Alan Turing: The Enigma The Centenary Edition

by Andrew Hodges

  Attitudes were one thing. Practical prospects were another. There was the nauseating business of having authorities ransack his emotional life and pronounce upon it, and there was the actual punishment that lay in store. The circumstances of his crime, with their elements of age and class difference, were against him. Even to the kindly disposed, this might seem a case of the ‘elderly degenerate’ of The Green Bay Tree, rather than the romantic wantonness of the greenwood tree.

  His intransigent attitude was also a challenge to the authority of the law. But on the other hand, only 174 of the 746 men prosecuted in 1951 for the crime of ‘gross indecency’ had been imprisoned, and then mostly for less than six months. He would have been in a more dangerous position had the charge been that of ‘buggery’, for the law distinguished carefully between different kinds of sexual activity. He was also a ‘first offender’, which diminished the chances of imprisonment. But beyond this, the times were changing, and a more modern attitude was coming to prevail. The backroom boys were beginning to affect not only descriptions, but prescriptions.

  Writing a new Foreword to Brave New World in 1946, Aldous Huxley suggested that ‘The release of atomic energy marks a great revolution in human history, but not (unless we blow ourselves to bits and so put an end to history) the final and most searching revolution.’ Despite the fact that he believed atomic power would usher in ‘highly centralised totalitarian governments’, continuing the trend which the Second World War had accelerated, he stuck to his guns of 1932. ‘This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings,’ he had claimed, and the signs were there in the existing research in ‘biology, physiology, and psychology’.

  Alan Turing was no stranger to these subjects; his intellectual development had circled round to face the question of Natural Wonders: ‘By what process of becoming did I myself finally appear in this world?’ The significance of his mathematical work, indeed, rested upon the fact that specific substances, the ‘growth hormones’ referred to in his paper, had been chemically isolated by experimental biochemists. Amidst the patient accumulation of facts, the discoveries of the sexual hormones since 1889 had engendered a particular interest. Such interest, both lay and scientific, was not confined to the role of the hormones in physiological growth. It was widely asserted that the ‘chemical messages’, at which E.T. Brewster had marvelled in 1912, determined the psychology as well as the physiology of the individual.

  If, to the more old-fashioned person, the problem of homosexuality remained one of ‘filth’ and indiscipline, of which as little was to be said as possible, the modern psychological view was dominated by the categories of ‘masculine and ‘feminine’, with a belief that gay men and lesbian women had been endowed by nature with some unusual mixture of these all-important characteristics.* One attraction of this view was that it left intact an assumption of universal heterosexuality, since these apparent exceptions could be defined away as cases where a woman was ‘really’ a man, or vice versa. Some found in this theory a scientific justification of homosexuality, according to the logic of the age, others found the hope of solving the hitherto unsolvable problem that it posed.

  The discovery of the hormones suggested that the eternal verities of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ might, indeed, be embodied in a simple chemical form. It was appropriate to a decade in which these great truths were so sedulously cultivated by Hollywood that the first major American experiments to test this theory were made at Los Angeles in 1940. The endocrinologists estimated the quantity of male hormones, or androgens, and of female hormones, or oestrogens, in the urine of seventeen homosexual men who had been ‘taken into custody’. They did the same for thirty-one ‘normal males’. Their results showed that even for a single individual this ratio could vary from time to time by a factor of up to thirteen. However, a judicious averaging of the ratios suggested that gay men had an androgen-oestrogen ratio of only sixty per cent of the others.†

  The data were intimately bound up with instructions. Dr Glass, describing this result,10 explained that ‘Obviously, if a biologic etiology were established, this would lead to investigation of therapeutic possibilities from a much wider perspective than now exists,’ which in English meant that if they could find a chemical to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, then they could use it.‡ So in 1944 Glass experimented11 with the injection into some eleven gay men of male hormones ‘kindly supplied’ by pharmaceutical companies. ‘Four subjects accepted organotherapy by compulsion’ – a court order in one case, and parental authority in the case of three boys. Alas, the experiment was not a success, in Dr Glass’s opinion. ‘Only three of the subjects reported benefit from this therapy. Five reported an intensification of the homosexual drive.’ This to the scientists was ‘a worsening of the condition’. It did not help in ‘the clinical management of the male homosexual.’

  Back at the drawing board of endocrinology, the failure of the experiment suggested a diametrically opposite approach. If the male hormone increased sexual ‘drive’, then perhaps the female hormone would decrease it – for heterosexual and homosexual men alike. This bright idea had already been tried12 by another American pioneer, C.W. Dunn, in 1940. He had reported that ‘At the end of the treatment there was a complete absence of libido.’

  One attraction of this technique was that it was so much more effective than physical castration. Surgery of this kind had held a traditional part in the American Way, especially since the eugenic clean-up of the late nineteenth century. In 1950 there were eleven states which allowed for compulsory castration, with fifty thousand cases on record.13 But there was also scientific evidence that castration did not successfully inhibit sexual activity, and in this respect the chemical approach was more promising.

  This was the lesson drawn by the first British paper14 on the subject, which appeared in the pages of the Lancet just a few days after Jefferson invoked the supremely human ‘charm of sex’ in his Lister Oration. It appeared under the authoritative name of F.L. Golla, director of the progressive Burden Neurological Institute at Bristol, where Grey Walter had built his cybernetic tortoises.* Neither compulsory nor voluntary castration was allowed in Britain. On the other hand, as he wrote, ‘The Criminal Justice Act, 1948, had emphasised the duty of the community to provide treatment for the habitual sexual offender.’ Hormone dosage resolved this contradiction, being both legal, and more effective. By 1949 Golla had experimented on thirteen men, and found that with sufficiently large doses ‘libido could be abolished within a month.’ He concluded:

  In view of the non-mutilating nature of this treatment and the ease with which it can be administered to a consenting patient we believe that it should be adopted whenever possible in male cases of abnormal and uncontrollable sexual urge.

  He had opened the visionary prospect of providing chemical castration for all homosexual men. In 1952, the Sunday Pictorial commented that

  What is needed is a new establishment for them like Broadmoor. It should be a clinic rather than a prison, and these men should be sent there and kept there until they are cured. Doctors and psychiatrists would welcome the idea. There is still a great deal to be learned about the delicately balanced endocrine glands which determine whether or not a man could take to these unpleasant activities.

  L. R. Broster, the Charing Cross Hospital specialist who has done pioneer work in this field, writes that surgical treatment has made great strides recently but ‘is still in the groping stage of trial and error’.

  The possibilities had, in fact, widened into a more ambitious sphere of human management. Another paper15 described how the male hormone had been administered to a fourteen-year-old truant:

  For many years he had shrunk from personal contacts, been sensitive, shy and latterly more solitary. Recently he had become morbidly preoccupied with thoughts on abstruse topics beyond his years, chiefly psychology and religion… In the ward he read a lot, wrote many letters, helped with
domestic jobs, showed interest in philosophy, but mixed little with others.

  But after a course of the drug

  his religious and other preoccupations disappeared. The drug was stopped and he was discharged, much improved. Six months later he was reported to have a job at a printers, but still apt to speculate on religion, and to be readily teased by other youngsters.

  Perhaps the fourteen-year-old Alan Turing would have benefited more from such scientific treatment than from the rough-and-ready team games. On the other hand, it was the female hormone which according to this authority had

  been most useful in controlling occasional outbreaks of homosexual behaviour in the 12 to 16 age groups.

  More effective than cold baths, or Nowell Smith’s eloquence, it was the oestrogen which had been useful in ‘enabling one of the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act, 1948, to be carried out.’ It was the beginning of a new era, in which chemical solutions could be found for the problems of social control.

  These advances did not escape the notice of other scientists. In 1952 Sir Charles Darwin, who always took a long-term view, published a book called The Next Million Years. Biology, rather than physics, he held to offer ‘the most exciting possibilities’, one being that

  there might be a drug, which, without other harmful effects, removed the urgency of sexual desire, and so reproduced in humanity the status of workers in a beehive.

  Other chapters in the progress of mankind had given rise to alternative methods of treatment, but these had generally disappointed the experts. Gordon Westwood summed up the experience of analytical psychoanalysts as that of finding homosexuality to present the most problems, of all the cases that they met. Lobotomy had been tried but, as Westwood wrote,16 this did not seem to be any more ‘successful’. Nor was the administration of a drug to induce epileptic fits, another medical advance of the 1940s. The application of behaviourism to the problem, by administering electric shocks or nauseating drugs in association with sexually attractive stimuli, was a technique still undergoing trial in Czechoslovakia and not yet introduced to British psychiatry. For the time being, the less scientific pain buttons offered by prison, loss of employment, social ostracism and blackmail were expected to control behaviour, and when these failed, the new men offered ‘organotherapy’, or chemical castration. Such were the resources of modern science that were offered to Alan Turing. He perceived them as the lesser evil, and on that basis went to trial. It was a trial between the old and the new.

  The queened pawn faced the White Queen. The case of Regina v. Turing and Murray was heard on 31 March 1952, at the Quarter Sessions held at the Cheshire town of Knutsford.17 The judge was Mr J. Fraser Harrison. Alan was represented by Mr G. Lind-Smith, and Arnold by Mr Emlyn Hooson. Both were prosecuted by Mr Robin David. The charges now amounted to twelve in number. With the Looking-Glass symmetry of symmetrical crimes, they began:

  Alan Mathison Turing

  1. On the 17th day of December, 1951, at Wilmslow, being a male person, committed an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male person.

  2. On the 17th day of December, 1951, at Wilmslow, being a male person was party to the commission of an act of gross indecency with Arnold Murray, a male person.

  and so forth, for each of the other two nights, and then Arnold was charged in exactly the same way so that the last accusation was that he:

  12. On the 2nd day of February, 1952, at Wilmslow, being a male person, was party to the commission of an act of gross indecency with Alan Mathison Turing, a male person.

  They both pleaded ‘guilty’ to all the charges, although Alan was guilty of something for which he showed no guilt. The prosecuting counsel, in outlining the case, laid stress upon his unrepentant remarks.

  There only lay his ‘character’ to set against this admitted lawbreaking. Normally, ‘good character’ would be a disguised statement of class status, but in these circumstances his status told against him. The theme of the better public schools had been the balance of privilege and duty, and as one of the prefect class he was supposed to set an example, not to break the rules himself. Alan Turing, however, was little interested either in the privileges or the duties of his class. He never tried to pull rank on the detectives, who saw him as an ‘ordinary fellow’, with his occasional visits to the local pub. Conversely, his crime was seen at least by an older generation as a betrayal of his class. Arnold likewise was made to feel by his family that his real crime had been that of dragging down a gentleman.

  The OBE* was duly given a mention, and Hugh Alexander bore witness that Alan was ‘a national asset’. Max Newman was asked whether he would receive such a man in his home, and replied that he had already done so, Alan being a personal friend of himself and his wife. He described Alan as ‘particularly honest and truthful’. ‘He is completely absorbed in his work,’ he continued, ‘and is one of the most profound and original mathematical minds of his generation.’ Lind-Smith pleaded that he should not go to prison:

  He is entirely absorbed in his work, and it would be a loss if a man of his ability – which is no ordinary ability – were not able to carry on with it. The public would lose the benefit of the research work he is doing. There is treatment which could be given him. I ask you to think that the public interest would not be well served if this man is taken away from the very important work he is doing.

  Mr Hooson, however, defended Arnold as the innocent led astray by Alan’s wiles:

  Murray is not a university Reader, he is a photo-printer. It was he who was approached by the other man. He has not such tendencies as Turing, and if he had not met Turing he would not have indulged in that practice.

  Max Newman and Hugh Alexander were amazed that Alan should go to the stake for Arnold, but Alexander was impressed by his ‘moral courage’ and Newman by his ‘strong line’. He answered back at the judge’s remarks, and he did not recant, at an occasion whose very essence was the obtaining of a confession. Hilbert had written of Galileo that in his recantation ‘he was not an idiot. Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom – that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time.’ But this was not a trial of scientific truth.

  The verdict quivered between the old and the new dispensations, and came down for the new. Bletchley Park scored a victory beyond its term. The state washed its hands, and handed Alan to the judgment of science. He was placed on probation, with the condition that he ‘submit for treatment by a duly qualified medical practitioner at Manchester Royal Infirmary.’

  The Wilmslow newspaper headline was:

  UNIVERSITY READER PUT ON PROBATION

  TO have Organo-Therapic Treatment

  Alan wrote to Philip Hall, two weeks later:

  (postmarked 17 April 1952)

  … I am both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on, but one is supposed to return to normal when it is over. I hope they’re right. The psychiatrists seemed to think it useless to try and do any psychotherapy.

  The day of the trial was by no means disagreeable. Whilst in custody with the other criminals I had a very agreeable sense of irresponsibility, rather like being back at school. The warders rather like prefects. I was also quite glad to see my accomplice again, though I didn’t trust him an inch.

  Perhaps it was surprising that he chose the scientific alternative to prison. He was annoyed at having been circumcised, and at any editorial meddling with his writings – small interferences compared with this piece of doctoring. Neither did he care much for creature comforts, and a year in prison, even an English one, would not have been much more uncomfortable than Sherborne. On the other hand, to take that option would have impeded his work, and very likely would have forefeited his Manchester position and the computer. He had the choice between his body and feelings on the one hand, and his intellectual life on the other. It was a remarkable decision problem. He chose
‘thinking’ and sacrificed ‘feeling’.

  There was no concept of a right to sexual expression in the Britain of 1952. People made jokes about bromides put in the servicemen’s tea. Samuel Butler might well have laughed in his grave at the prophet of the intelligent machine being punished for being sick, and treated for committing a crime. But no one at the time perceived an irony in Alan Turing being on the receiving end of science. As for Jefferson, ranging himself with the humanists, or Polanyi, foe of the state’s pretensions to order human life, and adherent of the Congress for Cultural Freedom – this was a private and distasteful medical matter, and did not gain the attention of the liberal intelligentsia of Manchester, discoursing on the folly and iniquity of treating minds like machines.

  Harry the burglar was sent to a Borstal the same day, in another trial. Arnold, however, was conditionally discharged. He left the court in a daze, hardly knowing to what he had confessed, and then found himself pointed out in the street by his neighbours. After a few weeks he escaped back to London, found a job in the Lyons Corner House in the Strand, and rapidly made his way into anarchic Fitzrovia. Here in the coffee-bar world, meeting such people as Colin Wilson, he was accepted as an individual and learned to play the guitar.

  For Alan, there were rather different consequences of the trial, because of the drug treatment. He was rendered impotent, although scientific opinion was that the impotence was not permanent and potency would return when the medication was stopped. It had other physical effects, for18