It must have been good to hear these words, even on such a black day. “He is completely absorbed in his work, and is one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation,” Newman said. The mathematician Max Newman, Turing’s long-time friend, was called as a character witness. Turing pleaded guilty on all six counts, as did Murray.
Turing why are you gay meme trial#
Following a distressing wait of more than four weeks, the trial was held in the quiet Cheshire town of Knutsford at the end of March.
The court granted Turing bail of £50, but refused to let Murray out of custody.
The charges were read out and both men were committed for trial. Three weeks later, at the end of February 1952, Turing and Murray appeared in court. Six criminal offences.Īfter Turing made his statement, he said to a police officer: “What is going to happen about all this? Isn’t there a Royal Commission sitting to legalise it?” But not until 1967 was homosexuality decriminalized in the UK. The burglary dropped out of the picture, eclipsed by this sensational new information.Īs the police knew all too well, each of the three occasions counted as two separate crimes under the antique 1885 legislation still in force - the commission of an act of gross indecency with another male person, and the reciprocal crime of being party to the commission of an act of gross indecency. In the course of reporting the burglary he gave the police a wrong description and this, as the newspaper reporter covering his subsequent trial wrote luridly, “proved to be his undoing.”ĭuring questioning, Turing admitted to having had sex with Murray three times. In the morning he led Murray to the local police station. The next time they had sex, Murray stole £8 from Turing’s pocket as he left Hollymeade in the morning, and not long after this the house was burgled.Įven though the finger of suspicion pointed at Murray and his seedy friends, Turing spent the night with him one more time. Afterwards Turing gave Murray a present of a penknife: probably the unemployed Murray would have preferred cash instead. Their first time was a few days later at Turing’s house, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow. Turing picked up Murray in Manchester’s Oxford Street and the two ate together. “Ronald” is an anagram of “Arnold,” and it was in December 1951 that Turing first met Arnold Murray, the Ronald Miller of his short story. Beggars can’t be choosers, Ron thinks meanly. Eventually Alec plucks up courage to invite the boy to have lunch at a nearby restaurant. Shyly Alec joins him on the bench and the two sit together awkwardly. He responds to a glance that Alec gives him as he passes, calling out uncouthly “Got a fag?”. Ron, who is out of work and keeps company with petty criminals, makes a small income from male prostitution. Pryce, we are told, has not had a sexual relationship since “that soldier in Paris last summer.” Walking through Manchester, Pryce passes a youth lounging on a bench, Ron Miller. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word was spelt without the ‘u.’” “The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too. “Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used,” Turing wrote revealingly. Pryce, like Turing himself, always wore what Turing described as “an old sports coat and rather unpressed worsted trousers.” Pryce, whose work related to interplanetary travel, made an important discovery in his twenties, which came to be called “Pryce’s buoy.” The nature of the discovery is left unexplained, and Pryce’s buoy is obviously a proxy for the universal Turing machine. The central character - a scientist by the name of Alec Pryce, who works at Manchester University - is a thinly disguised Alan Turing. Although only a few pages long and incomplete, it offers an intimate glimpse of its author. In this adapted extract from The Turing Guide, Jack Copeland walks us through the events leading up to his arrest and trial, which sentenced him to chemical castration. In 1952, Alan Turing, patriotic codebreaker and pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence, was arrested, tried, and punished on the basis of his homosexuality.