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Alan Turing and the British State:
The Blue Plaque
On 23 June 1998 I had the honour of unveiling an official English Heritage blue plaque on the Colonnade Hotel, London W9, the birthplace of Alan Turing. I read a message from the Rt. Hon. Chris Smith, MP, then Minister of State for Culture, Media and Sport in the British Government. It ended:
... He was dishonourably persecuted during his life; today let us wipe that national shame clean by honouring him properly.
This was the first recognition by Government of what had happened. I then delivered a short oration, end with a thought of his mother at his birth on 23 June 1912. Full texts here
The day was appropriate. It followed the 50th anniversary of the world's first working modern computer, which ran at Manchester on 21 June 1948. Then on 22 June 1998, the House of Commons had voted by a large majority to change the law so that homosexual and heterosexual acts would alike be governed by an 'age of consent' of 16. It was recognised by all sides that the issue was that of equal rights.
In 2009, Chris Smith (then Lord Smith) chose Alan Turing as a Gay Icon in the special National Portrait Gallery exhibition. See this Guardian newpaper report.
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The wording on the plaque reads: ALAN TURING 1912-1954
Code-breaker and Pioneer of Computer Science was born here |
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The Prime Minister's apology
Eleven years later, on 10 September 2009, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made a full personal statement of recognition, reflection and apology.
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Rank Outsiders become Insiders
Rank Outsiders was the British support group for lesbian and gay personnel in the armed forces. It had long campaigned against the way that homosexual people in the British armed services had been subject to an automatic and humiliating discharge. In 1999 the European Court of Human Rights declared the British government's policy unlawful. On 11 December 1999, the organisation insituted an Alan Turing Award. It was given to the British lesbian and gay rights organization Stonewall, for the vital support it gave to the legal challenge.
Now Rank Outsiders have disappeared. The outsiders are now insiders. The Alan Turing Award has fallen victim to its own success.
In this way, British policy moved closer to harmony with European culture. But since 2001, the commitment of the armed forces to American strategy has been predominant. This classic British dilemma is also part of Alan Turing's heritage.
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More memorials
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At the end of 1994, Manchester City Council renamed part of the Manchester ring road as
Alan Turing Way.
Hugh Whitemore, the playwright of Breaking the Code, used film of the ring road traffic to make an ironic ending for the television version of his play.
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Statue, University of Surrey (my photo) |
In about 1987, a plaque was put on Alan Turing's parents' home in Guildford, Surrey. (It was 8 Ennismore Avenue in Turing's time, now renumbered as 22 Ennismore Avenue.)
Then in 2004 the University of Surrey, also at Guildford, placed a large bronze sculpture of Alan Turing at a central position on its campus. Whilst conveying a sense of strength and intellectual command, it does not show the socially awkward, informal and unorthodox aspects of its subject.
There is a more modest sculpture at the University of Oregon.
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At Bletchley ParkA Turing sculpture by Stephen Kettle was unveiled at the Bletchley Park Museum in June 2007. The press release made no mention of Alan Turing as a victim of the British law, and this excited astonishment from uk.gay.com. The Museum's release was then amended to its present form. The exclusion was pointless: press reaction to the event naturally focussed on the drama of Turing's death. See this interesting comparison with the death of David Kelly and a further story on the controversy.
By any standards, the contrast between Turing's work for the State in the 1940s, and his trial and death in the 1950s, is a story of great public interest. As an example, Stephen Hawking's excellent sourcebook God created the Integers, when reproducing Turing's 1936 paper, pays detailed attention to it. The Bletchley Park Museum promises a comprehensive Turing exhibition in the future when resources are available.
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| In 2001 the London Borough of Richmond-on-Thames and the Hampton Society sponsored the placing of another blue plaque on Ivy House, Hampton, where Alan Turing lived in 1945-47. See this Scrapbook page.
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A bronze sculpture of Alan Turing was unveiled in Sackville Park, central Manchester, on his birthday, 23 June 2001
This project, brainchild of the sculptor and engineer Glyn Hughes, was supported by many individual donations and by Manchester City Council. It has the informality and location in the 'gay village' that rightly reflects Alan Turing's personality.
More pictures of the unveiling on the next Scrapbook page
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A work of pop art
Alan Turing has also inspired a sequence of works by the artist and sculptor Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who learnt of his story from my book. The detail below is from a 1999 screenprint. |
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This was followed in 2000 by a sequence of eight large new prints about Alan Turing, using texts from my book.
See my talk about the Turing Prints.
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Alan Turing in popular culture
This cartoon strip in low-life Viz magazine, August 2009, simply assumes that the reader will know all about Alan Turing as the top codebreaker at Bletchley Park (and goes on to make usual scientist-with-no-common-sense joke).
Perhaps the respectable media will eventually catch up with this level of knowledge. |  |
FOR ANOTHER KIND OF MEMORIAL, LOOK AROUND YOU...
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Empire of the Mind
This Internet Scrapbook is a virtual memorial to Alan Turing, but so far it only hints at the new forms of design and communication made possible through the computer. Web-artistry could create something completely new.
But there is one place where a physical memorial to Alan Turing could be sited. At the heart of the old Empire, into which he was born, there is now a world-mingling centre: Trafalgar Square, London.
Famous for commemorating Nelson who fought the naval war against Napoleon, two hundred years ago, here until the end of the twentieth century lay an empty space. | |
There had long been an empty plinth. In 2001 it was topped by a resin sculpture entitled Monument.
This work mirrored the plinth in solid resin. The sculptor, Rachel Whitehead, is renowned for her representation of empty spaces and negatives. We are meant to reflect: what is a momument, why monuments... this is a monument to the idea of monument, an anti-monument... Meanwhile the changing light, refracted through the huge cast resin, is intended to charm our eyes. This is meant to be thought-provoking, dramatically original, and the best of modernity in British art.
Here is a different view. Logical structures which refer to themselves and their own symbolic representation were clearly identified by Bertrand Russell in 1901. The surrealist artists played with them, but the logicians took them seriously, and in 1936 Alan Turing brought the logic of the computer out of them. Meanwhile the serious scientific analysis of light had led to the new concept of the quantum in 1900.
Forty years later, mathematical logic and electronic physics could be turned into the practical engineering of information technology. One person at the pivot of this process was Alan Turing.
To this onlooker, a work such as Monument is far from being modern. It is a pale, vague reflection of ideas which inspired new mathematics and science a century ago. It cannot begin to address what mathematicians and scientists have since done with those ideas: those advances, and their ironies and dark secrets, are beyond the world of 'modern' culture. Science is still rank outsider.
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The plinth (right) in Trafalgar Square, February 2000.
The National Gallery (of art) is in the centre.
The newly topped plinth, July 2001.
In the background, Nelson stands on his column.
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| Alan Turing did as much as anyone to save democracy from fascism. It was this non-violent Nelson's individual determination to master naval Enigma, against all odds, that was the key. His technological vision now underpins the network of universal machines on which the whole world economy now runs. His mathematical reformulation of the problem of Mind is now recognised as a central contribution to twentieth century philosophy and science. The relationship of logic to quantum physics, to which he turned at the end of his life, is now for the twenty-first century to investigate.
Unwittingly, the sculpture erected there in 2001 told a story of how far he and his scientific world were ahead of the culture that was saved by his work. In 2009, after the Prime Minister's apology, something greater work, dedicated to Alan Turing, could show how much this country's culture has changed.
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...KEEP THE WEB FREE AS LIVING MEMORY
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