Crime and punishment

In 1952 Turing was arrested and tried for being gay. The court convicted him and sentenced him to chemical castration. It was disgraceful treatment by the nation that he had done so much to save.

Turing faced this ordeal with his usual courage. Turing wrote a short story. Although only a few pages long and incomplete, it offers an intimate glimpse of its author.

The central character—a scientist by the name of Alec Pryce, who works at Manchester University—is a thinly disguised Alan Turing. Pryce, like Turing himself, always wore what Turing described as ‘an old sports coat and rather unpressed worsted trousers’. Turing called this Pryce’s ‘undergraduate uniform’, saying that it ‘encouraged him to believe he was still an attractive youth’.

At just the wrong side of 40, Turing must have been feeling his age. Pryce, whose work related to interplanetary travel, made an important discovery in his twenties, which came to be called ‘Pryce’s buoy’. The nature of the discovery is left unexplained, and Pryce’s buoy is obviously a proxy for the universal Turing machine. ‘Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used’, Turing wrote revealingly. ‘The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too’, Turing continued. ‘He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word was spelt without the “u” ’.

Pryce, we are told, has not had a sexual relationship since ‘that soldier in Paris last summer’. Walking through Manchester, Pryce passes a youth lounging on a bench, Ron Miller. Ron, who is out of work and keeps company with petty criminals, makes a small income from male prostitution.

He responds to a glance that Alec gives him as he passes, calling out uncouthly ‘Got a fag?’. Shyly Alec joins him on the bench and the two sit together awkwardly. Eventually Alec plucks up courage to invite the boy to have lunch at a nearby restaurant.

Beggars can’t be choosers, Ron thinks meanly. He is not impressed by Alec’s brusque approach and ‘lah-di-dah’ way of speaking, but says to himself philosophically, ‘Bed’s bed whatever way you get into it’.