Alan Turing was NOT driven to suicide after his conviction for ‘homosexual acts’, insists his nephew

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Alan Turing’s nephew has claimed the idea that his code-breaker uncle was ‘hounded to death by the state’ and took his own life because he was convicted for being gay is all part of a long-standing myth. 

Dermot Turing also suggested that he was not a ‘great codebreaker’ who was essential to Bletchley Park, as portrayed in the hit 2014 film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley. 

In the film, Turing was seen desperately battling to crack codes at Bletchley Park during much of World War Two, while in reality he had left the famous code-cracking HQ by 1939, at the beginning of the war. 

It also portrays him as struggling to cope mentally following his conviction for ‘homosexual offences’ in 1952, when evidence shows his ‘mood had lifted’, as he completed projects with enthusiasm in the two years after his trial. 

These two defining features of the movie, among others, have come under fire from his nephew who said such portrayals only help to perpetuate myths and that his uncle would have been ‘made sick’ by the repeated focus on his trial and time at Bletchley – pleading for his wider influence on mathematics to be his legacy instead. 

Alan Turing is considered a gay icon for how he bravely lived an open life despite homosexuality being illegal at the time – before becoming the first gay man to feature on a UK bank note when he was named the new face of the £50 note in 2019. 

Unfortunately, while alive, he was convicted of gross indecency for his relationship with a man before choosing to be chemically castrated over going to jail. 

Despite this, his nephew claims evidence from Turing’s archives suggest he had returned to his ‘normal self’ days after his trial ended and that his ‘mood had lifted’ just days before he took his own life by poisoning himself with cyanide in 1954 – which Dermot believes could have been over ‘boyfriend trouble’. 

‘It is trite and simplistic to assume that because he was convicted and put on this hormone treatment and took his own life within two years of that happening that these two things were causally related,’ he told The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival.

‘They are not. If you look at the documentary evidence it is quite clear that by the time Alan was off the hormone treatment, his mood was lifted and he was back to being his normal self and in fact he was probably back to being his normal self within days of the trial finishing. 

‘He was quite defiant and positive about the whole thing.’

Alan Turing created the British Bombe – one of the main methods used to break Germany’s Enigma-enciphered messages during the Second World War.

The Enigma enciphering machine was believed to be unbreakable as the cipher changed continuously.

But Turing was able to build a computer capable of cracking the code faster, with the first wartime Enigma messages broken in January 1940.

Enigma traffic continued to be broken routinely at Bletchley Park for the remainder of the war – which experts believe helped shorten the fighting by two years. 

But his nephew, author of Reflections of Alan Turing and other titles relating to his uncle, said there was also mythologising about the mathematician’s role at Bletchley.

He said it was Polish codebreakers who provided the basis for the cracking of the German machine, and that unlike what was portrayed in The Imitation Game, his uncle’s Bombe creation was ‘in the hands of engineers by 1939 and delivered to Bletchley Park in 1940’.  

He said: ‘It didn’t work too well but by the time of the Battle of Britain they had a souped-up version.

‘Turing’s main work at Bletchley Park was done by 1939 before Britain was really at war.’

In The Imitation Game, Alan Turing is shown singlehandedly inventing and physically building the machine, which was simply untrue. 

As his nephew explained, a predecessor of the Bombe was actually invented by Polish cryptanalysts. 

But Alan Turing was able to design a new machine that broke the Enigma code faster by looking for likely letter combinations and ruling out combinations that were unlikely to yield results. 

He also developed the improved machine with the help of fellow mathematician Gordon Welchman, who helped him with the design. He was also left out of the film.   

When a coroner ruled that Alan Turing had died by suicide, Dermot said his own father John created a conspiracy to reassure his mother, Ethel, that he had not taken his own life.  

Dermot does believe his uncle killed himself, rejecting the theory that he accidentally poisoned himself with the chemicals he had been using to gold-plate spoons.   

However, while in discussion with mathematical biologist Natasha Ellisson, Dermot said his theory is that it could have been over ‘boyfriend trouble’ rather than stemming from his trial and conviction.   

Ms Ellisson said Alan Turing’s works on ‘patterns in natures’ were still influencing contemporary research, prompting his nephew to say that he would prefer his uncle’s legacy to be about his wider mathematical insights. 

He added: ‘I would really like Alan Turing’s legacy to be about not this sort of sepia-tinted “oh we feel very proud of ourselves having won World War Two by codebreaking, not by actually shooting people”. 

‘Well that is nonsense isn’t it.

‘Alan Turing would have been made sick by this focus on his trial and the Bletchley Park thing, which I am sure he was very proud of . . . but it was just a tiny part of his life and wasn’t his career.’ 

Turing is also widely seen as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence due to his groundbreaking work in mathematics in the 1930s.

He was able to prove a ‘universal computing machine’ would be able to perform equations if they were presented as an algorithm – and had a paper published on the subject in 1936 in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society Journal when he was aged just 23. 

He laid the foundations for work on artificial intelligence by considering the question of whether machines could think. 

Turing also played a pivotal role in the development of early computers first at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and later at the University of Manchester. 

While at the NPL, his design for the Automatic Computing Engine, or ACE, would have been the first and most advanced computer the world had seen at that time. 

But his colleagues did not share his vision and were concerned that the engineering was too complex and decided to build a much smaller pilot ACE instead. 

Their rivals at Manchester University beat them to it, prompting Turing to join them as deputy director. He also wrote the first programming manual.

David Leslie of the Alan Turing Institute previously said: ‘What we really don’t realise is how this moment and Turing’s vision changed the entire world. 

‘Before this, literally nobody in the world had imagined that a single machine could apply countless strings of abstract symbols. 

‘Now we know them as programmes.’ 

As a result of his groundbreaking work, in 2019 Turing was revealed as the new face of the £50 note at a conference at the Science and Industry Museum in Manchester – making him the first gay man to ever appear on a British bank note. 

It came after the Bank of England asked the public to nominate a person with a historic scientific contribution for the new note.

Governor Mark Carney revealed Turing was chosen from a list of 989 candidates put forward in more than 220,000 nominations.   

The new polymer £50 note entered circulation in June of this year.   

It features a quote from Turing, given in an interview to the Times newspaper on June 11, 1949, reading: ‘This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. 

Turing was chosen following the Bank’s character selection process which included advice from scientific experts.

In February 2019 he was crowned the most iconic figure of the 20th century – beating other finalists including Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King.

The celebrated scientist was chosen by the public in a live broadcast of BBC Two’s Icons: The Greatest Person Of The 20th Century.

After Turing’s name was announced, presenter Nick Robinson said: ‘He was a man who worked almost entirely in secret, who received little credit for cracking the Nazi codes and shortening the war and who died having been branded a criminal.

‘Today he is the most celebrated figure of the 20th century – a father of computing, war hero and genius.’

Chris Packham, who backed Turing, said at the time: ‘Alan Turing’s genius brought Britain back from the brink during WWII. 

‘While he was punished for being different, his work celebrated diversity. Under the circumstances, that makes him truly iconic.’ 

Turing lived his life openly and was not afraid to make advances towards men. 

That was despite the fact that he could still be arrested and thrown in jail for ‘homosexual offences’ – thanks to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which made any male homosexual act illegal – whether or not a witness was present – meaning that even acts committed in private could be prosecuted. 

Often a letter expressing terms of affection between two men was all that was required to bring a prosecution. It was the same law used to arrest famed author Oscar Wilde.