Prime Minister apologises over death of Alan Turing

By Davey Winder
Friday, 11 September 2009 15:43

Security

He was one of the unsung heroes of World War Two, a brilliant mathematician and code-breaker who led the technological fight against Hitler. Some 55 years too late, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has apologised for the prosecution and persecution that ended up killing Alan Turing.

Online petitions posted to the official 10 Downing Street website are plentiful, provide fodder for newspaper reporters when it is a slow news day and rarely have any real impact. So I didn't exactly hold out much hope when I added my signature to this one:

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to apologize for the prosecution of Alan Turing that led to his untimely death."

The petition was submitted by John Graham-Cumming who, like many academics, geeks and gay rights advocates was simply looking for some justice 55 years after Alan Turing committed suicide. Some justice for a man without whom, the outcome of World War Two could have been very different indeed.

Graham-Cumming says that "Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think".

But Alan Turing was also gay in a time when society and the law disapproved of such sexual freedoms. Turing was not only prosecuted in 1952 for being gay, and found guilty of 'gross indecency' but sentenced to a prison term or chemical castration. He took the latter, and then took his own life two years later at the age of just 41.

Normally you might expect a few hundred people to sign a petition such as this, maybe a couple of thousand if you are lucky. As of today, this one has more than 31,000 signatures.

Thanks largely to a word of mouth online campaign which spread across social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the number of people signing and the amount of publicity being generated rose quickly.

Beleaguered British PM Gordon Brown, no doubt looking for a good news story to boost his ratings, latched on and in a highly unusual turn of events acted upon the demands of the petitioners. He gave that apology for the treatment of Alan Turing.

As one of the signatories of the Alan Turing apology petition, I today received an email from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. You can read it in full, including the apology, on page two.

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