Turing has long been an intellectual hero of mine, but I never until recently was convinced by the claims to moral heroism personified by Benedict Cumberbatch or typified by this recent coverage in The Guardian of a new book by Simon Goldhill:
Turing gained a “political strength and a political clarity” from his time at King’s. “He was somebody who was capable of standing up for himself as a gay man. He thought it was important not to lie, not to conceal, but to say: ‘This is who I am. I think you should be able to deal with this.’ He got that confidence from King’s. Guardian 8 Mar 2025
But the evidence has changed and I have changed my mind: this post explains why. To do that I’m publishing some important (to me) and previously unknown (to me) material which was found (not by me) after the main source that Goldhill relied on was published.
The paragraph above was written by the journalist Donna Ferguson and the quotes are from Simon Goldhill, a veteran Fellow at King’s, in an interview about his new book, Queer Cambridge. Goldhill’s book is almost entirely not about Turing, and the page or so which is naturally and appropriately cites Andrew Hodges 1983 biography as its major source. Hodges’ book is a brilliant combination of careful evidence gathering, based on oral history interviews with everyone relevant still living in the 1970s, combined with a passionate desire to tell a story of injustice. Andrew was also a meticulous scholar, and the facts of Turing’s intellectual and academic life are scrupulously sourced where possible. As for Turing’s inner life, there are a handful of revealing letters, but the portrait comes most alive when Hodges draws on the oral memories of Turing’s friends and loved ones, notably Robin Gandy. For understandable reasons, Hodges left most of these glimpses unsourced to any particular informant; a reader can generally infer who must have told him what, but the full interviews themselves are not available. So the key Goldhill claim of ethical heroism relied on primary sources we can’t now access, filtered through witnesses and a historian with a definite if admirable agenda.
And there is room for other perspectives on Turing. While I have no doubt that Turing acquired a ‘confidence from King’s’ corresponding to his class status and gender, its also possible to read a corresponding snobbery and misogyny equally normal for the time. More specifically, Goldhill’s claim of ‘political strength and political clarity’, derived more from Hodge’s broad portrait of Turing than any specific facts in the biography, rests in essence on Turing’s Wilmslow police statement of Feburary 1952 in which he acknowledged carrying out an illegal sexual act. I have long thought this was not heroism but hubris. Turing wrote that he thought the possibility of attracting the attention of the police for his acitvity was about 1 in 10, but what he did not write was what he thought the consequences would be. Policing in the rural towns of Cheshire was different to that in the entertainment districts of the commercial and industrial city of Manchester and different again to that of the High Tables of Cambridge, and it seems to me likely that Turing badly misjudged those differences. I speculate that he did not understand that if he had simply refused to make a statement, it is unlikely the police could have or would wanted to have done much more. But, while I still think that’s part of the picture, a new piece of evidence has emerged which very strongly supports Turing as a conscious speaker of the full truth.
AMT A/17 King’s College Cambridge. (c) The estate of CHO’D Alexander
After Turing’s death, his mother Sara received a number of letters of condolence, which she later made use of in her biography of her son. One of these letters was from Conel Hugh O'Donel Alexander, who had been at King’s three years before Turing, and got to know him well when they both worked at Bletchley Park. The letter is a moving one, written I would say by a man who loved his friend, telling Sara of her son’s ‘power to win the affection of everyone who really knew him’ and Alexander’s admiration of his ‘profound originality and insight but for his simplicity and honesty’. Sara Turing donated the first page of the letter to King’s, along with (presumably) most of the other material she had used in the preparation of the biography, some time before her death in 1976. It has been there, available to scholars ever since. But as the image shows, Mrs Turing painstakingly redacted the address and one of the paragraphs.
And this is where an astonishing thing happened a few years ago. The University Library in Cambridge has a funded unit developing new technologies like CT scanning to image manuscripts: they recently showed off their prowess on a reused 13C : Modern magic unlocks Merlin's medieval secrets. Decades after Andrew Hodges interviewed his witnesses and wrote his book and read the redacted latter, the team tried this new technology on the Alexander letter. And it worked: here is the text they found under Sara Turing’s redaction:
he would be asked if he admitted that what he was done was really wrong. Rightly or wrongly he himself did not think he had done wrong and that being so he himself would rather have been imprisoned than admit to it ; and it wasn’t obstinacy, he just would not have lied in order to escape. (King’s College Cambridge AMT A/17)
There’s a sadness in his mother’s need to censor this material in order to do right in her mind by her son, but that is another story. The revealed image was shown in an exhibition at King’s, but unlike the Merlin story it never seems to have attracted any PR flacks or made its way into the world wide web of Turing narratives. So it seems worth posting here: it is why, in the end, I despite some initial scepticism I do accept that Simon Goldhill got the big call right. (On the ‘political clarity’ that is; attributing that to King’s culture reamins a value statement more than a historical one).
Neither I nor (I think) Simon Goldhill had anything to do with deciphering the Alexander letter - I’m grateful for the cooperation of the Modern Archivists at King’s for this. I’m especially grateful to Andrew Hodges not just for telling me about the decipherment, but for positively engaging with a previous and badly wrong version of this post.
Some other myths
While we’re here, a some minor factual corrections to Queer Cambridge in an attempt to keep other myths vaguely anchored to historical evidence. Alan Turing was never ‘living with’ Arnold Murray, the 19 year old he was co-charged with for gross indecency. The only positive evidence we have is Murray’s account thirty years later to Andrew Hodges that Murray had been picked up by Turing on Manchester’s Oxford Road in November 1951 and stayed overnight at Turing’s house in Wilmslow a few times between then and their arrest in February 1952. Turing’s long-term relationships were entirely within his own upper-middle class.
Perhaps more importantly, Turing was never as far as I know ‘offered the choice’ between prison and chemical castration. His co-accused was put on probation, but if Turing was offered a choice it was between prison and probation, with a condition of probation being that he ‘submitted’ to the care of a’registered medical practioner at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. (Dermot Turing’s Prof is a key additional source here). It is unlikely that the judge making this order had a specific ‘care’ in mind: the reason for these referrals at the time was that the legal profession did not have any clear idea as to what would be appropropriate treatment. And, while it can’t be excluded, I think it unlikely that Turing was told by his doctor that he had to comply with a proposed oestrogen treatment or be in breach of his probation conditions. Firstly, the publically stated view of the profession at the time was that this would have been unethical, and secondly while some of the treatment was with a non-removable implant, this was at least ostensibly for pharmaceutical dosage reasons, and some of the treatment was with oestrogen tablets for which compliance would have been impossible to monitor.
This is not a review of the whole Queer Cambridge. The title is absurd and excluding, like calling a monograph on EM Forster novels Queer Literature. But there’s much to like in the warmth with which Simon Goldhill retells, and re-creates, King’s creation myth of an intellectually or aesthetically rigorous but socially tolerant society. I learned a lot, mostly not very interesting to those not interested in King’s self-mythologising but fascinating to those like me who are. I would have been more comfortable enjoying the book if Goldhill had extended the tolerance and empathy he celebrates to the victims of the snobbishness and misogyny he cannot ignore but notes only in passing. Perhaps it was indeed impossible to look for testimonies from the series of male sex workers who have apparently trooped into the Gibbs building over the decades. But negative evidence of the culture Goldhill’s subjects bequeathed has been there to hear at his own High Table over the years. In my experience , for example, it doesn’t take much prompting of women with experience of that academic culture to yield other, less glowing perspectives of how those values impacted on them.
[Both the image of the letter and the quotations from it are copyright by the estate of CHO’D Aexander. I think my use of them is fair use but I’d be grateful to hear from any copyright owner. The King’s archive has a paper copy of the re-imaged letter in A/17 from which I haved taken the ‘he would be asked’… quote after ignoring some words I can’t make out. It doesn’t contain any details of the imaging work itself or who carried it out and I wold love to know more details of that too].