Afterwards Turing gave Murray a present of a penknife: probably the unemployed Murray would have preferred cash instead. Their first time was a few days later at Turing’s house, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow. Turing picked up Murray in Manchester’s Oxford Street and the two ate together. “Ronald” is an anagram of “Arnold,” and it was in December 1951 that Turing first met Arnold Murray, the Ronald Miller of his short story. Beggars can’t be choosers, Ron thinks meanly. Eventually Alec plucks up courage to invite the boy to have lunch at a nearby restaurant. Shyly Alec joins him on the bench and the two sit together awkwardly. He responds to a glance that Alec gives him as he passes, calling out uncouthly “Got a fag?”.

Ron, who is out of work and keeps company with petty criminals, makes a small income from male prostitution. 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. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word was spelt without the ‘u.’” “The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too. “Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used,” Turing wrote revealingly. Pryce, like Turing himself, always wore what Turing described as “an old sports coat and rather unpressed worsted trousers.” 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. The central character - a scientist by the name of Alec Pryce, who works at Manchester University - is a thinly disguised Alan Turing. Although only a few pages long and incomplete, it offers an intimate glimpse of its author. In this adapted extract from The Turing Guide, Jack Copeland walks us through the events leading up to his arrest and trial, which sentenced him to chemical castration.

In 1952, Alan Turing, patriotic codebreaker and pioneer of computer science and artificial intelligence, was arrested, tried, and punished on the basis of his homosexuality.

Alan turing book