The Prosecution

1952 · Quarter Sessions · Work 479 of 1,871

The Prosecution, 1952, Quarter Sessions

The courtroom of a small English town hall used for the Quarter Sessions, after the hearing, a panelled dock and a raised bench, a folded charge sheet and a closed ledger left on the clerk's table below the bench, chairs pushed back, the public benches dark, grey daylight from tall windows on one side.

What it was used for
A criminal proceeding, not a device. What was applied was section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which made gross indecency between men an offence; that is how the Alan Turing (Statutory Pardon) Bill of 2013 names it, giving the conviction as 31 March 1952 at the Quarter Sessions at Knutsford, Cheshire. The dates are of different kinds: burglary at Turing's house on 23 January 1952, arrest on 7 February, trial on 31 March, a guilty plea. Sentence: placed on probation for a year together with hormone treatment with oestrogen, obligatory for the same year. His co-defendant Murray was bound over to be of good behaviour for twelve months.
What was new
Nothing invented; what is contested is the record. The British government stated in 2013 that the conviction led to the removal of his security clearance, so that Turing could no longer work for GCHQ, where he had continued after Bletchley. Andrew Hodges places the exclusion in the conditions since 1948, under which known homosexuals had become ineligible for clearance, and notes that the files on his security status for 1952-54 remain closed. The figures do not carry far either: 65,000 convicted and 15,000 still living are attributed to Lord Sharkey via the BBC, while another account gives 100,000 and 10,000; no government source for these figures was consulted. The 2017 pardon pardons a class, not a counted list: only the small figures for the living are published officially, 174 pardons out of 404 applications up to July 2018.

Further reading