Saturday, March 7

We started a movie last night starring Michael Douglas but it was so bad, and his acting was so embarrassing, that we binned it and turned to something else - The Imitation Game.  This is a terrific movie with a fascinating story.  Alan Turing was a mathematician who worked at Blechley Park during WW2.  He is credited with inventing the machine which ultimately gave the British the ability to decode messages sent from the Germans' Enigma machines.

I was surprised how closely the movie stuck to the real story: the intervention of Winston Churchill to give them the resources they needed, the girl he asked to marry him, and the way Turing overcame the resistance of the people he worked with.

As a boy, he was enrolled at Sherborne School but, on the first day of term there was a General Strike in Britain, so he rode his bike, alone, for 60 miles to get to school, staying at an inn overnight on the way.

He was a homosexual and was arrested and sentenced to chemical castration with regular injections of oestrogen.  He was found dead of cyanide poisoning just a couple of weeks after his 42nd birthday.

Clearly, this was one of the great minds of the 20th century but he was dead at 42 hounded and vilified for being different.  You can only wonder what he might have achieved if he had lived another 20 years, and been given the support and recognition he deserved.