Alan Turing: The Enigma (103 page)

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, for
¹⁸

To obtain the necessary effect mentally, it was necessary to maintain a moderate but not excessive degree of gynaecomastic response.

Translating from the Greek, this meant that there could be no ‘reduction in libido’ without the production of breasts. Again, according to the same authority,

There is at least a possibility that oestrogen may have a direct pharmacological effect on the central nervous system. Zuckerman (1952) has demonstrated, through his experiments on rats, that learning can be influenced by sex hormones, and that oestrogen can act as a cerebral depressant in these rodents. While it has yet to be shown that a similar influence is exerted in humans, there are some indications clinically that performance may be impaired, though more investigation is needed before any conclusion is reached.

So perhaps ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ could not be so neatly separated after all.
^*

There were some more minor consequences. The
News of the World
covered the case with a short article in its northern editions, headed ACCUSED HAD POWERFUL BRAIN. He remained under the auspices of the district probation officer. David Champernowne came to Manchester to do some work
^†
on the computer, and being invited to dinner at Hollymeade, found the probation officer another guest. Alan told a story about how the retired bishop of Liverpool had heard of the case and asked to see him – he had gone along, rather surprisingly for one who had written in 1936 that he would not tolerate bishops interfering in his private life. But nothing was private now. He had thought the bishop well-meaning but hopelessly old-fashioned. A further consequence, which for another person might have been major but which for Alan had little significance, was that, with a criminal record of ‘moral turpitude,’ he was henceforth automatically barred from the United States
^‡

Describing the events of the trial as with
amused detachment, Alan tried to continue as though nothing had happened – as though he had been caught doing a naughty experiment in the dormitory and had suffered the confiscation of his chemistry set. This was, indeed, more or less what had happened and on one level he could treat it like the humiliations of schooldays. Yet it had obliged him to become more conscious of the conduct of his life and more conscious of his environment. The short story that he scribbled out was one symptom of this increased self-awareness. One person who found him much more interesting and indeed congenial, now that he was not a remote mathematician with a one-track mind about machines, was Lyn Newman. With his reality revealed, Alan dropped his disconcerting evasiveness, and Lyn Newman found
¹⁹
that ‘once he had looked directly and earnestly at his companion, in the confidence of friendly talk,’ his eyes, ‘blue to the brightness and richness of stained glass’, could ‘never again be missed. Such candour and comprehension looked from them, something so civilised that one hardly dared to breathe.’ It was at this time that she

pushed first
Anna Karenina
and then
War and Peace
into his hands. I knew that he read Jane Austen and Trollope as sedatives, but he was totally uninterested in poetry and not particularly sensitive to literature or any of the arts, and therefore not at all an easy person to supply with reading matter.
War and Peace
proved to be in a very special way the masterpeice for him and he wrote to me expressing in moving terms his appreciation of Tolstoy’s understanding and insight. Alan had recognized himself and his own problems in
War and Peace
and Tolstoy had gained a new reader of a moral stature and complexity and an originality of spirit equal to his own.

For indeed, he was there in
War and Peace
, as Pierre wandering into the midst of the battle – and then? What did it mean? What was it for? And he was there in Tolstoy, whose puzzle was not over this or that fact, but what history was. Could an individual cause an event, hold power, or exercise will, as in the story book kind of history? ‘The subject of history,’ he wrote,
²⁰
‘is not the will of man as such but our presentation of it.’ It was, in other words, the level of description. The degree of ‘will’ would depend upon the kind of description, and ‘what is known to us we call the laws of necessity; what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression connoting what we do not know about the laws of human life.’ In particular, the laws of the
connection
, as he put it, between the mind and the world, were yet unknown, and therefore called free. These were Turing questions, in another form. In the January radio discussion he had said, ‘Thinking is those mental processes we don’t understand.’