In December 1951, Alan Turing had just completed his groundbreaking work on morphogenesis, which would be published the following year. Deciding he deserved a reward, he picked up a young man on the streets of Manchester and brought him home. The young man, Arnold Murray, later confided in a friend, who burglarized Turing’s house. Turing reported the burglary to the police. By then, the burglar had been arrested in connection with another offense and implicated both Arnold Murray and Turing. When the two men appeared in court in March 1952 on charges of “gross indecency,” they were convicted. Turing agreed to undergo hormone treatment, sparing him a prison sentence.
Earlier that year, Turing had written to his friend Norman Routledge:
I’ve now got myself into the kind of trouble that I have always considered quite a possibility for me, though I have usually rated it at about 10:1 against. I shall shortly be pleading guilty to a charge of sexual offenses with a young man. The story of how it all came to be found out is a long and fascinating one, which I shall have to make into a short story one day, but haven’t time to tell you now. No doubt I shall emerge from it all a different man, but quite who I’ve not found out.
That short story has now emerged in its entirety. A transcription from handwritten pages preserved in the archives of King’s College has just been published by Sarah Dillon. I learned of its existence in the pages of The New York Times (Life of Alan Turing Emerges in Richer Detail From Short Story) and found the complete text in the appendix to Sarah Dillon’s article in The Review of English Studies(‘Pryce’s Buoy’: Alan Turing’s autofictional short story).
Here is an excerpt:
But now it was time for lunch, and Alec was walking towards the University but looking out for a reasonably good restaurant. Alec had been working rather hard until two or three weeks before. It was about interplanetary travel. Alec had always been rather keen on such crackpot problems, but although he rather liked to let himself go rather wildly to newspaper men or on the Third programme when he got the chance, when he wrote for technically learned readers his work was quite sound, or had been when he was younger. This last paper was real good stuff: better than he’d done since his mid twenties when he had introduced the idea which is now commonly known as “Pryce’s buoy”. Alec always felt a glow of pride when this phrase was used. The rather obvious double-entendre rather pleased him too. He always liked to parade his homosexuality, and in suitable company Alec would pretend that the word was spelt without the ‘u’. It was quite some time now since he had ‘had’ anyone, in fact not since he had met that soldier in Paris last summer. Now that his paper was finished he might justifiably consider that he had earned another young man, and he knew where he might find one who might be suitable.