Codebreakers

Celebrating Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park codebreakers whose work altered the outcome of WWII, and later, crusaders of his legacy helped alter the law against homosexuality in England.

STORY BY

STEVE PAFFORD

It’s no exaggeration to say that Alan Turing was a genius and one of the most infl uential fi gures of the 20th century. Yet, even if you have only the vaguest idea of who this very English hero is his work continues to permeate modern life throughout the world in the 21st century too.

Regarded as the father of computer science and artifi cial intelligence, the pioneering polymath made vital contributions to the fi elds of mathematics, chemistry, and biology. Most famously, he played a crucial role in cracking the Nazi’s Enigma code at Bletchley Park, the principal nerve centre for Britain’s codebreakers in the Second World War, which helped defeat the Nazi’s Enigma machine and shorten the war by at least a couple of years.

To anyone brought up in the over-sharing social media age, the cloak of silence which surrounded a site so steeped in assiduous world history seems almost unbelievable. There

were thousands of people who worked at Bletchley that due to their signing of the Offi cial Secrets Act had taken their secrets to the grave. Indeed, such was their loyalty that Prime Minister Winston Churchill referred to the staff as “the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.”

With the publication of 1974’s The Ultra Secret discussion of Bletchley’s work finally became possible. Being a Bletchley boy myself I and many locals knew someone who had an association with the site, which included notable names such as James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

In the ‘90s, Bletchley Park became a museum, open to the public and housing interpretive exhibits and rebuilt huts as they would have appeared during their wartime operations. It receives hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. It’s a massive site and ideally needs a full day to begin to do it justice. The huts and larger reinforced concrete blocks are scattered round the grounds, which are dominated by beautiful Buckinghamshire parkland with a large lake with a fountain and Victorian Gothic mansion beyond.

The exhibition in block B is probably the most important part of the site and this needs at least an hour if not two hours to do properly. The Enigma machine and a reconstruction of a Bombe machine which was used to decipher the Enigma messages stand proudly in the basement and are quite a sight to savor.

There is, of course, ample information about Turing, the brilliant mathematician who was head of the Naval Enigma Team in Hut 8 and designed the fi rst Bombe. Turing revolutionised the fi eld of cryptography, conceived the computer as we know it today, and invented the academic discipline of computer science, The small display showing some of his personal belongings such as his teddy bear sourced from his family was a lovely touch and reinforces what a human tragedy was to befall him.

One of the earliest openly gay fi gures in 20th Century Britain, the post-war story of Turing is a terribly sad and cruel one, and a damning indictment of the pervasive attitudes to homosexuality at the time. Despite his essential contributions to the allied victory against Nazi Germany, his country repaid him with a prosecution for gross indecency that led to his apparent suicide in 1954 at the age of 41.

The homophobic off ense of gross indecency was introduced in 1885 and used to prosecute adult men for a whole range of “consensual, private homosexual acts” when it could not be proven they’d engaged in buggery. This meant that any sexual contact between men—including mere touching and kissing—was deemed illegal. Like Oscar Wilde before him, Turing was charged and convicted of the crime, and sentenced to chemical castration, the shame and consequences of which led to his death, deemed suicide from cyanide poisoning in 1954.

Finally, in the 21st Century Turing’s legacy has been become the stuff of legend. He has been em-

braced as a hero by the gay community, and thanks to Tony Blair’s reforming government, in 2003 gross indecency and buggery were repealed, and as a result, for the fi rst time in 470 years, England and Wales had a criminal code that did not penalize homosexuality. Northern Ireland and Scotland reluctantly followed later on, but it seems barely believable that gay sex ceased to be a crime in the UK as a whole only seven years ago.

After public fi gures such as Stephen Fry and Pet Shop Boys lobbied the government, the Queen also issued a royal pardon for Turing’s ‘crime’, fi nally wiping clean his record. Benedict Cumberbatch, who portrayed him in the fi lm The Imitation Game, told the Hollywood Reporter that “Alan was not only prosecuted, but quite arguably persuaded to end his own life early, by a society who called him a criminal for simply seeking out the love he deserved, as all human beings do.”

Turing is not only a national hero, but a local hero and a personal hero to me in so many ways. Soon he will even be honored as the new face of the £50 note, the highest value bank note in Britain. There’s also the Pet Shop Boys’ A Man From The Future, an ambitious song-cycle that focuses on key episodes of Turing’s life and work. Of course, the irony is that had he lived in the future, that part of his story would not have had such a tragic outcome. — STEVE PAFFORD is an English journalist, actor and author of the acclaimed book BowieStyle. Having trained from the fl oor up in UK music titles Q, MOJO and Record Collector, he’s had his work featured in a wide variety of British, American and Australian media including the BBC, CNN, The Independent and the New York Times. Steve divides his time between Australia and the south of France.