Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film The Imitation Game

by Andrew Hodges

  In 1952, as in 1942, the times were out of joint. The rulers of Great Britain were still apt to regard the behaviour of its population as that of a public school. In 1952 the pocket money and the tuck shop were under better management than before, and there was less open complaining from the Modern side. But the return of the old Headmaster in October 1951 had suggested invidious comparisons with former triumphs. In 1951 Britain had lost control over Iran and Egypt, countries so successfully held against German encroachment not ten years before. As during the crisis of imperialism in the 1890s, military loss of control could be identified with sexual loss of control. In the traditional view, homosexuality was an act, or practice, into which any man might be led – and such lapses into ‘slackness’ were to be prevented not only in the armed forces, but in the national life which raised and moulded them.

  Such a view, however, could already be identified with that of an older generation, and one which had been pushed aside since 1940. For nearly a hundred years there had existed a quite different kind of official description, which concentrated not upon the act, but the state of mind. Considerable efforts had been made to elucidate a ‘homosexual type’, or a ‘homosexual personality’, rather as the nineteenth-century psychologists had also devoted energy to defining criminal, or mentally deficient, or other ‘degenerate types’. The word ‘homosexual’ was itself a nineteenth-century medical neologism. Freud was often credited with making this mode of description available to people. Indeed, Alan and Robin would sometimes puzzle over the question of how people had been able to think about sexual desire before Freud’s day.

  In his 1950 Mind article, Alan had referred to the ‘skin of an onion’ analogy as helpful:

  In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations which we can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin which we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the ‘real’ mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it?

  His own view, of course, was that the mind was like an onion, and not like an apple, there being no central, irreducible, undetermined core. In a different way, nineteenth and twentieth-century science had been peeling the onion of the mind, and had dented the concept of responsibility with ‘mental illness’, shell-shock, neurosis, breakdowns and so forth. Where was the line to be drawn? The conservative fear was that every kind of behaviour would be excused by appeal to some irresistible, uncontrollable force majeure. Like Polanyi and Jefferson, they sought a non plus ultra to the pretensions of mental determinism, a barrier against the flood of threats to traditional values unleashed by the Second World War. They found one in homosexuality: the new men’s talk of ‘conditions’ and ‘complexes’ was not to be allowed to excuse a deadly social evil, corrupting and weakening everything in its path.

  At the same time, yet a third kind of description was gradually coming into focus, that of homosexual men as socially defined. From this point of view, the emphasis was to be placed not upon thoughts and feelings, nor on sexual acts, but on the particular patterns of acquaintanceship, money and occupations associated with homosexuality. The sociologist ‘Gordon Westwood’, whose book Society and the Homosexual opened the British debate in 1952, described male homosexuality in all of these ways, one after the other. Reaching a wider audience, the Sunday Pictorial’s series of reports2 on ‘Evil Men’ also broke what it called ‘the conspiracy of silence on the subject’ the same year, and likewise treated it from a modern psychological and social perspective, rather than in terms of the law. ‘Most people’, the newspaper explained, ‘know there are such things – “Pansies” – mincing effeminate, young men who call themselves queers.’ But these obvious ‘freaks and rarities’, it continued, represented but the tip of the iceberg. The problem was far greater than most people realised, and the time had come to tackle it.

  One of the difficulties pervading these discussions was that no single description was adequate to the matter in hand, although there was an obvious virtue to each of them. There were certainly many homosexual acts – in schools, for example – which had little to do with deep-seated desires, nor with a social ‘minority’. In contrast, the diffuse, romantic ambience of The Cloven Pine fell into no category recognised by the English criminal law. While there were others, like Arnold, who did not know what they wanted, but who were very familiar with the social patterns, with their advantages and disadvantages, of what a Methodist minister, quoted in the Sunday Pictorial, called ‘the worst city for homosexuality that I have been in’.

  The backroom boys of medicine and the social sciences were bringing these unwelcome contradictions to the surface. The law was under attack for its purely physical level of description. Gordon Westwood held, in contrast, that3 ‘The overriding consideration in dealing with homosexual offenders should be that it is a form of mental illness.’ But life was more complicated than that; the enforcement of the law was related less to the prevalence of the ‘acts’ than to the structure of British society.

  For this reason the attempt to form a more scientific description ran up against British doublethink. The psychologist Dr Clifford Allen told the Sunday Pictorial that ‘In the past battles may have been won on the playing fields of our public schools, but numerous lives have been broken in the dormitories’. The unofficial reality could be entirely different from any particular official line, and in private the most conservative personages might regard both the law and current psychological theories as nonsensical. But amidst the great complexity, one simplifying feature stood out. As in the ‘nation in miniature’ of the public school, it was contact between those of different social rank that was most likely to be discovered and punished. Alan Turing’s crime epitomised the action upon which the operation of the law was in practice focussed. So was its discovery, by a related petty crime, a classic case of successful detection. In another way again, the arrest was a textbook case, for the age range of thirty to forty was the one most frequently represented in the prosecutions of the period. It was also true that as what Westwood called an ‘outsider’, unfamiliar with the social milieu, he was natural prey for attempted blackmail.

  In the development of his sexual life Alan Turing was in many ways typical for a gay man of his time. He had enjoyed the benefit of a very unusual, very privileged ambience at King’s, but in the outside world, the same factors came into play as Kinsey had noted4 while interpreting the statistics:

  There is considerable conflict among younger males over participation in such socially taboo activity, and there is evidence that a much higher percentage of younger males is attracted and aroused than ever engages in overt homosexual activities to the point of orgasm. Gradually, over a period of years, many males who are aroused by homosexual situations became more frank in their acceptance and more direct in their pursuit of complete relations, although some of them are still much restrained by fear of blackmail.

  Kinsey found among his ‘active’ population a general increase in frequency of sexual experience up to an age of thirty-five, thereafter continuing at that level until the age of fifty, corroborating the common sense expectation that the ‘social taboo’ could inhibit sexual development for perhaps twenty years. In this respect Alan Turing was just launching out. It was only in his thirties that he had begun to find his way outside King’s. He had been involved in two extended relationships, but he was not by nature the most conjugal person, and his exploratory urge was better suited to the possibilities of the cruising-grounds, once he had overcome his shyness. It was not that he was very successful; nor perhaps did he escape a profound sense of compromise and of the loss of youthful ideals – ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ he wrote in his self-analytical short story – but he could take pride in breaking out of the framework of his upbringing, working out something for himself, and in managing without s
pecial privileges. He had gained experience, and as a very young forty, would want to pursue its opportunities before he was much older. It was this process which had been arrested.

  Another feature of the operation of the law was that this sinking of men’s souls was all the time on the increase. Between 1931 and 1951 there had been a five-fold increase in prosecutions, a steady rise through depression, blitz and rocket bombs alike. In 1933 it was indeed as J. S. Mill had said about heresy: that public opinion was more crushing than the direct application of the law. By 1952 the position had changed. This was consistent with the great extension of the role of the state in every direction, taking over functions formerly left to individuals, families, voluntary societies and so forth. It might be argued that the state was taking a larger role in policing sexual behaviour precisely because the inhibitory effect of public opinion was decreasing.

  In more conservative circles, it was taken that the law only gave the final stamp of authority to the ostracism of society. King George V was supposed to have said, ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’ Alan Turing, however, cared nothing for the opinion of society, and therefore was ahead of his time in laying bare the role of the state. For most gay men, the question of who knew would be of colossal significance, and life would be rigidly divided into two compartments, one for those who knew, and one for those who did not. Blackmail depended as much upon this fact as upon the legal penalties. The question was important to Alan too, but in a rather different way: it was because he did not wish to be accepted or respected as the person he was not. He was likely to drop a remark about an attractive young man, or something of the kind, on a third or fourth meeting with a generally friendly colleague. To be close to him, it was essential to accept him as a homosexual; it was one of the stringent conditions he imposed.

  Exposure, therefore, held no intrinsic terror for him. But a criminal trial would involve not merely exposure as a homosexual, but all the concrete details. It would be one thing to be a martyr for an abstract cause, and quite another to have the sequence of events with Arnold rendered into an unflattering public form. It would expose him not only as a sexual outlaw, which at least carried with it a certain pride, but as a fool. In this respect his insouciance was amazing. But it was his all-or-nothing mentality at work. He had presumably decided long before that such things were part of the ‘large remnant of the random behaviour of infancy’, and that it was absurd to be ashamed of anything harmlessly enjoyed, whether it be parlour games or bedroom pleasures. It meant that he had to take a stand not for an ideal, not for anything particularly rewarding or successful, but for that which was simply true. But he did not flinch. The detectives continued to be astonished when they visited him in connection with the case. He would take out his violin and play to them the Irish tune Cockles and Mussels, accompanied with glasses of wine.

  After three weeks, on 27 February, Alan and Arnold both appeared in the Wilmslow magistrates’ court for the committal proceedings. The CID officer, Mr Wills, described the circumstances of the arrests, and read out the statements in full. There was another prosecution witness: Alan’s bank manager, whose ledgers corroborated the detail of the £7 cheque. There was no cross-examination. Alan’s solicitor ‘reserved his defence’, and obtained his release on £50 bail. Arnold, however, was held in custody pending the trial proper, to be held at the forthcoming Quarter Sessions. The local newspaper5 reported the court appearance and the gist of the story. They printed both men’s full addresses, in the usual way, and a photograph of Alan.

  The case was not taken up in the Manchester papers, but there was certainly a possibility of the forthcoming trial being reported widely. In any case, Alan had to look after his individual relationships, so that people he cared about should not learn of what had happened from the newspapers or some other unfortunate way. In particular there was his family to consider. Alan wrote to his brother John – with a letter, for once, not a postcard or a telegram. It started off ‘I suppose you know I am a homosexual.’ John knew no such thing. He had always thought of his brother as ‘misogynist’, inasmuch as he avoided flirtatious chit-chat when on his occasional visits to Guildford. But Alan bore no resemblance to John’s picture of ‘pansies’, and this possibility had never occurred to him. John stuffed the letter into his pocket and read it later in his office.

  The letter explained some of the circumstances, and also that he was going to plead ‘not guilty’ and be properly defended. John immediately dropped everything and went to Manchester, where he consulted a senior partner in a leading firm of solicitors. He in turn saw Alan’s solicitor, and they persuaded Alan to change his plea to ‘guilty’. He was, in fact, caught between two untruths. To deny what he had done would be to tell a lie, and to convey a false sense that he considered it something that ought to be denied. Yet to be portrayed in public with words such as ‘guilty’, ‘self-confessed’, ‘admit’ was also to compound an untruth. There was no way to keep himself pure. In practical terms his statement to the police had rendered ‘defence’ impossible, and he had little to lose by pleading ‘guilty’. More pertinent, from John’s point of view, was the idea that a ‘guilty’ plea would render the trial both quick and quiet. He thought Alan had been a ‘silly ass’ to go to the police about the burglary, and that everything he had done showed his naiveté about the world outside the intellectual élite.

  Behind this lay the question of how to tell their mother. This was the very thing for which ‘men like that shot themselves’, and Alan told Robin that it was the worst part of the whole business. He had the gall to ask John to do it, which reasonably enough John refused. Accordingly it became Alan’s duty to make a journey to Guildford to tell her the facts of his life. Mrs Turing was not entirely clear about the significance of what had happened, but she was sufficiently conscious of the subject for there to be a distressing argument, somewhat at cross purposes. She then placed the matter firmly at the back of her mind. But for whatever mixture of reasons, the salient fact was that she did not let it cause an estrangement. In Alan’s schooldays she had sided with the authorities, seeing him as the problem for them, not school as a problem for him; this time she tacitly took his side.

  Alan wrote to his brother complaining that he had shown no sympathy with the position in which homosexuals found themselves, which was true enough. He also accused him of caring for nothing but his own reputation in the City, which was not. It was more that both alike shared their father’s character, and spoke their different minds.* John Turing made no secret of the fact that he considered his brother’s behaviour disgusting and disreputable, an extreme example of ‘a modus vivendi in which the feelings of others counted for so little.’ He was particularly offended by the letter of complaint, because he had intervened in order to protect Alan from himself.

  Perhaps nearly as difficult was the duty of telling Max Newman, so long a father figure. But if so, it did not show in Alan’s behaviour. He simply announced that he had been arrested, and the reason for it, while they were sitting at lunch in the refectory. He did this in a particularly loud voice, making it clear that he rather wanted it to be heard by all and sundry. Max Newman was astonished, but his reaction was one of support. Alan asked him to appear as a character witness at the trial, a request he also made of Hugh Alexander, currently working for GCHQ. They both agreed. So in this respect Cambridge liberalism was prepared to stand up and be counted on his behalf – no small matter when a known homosexual was a social leper, conferring stigma by association.

  It was easier to tell those who were already familiar with his homosexuality. To Fred Clayton Alan wrote:

  … The burglary business was actually infinitely worse than an ordinary burglary. I had got a boy friend, who … put his friends on to my house. One of these has been picked up by the police and has informed against us. When you come to Liverpool perhaps you will stop off to see me in jail.

  Then there was Neville; Alan telephoned and then made a journey down to Reading to se
e him. Neville thought Alan had been incredibly naive to call in the police in the first place. He was, of course, indirectly threatened himself, being fortunate that the police had not pursued their enquiries further, searching through letters and so forth. One ship in the convoy having gone down, the others had to look out very sharply. Not himself coming from the governing classes, he felt it as a simple outrage that someone who had done something very important in the war could be treated in this way. The visit was painful. Neville’s mother heard what had happened and applied sufficient emotional pressure to stop her son from seeing Alan again.

  There were others too who had to know. Alan wrote to Joan Clarke (herself, as it happened, now engaged to be married), explaining that he had not told her that he ‘did occasionally practise’, and that he had been found out. ‘They’re not as savage as they used to be,’ he added, thinking back perhaps to the trials of Oscar Wilde. He also wrote to Bob, now away in Bangkok, where his letter, with its tone of ‘never apologise, never explain’, caused shock and sadness.

  At the university it was yet another case of Alan proving a great embarrassment. They dealt with it as ‘typical Turing’. There were members of staff who avoided him, but then they had avoided him anyway. Most people coped with it by carefully not referring to the case. A more free and easy atmosphere prevailed in the computing laboratory than elsewhere, although one or two of the staff were shocked. Tony Brooker’s attitude suited Alan best: he had no idea such laws existed, and was simply interested to hear from Alan about what happened. In some ways the case made Alan appear a more human figure. When he called in Cicely Popplewell and asked ‘Are you shockable?’ explaining that he might be going to prison, it was the first time he had treated her as a person. There was no question of helping or extending sympathy to him – his personality ruled it out. Individual people were onlookers on events that might as well have been happening in Russia. Alan probably found an element of pleasure in confronting the more ‘stuffy’ elements of Manchester, and gave the impression, which the less sensitive seriously believed, that he did not care a jot about the case. As at school, he bore his afflictions cheerfully.