home for dinner. After several of these dinners, Murray was invited to stay the night. Their relationship, by Andrew Hodges’ account, was at once awkward, odd, and in some curious way affecting, with the lad finding Turing’s intellect and superior social class eye-opening.
But then money started to go missing; Turing instantly suspected Murray. Words were exchanged. After Turing’s house was burgled, Murray, slipping up, admitted that he knew the burglar in question – a lad he called Harry – and had happened to meet him a short while back when Harry had been planning a crime. Turing went to the police with the information on ‘Harry’.
But it all suddenly backfired on Turing. The police caught up with Harry, who in his statement gave an account of Arnold Murray’s numerous visits to Turing’s home. The police now decided to turn their attention to Turing.
Turing made no bones about the allegation of homosexual behaviour – indeed, while Detective Mills was round at his house, Turing gave him wine and entertained him with a few old melodies on his violin. To his closest friends, Turing had always been open about his orientation, even going so far as to make jokes about men that he found attractive. But in 1952, there was a sort of mini-hysteria in Britain surrounding the entire subject of homosexuality.
There was the celebrated case of Lord Montagu and the journalist Peter Wildeblood, not to mention an undercover officer entrapping the actor John Gielgud in a public lavatory. The subject made lurid headlines in the Sunday scandal sheets. Turing was charged with gross indecency. He did not seem to understand how anyone could possibly imagine that he had committed a crime.
At Turing’s trial, Max Newman and Hugh Alexander, now at GCHQ in Cheltenham, appeared as character witnesses. Turing was found guilty, though spared prison. Hideously, though, as part of the condition of being bound over for a year, he was also required to submit, for a limited period of about a year, to ‘Organo-Therapic Treatment’ at Manchester Royal Infirmary. In short, this was an extremely primitive form of hormone treatment involving oestrogen. Turing was, for a time, rendered impotent, and grew breasts.
Nevertheless, although the trial had obviously caused a certain amount of disquiet within Manchester University – and even though GCHQ had removed his security clearance – he had been allowed to hold on to his academic post. And by this stage, he was widely admired within the British