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Wow, that's the first I've heard of it. I don't necessarily doubt you but do you have references to this?Originally Posted by Nugget
Can you provide a link with any credible evidence for this?
So clever my foot fell off.
Wow, that's the first I've heard of it. I don't necessarily doubt you but do you have references to this?
Just seen (a picture) of the £50 note. Please tell me that's not Colossus in the background.
Gets my vote and in some way makes up for the persecution he faced after the War.
Given the total pardon that he has been officially granted I think it highly unlikely that there are be any doubts over other misconduct or crime. I have not found any online evidence of other evidence.
Moreover, it is a common but totally unfounded smear to conflate paedophilia with homosexuality, when in fact the two are totally separate.
I am disappointed by the recent suggestion from the designer of the apple logo was not instructed or inspired by Turing, this was taken as plain fact a few years ago, im fact it had been confirmed by Apple staff to be true before the recent revelation that the bite was "for scale". Odd that he would deny this so late in the day.
D
So apparently there is no credible evidence, or evidence at all for the horrible accusations made above.
So clever my foot fell off.
To quote you on a different criminal case:
‘In the absence of any hard evidence (sufficient to justify a prosecution), should the McCanns not be entitled to the benefit of the presumption of innocence that is one of the cornerstones of our legal system?’
Or does that not apply to gay men?
Ouch.
Not sure about gay men but it surely doesn’t apply to Russians implicated in the Skripal poisoning, unless of cause being in the vicinity of the crime scene counts nowadays as a hard evidence.
Fas est ab hoste doceri
I am just back from holidays and have urgent matters relating to my own business to attend to. It will take me a week or so to set out the evidence to allow you and others to make a reasoned assessment. If the evidence does not stack up, I will happily edit my comments but I can assure you that I am not in the habit of making stuff up!
To be fair, I don’t think that Petrov or Boshirov were ever likely to be chosen to appear on the next £50 note, which is what this thread is about.
Mind you, if it was an online vote, who knows..?
Fair enough, I know that evidence of this kind of crime has been suppressed before.
Can I suggest that a new thread in the BP might be a better place to share it.
Okay, I'll tell you that it's not Colossus in the background.
It is the Turing designed Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine.
Jolly good then. :)Okay, I'll tell you that it's not Colossus in the background.
It is the Turing designed Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) Pilot Machine.
Andrew Hodges, the author of Alan Turing: The Enigma - the book that the film The Imitation Game was based on, provides a significant amount of detail on Turing’s life gleaned from a review of Turing’s Papers, interviews with Turing’s friends, family and colleagues. One commentator observes that Hodges is clearly in love with his subject and the biographer studiously avoids drawing any negative conclusions on Turing’s private life.
Nevertheless, there are various incidents recorded in the book which (when taken together) paint Turing in a less than flattering light.
(1) “Documents and photos showing how World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing sponsored two Jewish refugee children from Austria and helped educate them in the UK have been put on show in Cambridge (Jewish News, October 2017)”
Alan Turing at the front and Bob just behind him
Turing, who was then aged 26 and his friend Fred Clayton, had learnt about two Jewish children at a refugee camp on the coast, at Harwich, having been brought to the UK by Quakers’ Relief Action. In February 1939, the two men cycled to the camp and agreed to sponsor the young boys.
Clayton sponsored a boy from Dresden, known only as Karl, while Turing took responsibility for a boy from Vienna, called Robert Augenfeld (Bob). Fred managed to get Karl into a public school in Lancashire (Rossall) and this was arranged for Bob as well.
A few months later, Alan and Fred took the refugee boys for a week’s sailing holiday. However, during the holiday, Fred became very concerned at Turing’s sexual overtures towards the young boy. It was in the context of justifying making a pass at the boy, that Turing came up with a remark to the effect that no boy with a couple of terms under his belt at a public school could possibly be inexperienced when it came to homosexuality.
Hodges reports that in August or September 1940, Alan organised a week’s holiday just for Bob and himself “to give the boy a treat” after his first year at Rossalls. He booked a smart hotel and took the boy fishing and for long walks over the hills. It was then that Turing made a pass at the young boy but was rebuffed.
Hodges tries to play the incident down – Turing made “a gentle sexual approach” and once rebuffed “Alan did not ask again” and he points out that Turing continued to take an interest in Bob’s education. However, Bob (Robert Augenfeld) who was interviewed by Hodges for his book thought “that the possibility had been at the back of Turing’s mind from the beginning”.
Turing was basically grooming the child for sex – a 12 year old Jewish boy who was very vulnerable having been separated from his parents under deeply traumatic circumstances (Jews: Vienna: Nazis: 1938/39).
At Page 260 of The Enigma, Turing is quoted by Hodges as telling Joan Clarke about Bob “explaining how he remained for the time being a financial commitment and that it was not a sexual matter – again true but not quite the whole truth”.
(2) Hodges states that Turing retained an almost untouched innocence of “why not” in respect of sex. He cites a conversation Turing had with his close friend Robin Gandy about whether or not it was appropriate for a man to “persist with efforts to gain the interests of a boy of less than 15 or so (if he declines them).”
Hodges indicates that Robin Gandy had strong feelings on this issue because he had himself been put off sex for a long time by a "too-enthusiastic admirer” when he was a boy. Hodges states coyly in a footnote that Alan agreed with Robin!
Three things jump out from this conversation:
Firstly, the conversation is presumably based on Turing’s own personal experience of approaching and having been rejected by boys of less than 15 (and by implication not on other occasions?) - it doesn't really make sense otherwise
Secondly, that Turing, Gandy and perhaps even the author appear to have no issue with Turing (or any man for that matter) making sexual approaches to a boy of 15 or less as long as they are not rejected – the issue at stake was merely that one should respect the boy’s wishes if he was reluctant to respond
Thirdly, “a too-enthusiastic admirer” is not a term that would be used today to talk about a child whose efforts to resist sexual advances from an older man were overruled
(3) In a letter to his mother, Turing writes about going back to Sherborne to lecture the schoolboys in 1953:
“Went down to Sherborne to lecture to some boys on computers. Really quite a treat in many ways. They were so luscious and so well mannered with a little dash of pertness…”
By anyone’s standards, these are discomforting terms (luscious and pertness) with strong sexual overtones - creepy is probably more accurate
(4) In “The Enigma”, there are several other quotes scattered throughout the book which are suggestive of Turing’s unhealthy interest in under age boys.
“Alan always used to stay in the YMCA in London if only because it would hardly occur to him to pay to stay anywhere grander and this would have held something for his eye in the shape of naked youths in its swimming pool”
In the summer of 1953, after the probation period relating to his conviction was over, Turing (now aged 41) went on holiday to Corfu:
“On the beach in Corfu, with the dark mountains of Albania on the horizon, he could study both the seaweed and the boys”
“The American Novel “Finistere” which had appeared in 1951 was much admired by Alan. It described the sexual relationship between a 15 year old boy and his [male] teacher”
Just before he committed suicide, Turing went out for a walk with (his friend) David Champernowne “and certainly did talk in a worried way about the Norwegian boy, Champ forming the impression that he had been imprudent and perhaps a bit reckless”
“In the hotel in Paris, the boy (picked up by Alan) had solemnly lifted up the mattress and inserted his trousers, pour conserver les plis, which this time amazed Alan who never had a visible crease and just wanted to get on with it. Afterwards the boy made up some story about exchanging their watches so as to prove their trust for each other until they met the next day, so Alan showed his trust and lost the watch”
(5) Anthony Cave Brown's 1987 book "C": The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill records that:
“Menzies had known that Turing was a practising and aggressive homosexual; this had emerged soon after his employment at Bletchley. But since he caused no offence to his colleagues at Bletchley, and since he was perhaps the only man in Menzies’s service who might have been called ‘indispensable,’ his services were retained...
Early in 1944, a suspicion arose that Alan Turing was the man responsible for molesting schoolboys at the main public library in Luton, a large industrial town not far from Bletchley. While no proceedings arose, it was decided that the need for good order and discipline required his removal from Bletchley Park (to Hanslope Park) but not before he had done his finest work."
Cave Brown goes on to say that “If it hadn't been for his tangible work at Bletchley's Hut 8, Turing might have been disposed of much sooner. His stunning accomplishments in theoretical realms—the concept of the algorithm, a vision of a computing machine that could follow rules to manipulate symbolic information fed to it on a strip of tape, and a new understanding of the biological processes that cause organisms to develop their shapes - would have been unlikely to win the same leniency.”
Cave Brown quotes his main source as being the intelligence services (MI6). [Hodges does not refer to this incident in his book]
Some commentators have rejected the Luton Library allegations as just another example of innocent homosexual (Alan Turing) being victimised by an intolerant society. However, given the evidence that Turing was in fact a paedophile or technically an ephebophile - someone sexually attracted to boys of 15 and under – there is perhaps reason to take the allegations more seriously. Nevertheless, innocent until proven guilty and all that although “Not Proven” would be a fairer verdict.
Conclusion
In his Author's Note, Hodges states that there is very little source evidence from which to reconstruct a picture of Alan Turing, few original documents and little in the way of published commentary. Also, most of Turing's Papers were subject to a degree of censorship by his mother and family before their release.
However, even on the basis of the limited evidence available, I would conclude that Alan Turing would not be any more accepted by society today (and particularly the press) than he was in the 1940s/50s.
One commentator sums it up as follows:
"Ultimately, then, I think the problem that Alan Turing represents – between the 'useful' characteristics an individual possesses, those aspects of the self that society can make use of, and their 'undesirable' characteristics, those that pose a threat to social values and order – would be unsolvable even today."
Thank you for taking the time to respond on this.
However, I read that as a lot of speculation, assumption and innuendo.
And a great deal of weight is placed upon the writings of a "journalist/author" whose credibility (a quick Google shows) and loose relationship with the truth appears to be well established record:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...ooksobituaries
I'm not saying there isn't something here, but there seems little actual concrete evidence, and more than sixty years on I suspect there is unlikely to be. While such salacious tattle might be intriguing, and even indicative of something unsavoury, it is very far from proven fact. It should be born in mind that Turing was a homosexual in a time when such behaviour was against the law, and would de-facto have been considered extremely deviant by many.
Without truly compelling evidence, I am inclined to, cautiously, give the benefit of the doubt. It is clearly very easy to accuse, and much more difficult to disprove, especially of these kinds of matters - as recent events regarding Carl Beech clearly demonstrate:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ent...b020cd994f7b6a
I also think it extremely likely that Turing will have been incredibly carefully vetted by the BoE as a candidate for the £50 note. If there had been significant credible doubt, I think it unlikely the risk would have been taken to celebrate his life and contribution to the world in this way.
So clever my foot fell off.
Only one of the incidents (number 5 in the list) is related to Cave Brown and I qualify this case. All the others are based on first hand evidence from Turing's friends and colleagues, as well as Turing's own words as per his letters. The incident involving the sponsorship of the Jewish boy (Bob) is evidenced by the boy (interviewed by Hodges), Turing's close friend (Clayton) and Turing himself acknowledged the incident as per Hodges biography - widely recognised as a most thorough and comprehensive biography of Turing.
I suspect that this may be the reason why his head is on the £50 note and not the £5 or £10 note.
Last edited by Nugget; 2nd August 2019 at 21:18.
Thanks for pulling that information together, which led me to read up a little more as well.
I agree his attitude and behaviour towards teenage boys would be regarded as unacceptable and maybe illegal now, probably even more so than then. Unfortunately this kind of behaviour continues to be all too common among some groups of adults, whether gay or straight, who have some authority or relationship with groups of young people.
I’m sorry for jumping to the conclusion that your original comment was anti-gay. I still believe strongly that the treatment of Turing would have been very different if he hadn’t been gay.
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