Do we like Alan Turing?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or acts of his own turned up, and his wartime work stands, but the record of his own views is thin.
Alan Turing was born in Maida Vale, London, on 23 June 1912. He joined the codebreakers at Bletchley Park in September 1939 and led the work in Hut 8 on German Naval Enigma. He also designed the Bombe, Britain's first special-purpose codebreaking machine, and later worked on secure voice systems.
In 1952 he was convicted of gross indecency over a relationship with another man, under a Victorian-era law. Afterwards he lost his security clearance and was monitored by the British authorities. A man who had helped win the war was treated as a criminal by the same state he had served.
Now the harm check. We went looking for anything he said or did against women, people of colour, migrants, trans people, public health or the planet, and nothing of his own turned up. That is a thin record, because he died in 1954 and left few public statements on those subjects. So this is a pass on what we found, not a clean bill of health on every view he ever held.
The recent news is a literary find. Cambridge professor Sarah Dillon transcribed 'Pryce's Buoy', a six-page handwritten fragment held at King's College, and published her study on 24 July 2026. She says it shows him as “playful, funny, cheeky, literary”. It also shows he borrowed closely from Angus Wilson's 1952 novel Hemlock and After.
The good stuff is mostly what he gave the world. His wartime codebreaking and his designs sit at the base of modern computing. In 2021 the Bank of England put him on the new £50 note, which went into use on what would have been his 109th birthday. We found no charity work to point to, and that is honestly the whole list.
Both tests come out as passes, and the unfairness in this story runs the other way. He was prosecuted for who he loved and punished for it, then honoured long after it could help him. If you're after a hero for the family page, he's an easy yes.