Racy short story by Alan Turing offers glimpse of ‘playful, funny, cheeky’ side

Prof Sarah Dillon with the Alan Turing short story. Photograph: King’s College/Cambridge View image in fullscreen Prof Sarah Dillon with the Alan Turing short story. Photograph: King’s College/Cambridge Racy short story by Alan Turing offers glimpse of ‘playful, funny, cheeky’ side Writing from year after gross indecency arrest challenges ‘isolated mathematician’ image, says Cambridge academic When people think of Alan Turing , they might imagine he was arrogant, isolated, humourless, tortured. A better way of remembering the father of modern computing would be, an academic argues, as “playful, funny, cheeky, literary, and someone who really liked sex”. The Cambridge University English literature professor Sarah Dillon has transcribed and studied a little-known short story that Turing wrote in the year after his arrest in Manchester for gross indecency. Her conclusion challenges the popular understanding of Turing as an “isolated mathematician”. The short story, she said, shone light on a man who loved literature, was enjoying life and was not ashamed of his sexuality. “I hope it will go some way towards resetting the narrative around Turing,” she said. “We think we know this figure and we don’t. There was more to him than is popularly believed.” View image in fullscreen Alan Turing is considered the father of modern computing. Photograph: GL Archive/Alamy Turing was Britain’s most prominent second world war code breaker. Some historians believe the work of Turing and others at Bletchley Park, breaking the German Enigma code, shortened the war by as many as four years . His pioneering postwar work at Manchester University helped open the door for the development of modern computers and artificial intelligence. In 1952 he was arrested and prosecuted for his homosexuality. Rather than go to jail he agreed to chemical castration. In 1954 he died aged 41 as a result of cyanide poisoning, which a coroner ruled was suicide but which some believe was an accident. In 2009 the UK government apologised for the “appalling” way Turing had been treated. For many people, their understanding of Turing is shaped by the 2014 film The Imitation Game starring Benedict Cumberbatch. “That is the problem,” said Dillon. “I actually rewatched it last night which confirmed my memory of it. It’s a really good film but it’s not accurate. It makes a lot of historical mistakes. “The version of Turing that it presents is a kind of Hollywood lone hero that actually doesn’t resemble what we know about the man himself.” View image in fullscreen A page from the short story. Photograph: King’s College/Cambridge Dillon said the film got Turing wrong, depicting him as having no sense of humour , being very individualistic, refusing to collaborate, and having antagonistic relationships with other people. “He wasn’t this one-dimensional figure that Hollywood has painted him as,” she said. The short story, in the King’s College, Cambridge, archives, has been known about by Turing exper