CHAPTER 4

Crime and punishment

jack copeland

I

n 1952 Turing was arrested and tried for being gay. The court convicted him and sen-

tenced him to chemical castration. It was disgraceful treatment by the nation that he had

done so much to save. Turing faced this ordeal with his usual courage.^1

Arnold

Turing wrote a short story.^2 Although only a few pages long and incomplete, it offers an intimate

glimpse of its author. The central character—a scientist by the name of Alec Pryce, who works

at Manchester University—is a thinly disguised Alan Turing.

Pryce, like Turing himself, always wore what Turing described as ‘an old sports coat and

rather unpressed worsted trousers’. Turing called this Pryce’s ‘undergraduate uniform’, saying

that it ‘encouraged him to believe he was still an attractive youth’. At just the wrong side of 40,

Turing must have been feeling his age. Pryce, whose work related to interplanetary travel, made

an important discovery in his twenties, which came to be called ‘Pryce’s buoy’. The nature of

the discovery is left unexplained, and Pryce’s buoy is obviously a proxy for the universal Turing

machine. ‘Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used’, Turing wrote revealingly.

‘The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too’, Turing continued. ‘He always

liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word

was spelt without the “u” ’. Pryce, we are told, has not had a sexual relationship since ‘that soldier

in Paris last summer’. Walking through Manchester, Pryce passes a youth lounging on a bench,

Ron Miller. Ron, who is out of work and keeps company with petty criminals, makes a small

income from male prostitution. He responds to a glance that Alec gives him as he passes, calling

out uncouthly ‘Got a fag?’. Shyly Alec joins him on the bench and the two sit together awk-

wardly. Eventually Alec plucks up courage to invite the boy to have lunch at a nearby restaurant.

Beggars can’t be choosers, Ron thinks meanly. He is not impressed by Alec’s brusque approach

and ‘lah-di-dah’ way of speaking, but says to himself philosophically, ‘Bed’s bed whatever way

you get into it’.