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British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s
Apology to Alan Turing
11th September 2009
2009
has been a year of deep reflection - a chance for Britain, as a nation, to
commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A
unique
combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense
of pride
and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this
year I
stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the
sacrifice
of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy
65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have
passed
since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms
against
Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both
pleased and
proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians
and LGBT
activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another
contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship;
that of
code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous
for his work on
breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that,
without
his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well
have been
very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to
whose
unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of
gratitude he is
owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated
so
inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ - in effect,
tried
for being gay. His sentence - and he was faced with the miserable
choice of this
or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female
hormones. He took his own life just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice
for Alan Turing and
recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt
with
under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his
treatment 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. Alan and the many
thousands of
other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic
laws were
treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of
conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last
12 years this
government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our
LGBT
community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s
most
famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long
overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for
his contribution to
humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe
which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that
our
continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is
difficult to
believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate
- by
anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous
prejudices -
that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European
landscape
as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had
marked
out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to
men and
women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan
Turing,
that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s
history
and not Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those
who live freely thanks
to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so
much
better.
Gordon Brown
More on Alan:
Alan Turing is considered to be
the father of modern
computers. He developed binary mathematics
into a system that could calculate and solve problems for any data that
may be
fed into his system.
He also invented fractal mathematics
used in chaos theory.
He ended his life biting into an
apple laced with cyanide. He had been fired from his government job and
shamed
in the courts after he was blackmailed about a homosexual affair. Alan
went to the police with the blackmail letter but
instead of being helped he was charged with gross indecency punishable
by
prison term of seven years. At his trial he pleaded guilty to being a
homosexual. His lawyer got him off prison on the basis of his war
service and in
exchange for being given hormone treatment to suppress his sex drive by
feminising him.
Apple Computer’s logo, the bitten
apple, is to commemorate
him.
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