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the movie, Jobs admits that in fact there was no connection, but wishes that the rumours were
true.^30 Going back to 1992, The Strange Life and Death of Dr Turing (made for the BBC by
Christopher Sykes) remains one of the best Turing films. Included are interviews with Turing’s
ex-fiancée Joan Clarke and his Bletchley Park colleagues Jack Good and Shaun Wylie, as well as
his close friends Robin Gandy, Norman Routledge, and Don Bayley. American logician and AI
pioneer Marvin Minsky introduces the film, saying:
Here’s a person who discovered the most important thing in logic: he invented the concept of
the stored-program computer . . . here’s the key figure of our century.
Items that belonged to Turing have become increasingly valuable. In 2011, thanks to a
large donation from Google, Turing’s ‘secret papers were saved for the nation’ (the Te l e g r a p h
reported).^31 The Bletchley Park Trust, backed by Google, paid an undisclosed six-figure sum for
the papers at auction. In fact the papers were not secret at all, consisting mostly of offprints of
journal articles that can be found on the shelves of any major university library. The collection
originally belonged to Max Newman and some items are marked ‘M. H. A. Newman’ in Turing’s
hand (and there are also occasional marginal notes in Newman’s own hand). The papers now
form part of the ‘Life and Works of Alan Turing’ exhibition described in Chapter 19. Four
years after the auction of the papers, a notebook containing 39 pages in Turing’s handwriting
was auctioned in New York for more than a million dollars.^32 This is (so far as is known) the
most substantial surviving manuscript by Turing; other Turing manuscripts are around ten
pages or less.
Political legacy
Winston Churchill reputedly described Turing and the other Bletchley Park codebreakers
as ‘the geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled’.^33 But Turing, in the shadow of a
giant wall of secrecy, received no greater official recognition for his war work than the OBE—
practically an insult when a knighthood would have been more fitting. With the lifting of the
veil of secrecy, Turing’s status has changed from almost-forgotten mathematician to gay icon
and national hero.
At the 1998 unveiling of the blue plaque marking Turing’s birthplace (see Fig. 1.1), a message
was read out from one of the UK’s first openly gay members of parliament, Chris Smith:^34
Alan Turing did more for his country and for the future of science than almost anyone. He was
dishonourably persecuted during his life; today let us wipe that national shame clean by honour-
ing him properly.
The wish to wipe away the national shame gained momentum. Computer scientist John
Graham-Cumming led a campaign demanding a government apology; among the campaign’s
many supporters were biologist Richard Dawkins, novelist Ian McEwan, and gay-rights cam-
paigner Peter Tatchell. In 2009 the apology arrived, in the form of a statement in the Te l e g r a p h
newspaper by the British prime minister Gordon Brown:^35
While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treat-
ment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry
I and we all are for what happened to him. . . . This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s
most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality, and long overdue.