Although there was very little time for much other than our daily routine of travel, eating, bodily maintenance, booking the next accommodation and mapping/blogging, we did have the Guardian, ebooks and audio books on our iPads. We watched a little French TV on 2 nights only. It is good for our French but mostly this was more than we wanted to do.
I did finish off Andrew Hodges' lengthy and impressive biography of Alan Turing, prompted by having seen the film, The Imitation Game, earlier in the year and wondering how close to the true story it came. Not very. Benedict Cumberbatch had a good stab at it but opted for a much more autistic interpretation and Keira Knightley was a ludicrously glamorous version of Joan Clarke. Alan was a very eccentric chap, frustrating his mother by collecting the numbers from the little metal tags on telegraph posts but I found these fascinating. He also favoured ties in lieu of belts and was a scruffy article.
This is a powerful and committed book. As a campaigning gay man and a maths/physics academic, AH was strongly drawn to AT's story, as he gradually found out more. AT was a shy and socially awkward man, who reached the conclusion that being gay was as normal as anything else in human nature and should not be prohibited in a free society. He was out to his closest friends and colleagues and this and his various oddities were tolerated in the exclusive and privileged academic circles in which he moved. Kings College Cambridge suited him particularly well: there was a strong homosexual culture, including JM Keynes and, later, EM Forster. Alan was wide-ranging in his thoughts and interests and keen to cross the strong boundaries which existed at the the time between maths, science and engineering, the latter being distinctly below the salt. He had his own small laboratory at home and carried out various experiments, including the use of poisons.
I was also interested because of the connections with Manchester and Oxford Road/Street, where I worked for close on 25 years. An early coffee bar, cinemas and various pubs and public toilets were the centre of Manchester's gay sub-culture in the 1950s until a move to Canal Street during the 1980s. It was on Oxford Road that Alan invited a young man, Arnold Murray, to visit him at his house in Wilmslow, leading to a subsequent burglary by an acquaintance of Arnold. Very little was taken and Alan foolishly reported the burglary to the police. In the subsequent interview he was caught out in a lie, leading to his naive and frank admission of his relationship, still illegal under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same cruel legislation under which Oscar Wilde was prosecuted.
The Government was experimenting with oestrogen injections and Alan opted for this instead of prison. The treatment does not seem to have successfully inhibited his urges or his outness; he visited Norway and Club Med in Corfu, where attitudes were more liberal. A young Norwegian came to seek him out and was deported, indicating the level of surveillance that he was under, reinforced by American Cold War paranoia about the likelihood of the Russians' blackmailing homosexuals with sensitive knowledge. Guy Burgess, another Cambridge homosexual and Donald Maclean (both Trinity, Cambridge and British Embassy, Washington) had disappeared in 1951. Alan's work on Enigma and the encryption of secret correspondence between the US and British governments came back to haunt him. Hodges' conclusion is that his death was suicide, probably as a rational decision, after it became clear that the security services would restrict his life and his work, keeping him under intensive surveillance. He was found lying neatly in his bed with a part-eaten apple on the bedside table. Death was by cyanide poisoning and, although the apple was never tested, Hodges believes that Alan's love of games and riddles would have led him to take satisfaction from a Snow White finale.
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