26 | 2 THE mAN wITH THE TERRIBlE TROUSERS
Breathless and heady stuff, and controversial. Alan had jumped in with both feet:
Mr Turing said yesterday: ‘This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of
what is going to be . . . It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do
not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect,
and eventually compete on equal terms. I do not think you can even draw the line about sonnets,
though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be
better appreciated by another machine.’
The business about sonnets began with Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, who was the professor of
neurosurgery at the University of Manchester and had spoken on the subject ‘The mind of
mechanical man’ in his Lister Oration, the day before The Times interview. Sir Geoffrey was
unenthusiastic about the idea of thinking machines, and among his remarks he had said:
not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emo-
tions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain.
For his peroration, Sir Geoffrey decided to quote several lines from Hamlet, including:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty . . .
and so forth. Of course Alan knew Hamlet. Alan’s brother John, my father, says this:^4
I think it must have been when Alan was due to take the School Certificate examination that he
read Hamlet in the holidays. My father was delighted when Alan placed the volume on the floor
and remarked ‘Well, there’s one line I like in this play’. My father could already see a burgeoning
interest in English literature. But his hopes were dashed when Alan replied that he was referring
to the final stage direction—Exeunt, bearing off the bodies.
Battle was joined, in the most civilized fashion: Sir Geoffrey for the establishment and for
those who saw machines as calculators, and Alan for the visionaries. In 1952 the BBC brought
them to face each other in a debate on the wireless about whether machines could be said to
think, and to ensure fair play the referee was Professor Newman.
Intellectually, then, Manchester was a great place to be for Alan, but from a personal angle
the move to Manchester was to be more complex. The story is well known. My grandfather had
left Alan his gold watch and this, along with some minor items, was stolen from Alan’s house by
a local petty thief acting in cahoots with a young man that Alan had picked up in a pub. Being
pretty unworldly, as well as deeply upset about the watch, Alan had gone to the police, who were
far more interested in the sexual practices of a Fellow of the Royal Society who was working on
the mechanical brain and had been giving talks about it on the wireless.
From the family viewpoint, all this was socially difficult. Alan’s brother John, a solicitor,
was consulted. He felt that the best thing was to minimize the amount of publicity, not least
to protect their mother from the scandal, and pleading guilty was the best way to do that. In
court Alan did as he was told, but defiantly: he was the one who had been morally wronged. The
result was that the press coverage was minimal, and his mother was duly protected—a success
of sorts. Alan did not go to prison or lose his job—another victory—but the Turing boys were
both casualties in different ways.
As we all know, the court’s sentence was a probation order coupled with the condition that he
take a course of hormone ‘therapy’; this caused Alan to grow breasts and (I imagine) mixed him