Today at Bletchley Park, a statue of Alan Turing will apparently be unveiled to commenorate his work done there during World War II. I say apparently, because there is no mention of it on the official Bletchley Park web site, either in the news or the events section.
Yet, it appears that the people who run Bletchley Park have sent out the press release about it to "probably the largest distribution I’ve done for the park, including most consumer magazines where there is a travel (eg days out), arts or culture interest (homes, lifestyle, specialist military, history, maths, computers, womens titles etc). Plus all the broadcast, current affairs & news media" – at least according to Caroline Murdoch who works in the Bletchley Park organisation.
OK, so news of the statue’s unveiling doesn’t actually seem to have hit Bletchley Park’s own web site.
What I find slightly more than just slapdash, however, is that the press release also doesn’t actually mention that Turing was gay. I would have thought that fact was rather a crucial component of his story. Let Stuart Who, over at Gay.com, take up the story, and the email exchange with Bletchley Park.
Update: Well, it’s a day late, but I see that Bletchley Park has finally got around to mentioning the unveiling of the statue of Alan Turing. They still don’t acknowledge that he was gay, though, and refer coyly to the fact that "he died tragically in 1954 at the age of only 41, having received no public recognition of the colossal contribution he made to the outcome of the war and the computer age that was to follow". Hmm. I think that The Guardian captured a fuller picture in one of its leaders today:
Turing never benefited from the revolution that he started. In 1952, he was convicted of having a sexual relationship with another man, to which he made no defence other than to say he saw nothing wrong in his actions. The conviction robbed him of his security clearance for GCHQ, for which he still worked, and made him the target for surveillance at the height of the cold war. He died after eating an apple laced with cyanide. The symbol of the half-eaten apple lives on to this day.
Update 2: Well, it seems as though the people at Bletchley Park have been stung by the comments such as mine that they were being mealymouthed. The web site now carries a fuller account of why Alan Turing committed suicide. Better late than never.
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