Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [136]
Turing nevertheless started to go for sessions with a psychiatrist. It seemed clear to some that despite his energy and good humour, the events of the trial, and the sentence, weighed heavier upon him than he liked to suggest.
Turing’s sentence expired in 1953. The University of Manchester appointed him to a Readership in the Theory of Computing, which would have made him financially secure for a great many years to come. Turing also enjoyed foreign holidays – a genuine rarity in the pre-jet age 1950s.
So there remains at least some ambiguity about the circumstances of his suicide in 1954, at the age of forty-two. He was found in bed by his housekeeper, with white foam around his mouth. There was a jar of potassium cyanide in the house, and of cyanide solution. On his bedside table was an apple, out of which several bites had been taken. The obvious conclusion: the apple had been dipped in cyanide. Indeed, author Andrew Hodges went so far as to recall how, some years back, Turing had become fascinated with the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the wicked queen’s chilling incantation: ‘Dip the apple in the brew/Let the Sleeping Death seep through’.
According to Hodges, Turing had prepared a new will several months earlier. But the fact that he left no note, and indeed no indication whatsoever that such a course might be on his mind, has led others to speculate that his death might have had an even more macabrely random element about it.
Keith Batey is one who cannot quite believe that Turing committed suicide. He recalls: ‘When I was secretary at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, I overlapped with James Lighthill. He’d been Professor at Manchester with Turing. James said he didn’t believe Turing committed suicide. He said that he [Turing] was a great man for experimenting and he was experimenting with acidification of cyanide on coke. James said he did this while he was eating an apple and that’s how he got poisoned. He went on to say that [Turing] had bought himself two pairs of new socks three days previously. And he wouldn’t have done that if he was going to commit suicide.’
In the acclaimed Turing play Breaking the Code (1988) by Hugh Whitemore, the dramatist delicately hints at another possibility. In the final scene, Turing is enjoying a Greek holiday. He has picked up a young man. The young man says nothing and Turing assumes that he cannot speak English. As they recline, Turing, now talking almost to himself, finally talks out loud about Bletchley – about the work he did, the breakthroughs he achieved, the intolerable burden of security and secrecy. And still the Greek boy says nothing.
But from this we suddenly, chillingly, infer: what if the Greek boy was a set-up? A Soviet spy? Such things were known. If that were the case – if the boy understood every word and reported it back – would it have become plain to British security services that Turing had leaked the vital information? And if so, could they not have arranged to have had him conveniently removed?
The play ends as our speculation begins. But that is simply theatre. These days, Turing is rightly remembered for his achievements, as opposed to his eccentricities and foibles. A bust of his head now stands in the Bletchley Park museum. And in September 2009, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised – on behalf of the government and, we presume, the nation – for Turing’s prosecution. ‘He was a quite brilliant mathematician,’ said Mr Brown, praising his contribution to ‘Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship’.
‘The debt of gratitude