COPElAND | 39
If Turing was suffering from life-threatening depression following the months of hormones,
there is no evidence of it. So far as it is possible to tell from the evidence that survives, his mental
state during the remaining 14 months of his life seems to have been unremarkable. His career,
moreover, was at one of its highest points, with his research into growth going marvellously
well and with the prospect of fundamentally important new results just around the corner.
Turing talked about the topic of suicide with his friend Nick Furbank: ‘It was the sort of thing I
did discuss with him from time to time’, Furbank told me.^24 But if Turing was talking obliquely
about himself, this was not clear to Furbank—if he had an intention to take his own life, he did
not tell his friend. Furbank felt no concern: caught up in other things, he unintentionally drifted
out of Turing’s circle, and there were no visits to Hollymeade during the 2 or 3 months prior
to Turing’s death. Furbank accepted the verdict of Turing’s inquest—many did—and nearly 70
years later still believed that he had ‘failed’ Turing.
Another Turing movie, Codebreaker, was first shown on British television in 2011: much of
the action of this well-told docudrama, produced by Patrick Sammon and Paul Sen, consists
of fictitious conversations between Turing and his psychotherapist Dr Greenbaum.^25 It was in
1952 that Turing began seeing Franz Greenbaum, who lived a short bicycle ride away along
the Wilmslow Road. In typical Turing fashion he soon formed friendships with not only the
analyst but also his young family, often spending Sundays with the Greenbaums. Towards the
end of the screenplay the Turing character discusses suicide with the Greenbaum character. In
Sammon and Sen’s follow-up article ‘Turing committed suicide: case closed’, they portrayed
Greenbaum as feeling that ‘suicide was a likely scenario’ and as believing that, as Turing’s
therapist, he had ‘insight into Alan’s death as suicide rather than accident’.^26 These are not
Greenbaum’s own statements. In the year after Turing’s death the real Greenbaum wrote in a
letter to Sara (whether sincerely or not we cannot tell): ‘There is not the slightest doubt to me
that Alan died by an accident’.^27
Sammon and Sen described the fact that, approximately four months before his death, Turing
prepared a will as ‘evidence of pre-meditation’.^28 Yet for a person to make a will at the age of 41
is not an unusual event. In any case, Turing’s will seems poles apart from the last instructions
of a man expecting to die soon. He included a small bequest to his housekeeper, Mrs Clayton,
together with an additional annual bonus ‘for each completed year in which she shall be in my
employ from and after the thirtyfirst day of December One thousand nine hundred and fifty
three’ (see Fig. 4.1).^29 Never a man to waste words, it seems unlikely that Turing would have
included this formula in his will unless he was actually envisaging Mrs Clayton’s bonuses accru-
ing during her future years of service to him.
last days
The week before Turing died, he and Robin Gandy passed an enjoyable weekend together at
Hollymeade: Turing’s housekeeper Mrs Clayton said that ‘they seemed to have a really good
t i m e ’.^30 ‘When I stayed with him the week-end before Whitsun’, Gandy said, ‘he seemed,
if anything, happier than usual’.^31 Turing’s neighbour, Mrs Webb, also found him perfectly
cheerful. On Thursday 3 June, just four days before his death, he threw an impromptu party
for her and her little boy Rob, making them tea and toast. ‘It was such a jolly party’, she
recalled.^32 Gandy accepted the official verdict of suicide, but felt that there was no reason for
Turing’s action.