Happy Birthday, Alan!

And I almost missed it…

Today marks the birth of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician and one of the founders of computer science. He worked at Bletchley Park during World War II and was instrumental in cracking the Enigma code.

He was homosexual, and, according to the laws at the time, was prosecuted for "gross indecency and sexual perversion". As a result it seems likely that he committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

His life became the subject of a play written by Hugh Whitemore: Breaking the Code. While a dramatisation, it still conveys something of the life and pressures that Turing must have been under. The title role was played by Derek Jacobi, who was perfect. As Jacobi himself has said, "the play really does put across the story of Alan Turing as a man who saved the State and who was then destroyed by the State".

The play is available on video with Jacobi in the role. Try and track it down if you can. At all costs avoid Enigma – a crass film based on Robert Harris’ novel of the same name. The film overlays many of Turing’s thoughts and ideas onto its fictional heterosexual hero. Yet another example of the ways in which gays are edited out of history.

Turing was born in a house that is now the Colonnade Hotel, in Maida Vale, London. The fact is marked by a blue plaque (see the photograph). I spent a number of happy years living just around the corner, in Bristol Gardens, and was pleased to discover the Turing connection. Another connection was that in the days of the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s, I met with Andrew Hodges, who became Turing’s biographer, and who maintains a web site devoted to the life and work of Turing.