CityLife

Celebration of Alan Turing's '100th birthday'

Tony Lloyd, Graham Stringer and Pat Karney surround Turing's statue in Sackville Gardens

MANCHESTER is to stage a festival to celebrate the 100th anniversary of genius codebreaker Alan Turing’s birth.

It will take place in June 2012, and will centre on a performance of Breaking the Code, the play about how he unlocked secret Nazi transmissions during the Second World War.

Turing helped create the computer while working at Manchester University after the war. In recognition of this achievement, council bosses hope to ask Microsoft founder Bill Gates to open the festival.

The plans were announced at a celebration of Turing’s life in Manchester’s Gay Village this weekend which was arranged after Gordon Brown apologised  for Turing’s prosecution for gross indecency.

'Fascinating'

City centre councillor Pat Karney said: “We have a lot of great heroes in Manchester, a lot of people who have contributed to building Manchester into a great city, but we have few gay heroes – he is one of them in terms of his contribution to our country and city.”

Manchester Blackley MP Graham Stringer said: “His is an extraordinary story of a man who saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives, who helped invent the computer and was persecuted to the point of death by suicide. His is a fascinating and sad story which we must remember.”

Turing hastened the Allied victory through his work at Bletchley Park and later moved to Manchester to work on the pioneering Mark 1 computer.

He was prosecuted for gross indecency in 1952 after he admitted to a gay relationship. His punishment involved taking experimental hormones which caused distressing physical side-effects and probably caused his depression.