Alan Turing Pardoned

[MsGuy]

Alan Turing, mathematician, founding father of cybernetics and one of the leaders of the Bletchly Park team of code breakers that allowed the English to read German military communications during WWII, was pardoned this week by the British government for being queer.

Turing, who was something of a naif in worldly matters and open about his sexuality, was robbed by a rent boy in 1952. When he reported the theft to his local constabulary, the coppers promptly prosecuted Turing for being homosexual. He was given a choice between years in prison or chemical castration.

I've read somewhere that the chief constable responsible for the charge later regretted pursuing the matter saying that he had not been aware that Turing had been awarded the Victoria Cross (= Congressional Medal of Honour) for his war work. (Not sure if that is true or that, if true, it makes the Chief Constable less of an asshole or more.)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-royal-pardon-british-codebreaker-turing-20131224,0,7253815.story#axzz2oQWSPfqO

[AdamSmith]

pardoned this week by the British government for being queer.

Thank you! I was thinking likewise: Don't do us any favors, Ma'am.

[AdamSmith]

The Guardian notes the 75,000 other faggots prosecuted under these laws whom the government has not deemed worthy of pardon because, so sorry, they were not geniuses. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/24/alan-turing-pardon-wrong-gay-men

[Guest PasadenaCA]

The Guardian notes the 75,000 other faggots prosecuted under these laws whom the government has not deemed worthy of pardon because, so sorry, they were not geniuses. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/24/alan-turing-pardon-wrong-gay-men

So if I follow this story correctly, the British found homosexual behavior so abhorrent, that they considered incarcerating 75,000 sexually active gay men together. Great plan.

[Guest zipperzone]

Hmmm... It's a wonder that certain members of the Royal Family were not included in this "purification" process.

[AdamSmith]

So if I follow this story correctly, the British found homosexual behavior so abhorrent, that they considered incarcerating 75,000 sexually active gay men together. Great plan.

Good point.

Although article says that before 1948 many got "hard labor" instead.

[lookin]

I've read somewhere that the chief constable responsible for the charge later regretted pursuing the matter saying that he had not been aware that Turing had been awarded the Victoria Cross (= Congressional Medal of Honour) for his war work. (Not sure if that is true or that, if true, it makes the Chief Constable less of an asshole or more.)

I tried finding a source for that and I can't. When Turing was arrested in 1952, almost no one would have known what he did during the war or would have given him an award for it. The codes he cracked were still in use by several countries long after the war was over and the British didn't want anyone to know they had broken them. Churchill knew of course and told the folks at Bletchley that they had shortened the war by two years, but they must never talk about it. It wasn't until 1970 that anyone who worked there said anything, and then it was one of the American code breakers who had been on assignment at Bletchley during the war. It took another decade or two for the story to get into the public domain.

I think it would make a terrific movie. Not the fictionalized Enigma which didn't even mention Turing, but the real story. If the German U-boats had been able to operate without detection, the British would have had a much closer call than they did. After he found the British starting to show up wherever his subs were, Großadmiral Dönitz started to believe his unbreakable code had been broken, but the generals in Berlin assured him it was impossible.

If I understand correctly, one of the keys to breaking the Enigma code was the realization that, because of the way the machine was designed, no plaintext letter could ever be encoded as itself. "Aha!", said Turing, and some other very smart folks, "let's see what we can do with that."

A replica of the Turing Bombe -

the originals were destroyed after the war

[TampaYankee]

Too little too late.

The only British award or honour bestowed on him was Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his work at the 'Foreign Office' -- probably a cover for his work at Bletchley Park.

From a reading of the recent history to get Turing pardoned and honored it's pretty clear, if said history is presented accurately, that the Brits were shamed into doing this rather than rushing over themselves to right a wrong. So don't wait for an avalanche of more pardons for others convicted of 'Gross Indecency'.

This attitude from a society where probably a majority of the upper class males have probably buggered or been buggered multiple times in their life. British public schools are notorious a bastion of 'wide ranging education'.

[Guest CharliePS]

What I find irritating about this whole business is that a "pardon" implies that punishment for the original "offense" was justified, but now we are feeling magnanimous toward the offender. I wish they would issue a "mea culpa" instead.

[MsGuy]

The only British award or honour bestowed on him was Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his work at the 'Foreign Office' -- probably a cover for his work at Bletchley Park.

TY, you're right, the OBE rather than the VC was the honour Turing received (and it was for the War work). Sorry, I was posting from memory, a dodgy enterprise for me now-a-days.

You're right about the origin of the pardon too. What politician cares about some academic faggot being fucked over way back when?

lookin:

When Turing was arrested in 1952, almost no one would have known what he did during the war or would have given him an award for it.

lookin is also correct. The code work at Bletchly was a closely guarded secret at the time. Under the Official Secrets Act, Turing would not even have been able to mention his war efforts to ameliorate his punishment.

Where I read about the Constable's later regrets is a complete mystery to me. Possibly it was from PBS type documentary I watched. I have no idea how factual it is but I'm pretty certain it didn't come from some fever dream of my own.

====

Turin's story has stuck in my craw ever since I found out about it. Maybe (for me) it represents the epitome of mindlessly cruel homophobia.

I forget about him for months at a time but then I see his name somewhere and get pissed off all over again.

[lookin]

The code work at Bletchly was a closely guarded secret at the time. Under the Official Secrets Act, Turing would not even have been able to mention his war efforts to ameliorate his punishment.

Interesting point and one I hadn't thought of. It must have been hard for him, and not surprising if he felt his countrymen ought to have let one slide.

Maybe the constable later wished he'd known about Turing's contributions to the nation and would have let him skate.

From what I've read about Turing, he was richly blessed in the parts of his brain that could blaze mathematical trails that few others could follow, but not very advanced in the parts responsible for sensing trouble and staying out of it. He was certainly naive, as you say.

For whatever reason, Turing admitted breaking the law to a sworn officer and stepped into a shit pile that most of his gay countrymen had figured out how to avoid.

Reminds me of some friends of mine who had an intruder climb through their window while they were away and steal a couple of nice plants from their grow room.

They thought it was their teenage neighbor and called the local Sheriff to check the windowsill for fingerprints.

The snag was this was thirty years ago, long before Prop 215, and the Sheriff laid a passel of charges on my friends that required a high-priced lawyer to get pared down to something manageable. To this day, none of us knows what they were thinking, other than that they weren't doing anything terribly wrong as they saw it, and the law was the problem and not them. They were right, of course, but the law was still the law and sometimes the constabulary takes a rather dim view of those who break it.

My friends could probably have stayed out of trouble by sucking up their property loss and so could Turing. Whether it was a sense of entitlement or plain old naivete, they got a little too close to the bear.

What happened to Turing afterwards was awful. Though I wasn't an adult, I was fooling around with other guys in the U. S. just a few years after Turing did in England. Some of my older friends had gone through hell a decade earlier for getting caught having gay sex. Even as a fairly naive teenager, I knew the importance of carrying on below the radar. Still, I've done more than my share of stupid things, and know how lucky I've been. Wish Turing had also caught a break.

[TampaYankee]

The whole modern world owes him a debt of gratitude, not just Britain. He laid the fundamental groundwork for modern computing much as Newton did for Mechanics and Optics. Turings work is essential to everything that has a logic circuit in it. That's just about everything that isn't grown in a field or caught in the sea. Who knows what other contributions he would have made if his life had not been abruptly curtailed by the establishment and ultimately depression.