Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing shows ‘funny, cheeky’ side in story

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The six-page, hand-written short story known as Pryce’s Buoy has been transcribed and studied for the first time by Sarah Dillon, professor of literature at Cambridge University.

She says the story offers new insights that challenge the view of Turing as an isolated, lonely genius.

She said: “We’ve distilled a version of Turing that is a two-dimensional stereotype.

“He’s come to be seen as socially unaware, entirely concerned with logic and numbers, and pretty isolated.

“His short story reveals a very different man: playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex."

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Turing is known as a founding figure in computer science, cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

During the Second World War, he was instrumental in breaking Germany’s Enigma code, helping the Allies to win the war.

Despite these groundbreaking achievements, Turing was convicted of gross indecency for homosexuality in 1952 and forced by authorities to take hormones.

He died in June 1954 from cyanide poisoning and an inquest ruled he had died by suicide.

However, many scholars and friends have disputed this finding and said his death was from accidental poisoning.

In the new research, Pryce’s Buoy, which was previously unpublished, has been printed in full, with Prof Dillon believing Turing wrote in late 1952 or early 1953.

The tale involves Ron Miller, a working-class rent boy, and Alec Pryce, a homosexual scientist famed for an invention in his 20s known as ‘Pryce’s buoy’.

The parallel with Turing’s work is clear, according to Prof Dillon, who said she believes the story is a direct fictionalisation of the late 1951 sexual encounter which led to Turing’s arrest.

In the story, Alec feels he’s earned some fun after Christmas shopping and goes looking for a young man.

The narrator then switches from Alec’s mind to Ron’s.

Ron is broke, unemployed and looking to make some money from sex.

Ron thinks to himself: “If he let someone take him under the arches for 10 minutes he might get five bob.”

Turing then writes: “Ron caught Alec’s eye and gave him a half-hearted smile. It was enough though.”

Sitting on a park bench, the men assess the situation and each other. Ron thinks Alec is shabbily dressed but wealthyish.

Alec’s impression of Ron is that he is “not a real beauty, but had a certain appeal. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.”

The pair then walk to a restaurant. Turing writes that Ron “didn’t go in for lah-di-dah ways of talking. It’d come to the same anyway. Bed’s bed whatever way you get into it. Alec thought otherwise.”

Prof Dillon said: “I love the hesitancy, the way it evokes the uncertainty of potential sexual encounter, the ‘am I reading this situation wrong?’ worry, ‘am I going to put my foot in it?’ ‘Am I going to go too far?’ ‘What did they want?’ ‘What do I want?’ ‘Can I back out?’ Turing gets those tensions, the leaning in and backing out. He does it really well.”

The story then abruptly cuts off in the restaurant, mid-sentence at the bottom-right of a page, with the words ‘Ron wouldn’t’.

Prof Dillon said: “There was clearly more and that’s so frustrating. We don’t know where the rest of it went. We don’t know if Turing’s mum censored it.

“Did it get more sexually explicit? How did it end? That’s frustrating but everything else is so exciting.

“Turing died when he was only 41, and in those years running up to his death, he was trying to understand himself and his world.

“Literature offered him a really powerful way of doing that. This was the moment when he really felt a release, a chance to be more creative and playful.”

Prof Dillon also found that Turing copied the style of a gay novel, Hemlock And After, by fellow Bletchley Park veteran Angus Wilson.

Dillon also argues that Hemlock and After was the novel Turing needed to read at a pivotal moment in his life.

“Wilson showed that homosexuality was normal and an integrated part of many people’s psychological and social lives,” she said. “He also made the law against it look increasingly outlandish.

“Imagine being Turing. You’re a homosexual man, you’ve been prosecuted, you’ve been forced to take hormone treatment. And then just months later, you read this novel. It must have been such a powerful moment for Turing amid so much trauma.”

Turing also added a layer to the story in which Ron thinks about how well his more effeminate-looking acquaintance Eric does with “toffs”, Prof Dillon said.

“I love Turing’s shifting focalisation,” she added.

“He gets this from Wilson, of course, who gives us access to both his characters’ minds too.

“But in the Turing story that access goes a step further, taking us out into their thoughts about their wider professional lives and social networks.

“When Turing does this with Ron, he starts to challenge some dominant narratives around interclass pick-ups at that time.”

Prof Dillon’s analysis is published in the Review of English Studies.