Gordon Brown last night issued a posthumous apology to Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing for the 'appalling' way he was punished for being gay.
The Prime Minister said he was 'deeply sorry' for the inhumane treatment of the Cambridge mathematician - 53 years after his death. Mail Online
Turing reported a crime to the police. During the investigation Turing acknowledged a sexual relationship with Murray. Homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and so both were charged with gross indecency under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, the same crime that Oscar Wilde had been convicted of more than fifty years earlier.
Turing was given a choice between imprisonment or probation conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido. He accepted chemical castration via oestrogen hormone injections, which lasted for a year. One of the known side effects of these hormone injections was the development of breasts, something which plagued Turing for the rest of his life.
Turing's conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, and barred him from continuing with his cryptographic consultancy for GCHQ. At the time, there was acute public anxiety about spies and homosexual entrapment by Soviet agents, possibly due to the recent exposure of the first two members of the Cambridge Five, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, as KGB double agents. Turing was never accused of espionage but, as with all who had worked at Bletchley Park, was prevented from discussing his war work. Wikipedia