In the decades after the war, Bletchley Park fell into disrepair. Eventually, the facility was preserved and certain areas of it restored. However, much restoration work remains because parts of the codebreaking center are dilapidated.  A £7.4 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, along with private and corporate support is funding the restoration project.  The BBC reports that renovation work will begin very soon.

The project is due to be completed by June of 2014, in time for the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings. “If Bletchley could do it on time then I’ve got to do it on time,” says project manager Steve Prowse.  “Some of the Bletchley atmosphere rubs off.  If they were able to do this sort of work in these sort of conditions, then there’s no excuse why we can’t make it work.”  Read more.

CODEBREAKER is one of five nominees for Outstanding Documentary.  The winners will be announced this spring at the 24th annual GLAAD Media Awards at ceremonies in San Francisco, New York City, and Los Angeles.  Read more.

CODEBREAKER’S director, Clare Beavan, (right) accepts the Audience Award.

CODEBREAKER has received the Audience Award at the  2012 European Science TV & New Media Awards.  The Film’s director, Clare Beavan, accepted the award at a late November ceremony in Lisbon, Portugal.

The European Science TV and New Media Festival took place last July in Dublin, Ireland.  The event featured two dozen science related films from across Europe.  Audiences selected CODEBREAKER as the top film.  “We greatly appreciate this recognition,” says Patrick Sammon, one of the film’s Executive Producers. “It has been exciting to see the positive reaction this film is getting around the world.”

CODEBREAKER also received the Audience Award at this fall’s Side by Side LGBT International Film Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Ed Stoppard (left) stars as Alan Turing, while Henry Goodman plays his psychiatrist.

TODpix, in conjunction with Story Center Productions and Furnace, announces the U.S. Theatrical Premiere of CODEBREAKER in Washington, DC on October 17th and New York City on October 25th.  “We’re excited to offer this compelling and unique new film to American audiences,” says TODpix President Andrew Fogelson. “It’s an incredible story that will capture the hearts and minds of everyone who sees it.”  Tickets are now available for these premiere events!

“Alan Turing is one of the most  important people of the last century and it’s a shame that most  people have never heard  of him and still fewer understand his lasting legacy,” says Patrick Sammon, the film’s creator and one of its Executive Producers.  “Hopefully this film will help Turing receive more recognition for his incredible contribution to our world.”

The DC premiere will be held at the AMC Loews Georgetown 14 at 730pm on Wednesday October 17th.  The premiere will continue on Thursday October 25th in New York City at the AMC Empire Theatre 25.  Sammon will attend each premiere event to offer an introduction and provide a live Q&A with the audience after the film.  The Washington and New York premieres will be followed by screenings at theaters in other U.S. cities.  More details  soon!  You can sign up for updates on the U.S. theatrical release schedule.

The film is a finalist to receive two awards from The European Science TV & New Media Festival.  The mid-July festival in Dublin, Ireland showcased science films from across Europe.  CODEBREAKER is one of three finalists being considered for a Jury Award and one of four finalists in contention to receive an Audience Award in the docudrama category.  The winners will be announced in November.

Ed Stoppard (left) stars as Alan Turing, while Henry Goodman plays his psychiatrist.

Last week, the film was selected for the shortlist of the Grierson Awards.  The Griersons have been described as “the Oscars of the documentary world.”  Our film is one of eight that have been put on the shortlist for Best Historical Documentary. Dawn Airey, Chairman of the Grierson Trust said, “The shortlist contains some of the most talked about television of 2010/11 and some little known gems. I wish them all the very best as they prepare to battle it out to the final nominations and on to victory.”  Final nominations for the Grierson Awards will be announced in September with winners unveiled at a London gala celebration in early November.

CODEBREAKER was recently selected to compete in the prestigious Pariscience International Science Film Festival. 15 films will be competing to receive one of four cash prizes.  The festival runs from October 4-9 in Paris.

• Professor David Leavitt, featured in CODEBREAKER and the author of a Turing biography, was interviewed during a recent episode of Science Friday on National Public Radio in the US.
• The Turing Solution broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last month to mark Turing’s Centenary.  It’s hosted by Mathematician Matt Parker, who was one of the contributors in CODEBREAKER.   This radio program focuses on Turing’s work as the father of computer science.
• Ian Watson, an Artificial Intelligence researcher, recently was interviewed on New Zealand national radio to discuss his new book, “The Universal Machine: From the Dawn of Computing to Digital Consciousness.” Watson’s interview focuses on Turing’s contributions to our world.
• The Science Show on ABC radio in Australia marked Turing’s Centenary by featuring several Turing experts to discuss his life.
• The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) held a large Turing Centenary conference in San Francisco last month.  Here’s a webcast of the conference’s opening session – a panel discussion titled, “Turing the Man.”
• This spring,  The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park hosted a Centenary event focused on Turing’s post World War II work at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).  “Turing and his Times” featured a talk by computer historian Professor Simon Lavington.  It also included the premiere of an NPL video featuring interviews with two people who worked with Turing at NPL.
• In May, Princeton University released a short video about Turing and the time he spent at Princeton.  He received a PhD in Mathematics from the school in 1938.  Princeton University Press recently issued a new edition of Turing’s doctoral thesis.

The evidence is clear that Alan Turing committed suicide on June 7, 1954.  A recent analysis by Professor Jack Copeland aims to call this conclusion into question.   Based on previously public information and new research that our team conducted during the production of CODEBREAKER, we believe the evidence strongly supports the conclusion that Turing took his own life.

The theory that Alan Turing’s death was an accident has been around for decades.  Turing’s mother Sara believed it until the day she died in 1976.  While we can sympathize with her loss, it’s clear she was wrong back then.  And, with all due respect to his distinguished academic achievements, we believe Professor Copeland is wrong now.

Our production team spent 18 months researching Turing’s life, death, and legacy.  As part of that process, we reexamined the circumstances of Turing’s death.  We concluded that the evidence was so strong in favor of Turing’s suicide that we didn’t include his mother’s speculation in our film.  In no particular order, here is why we reached this conclusion:

1. Alan Turing’s brother John has written an account of his brother Alan in which he describes reading the dream books that Alan Turing had written at the suggestion of Dr. Franz Greenbaum, a Jungian analyst whom Alan visited during the last 18 months of his life.  After Alan’s death, John Turing was urged to read these dream books by Dr. Greenbaum because at the time John was inclined to believe the death was an accident.  Greenbaum felt that there was enough evidence in the dream books to suggest that Alan was deeply unhappy and that suicide was a likely scenario. After reading the dream books John Turing changed his mind: Alan, in his mind, had committed suicide.  The dream books have since been destroyed, but John Turing’s son Dermot is convinced that his father was right and that his uncle Alan committed suicide.  In turn, Dr. Greenbaum’s surviving daughters remember their father being devastated at Alan’s death, devastated because as his therapist he had an insight into Alan’s death as suicide rather than accident.

2.  Professor Copeland says the coroner should not have ruled the death a suicide in part because there was no evidence of pre-meditation.  The historical record tells a different story.  First, Turing prepared a last will and testament on February 11, 1954, less than four months before his death.  Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, in his book “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” notes that Turing mentioned suicide as far back as 1937.  Additionally, Turing’s close friend and the executor of his will, Nick Furbank wrote to Turing’s friend Robin Gandy soon after the death.  Furbank mentioned that Turing had previously spoken of suicide to him and Turing had put some of his papers in order before his death.  Furbank wrote, “The way he talked about suicide before, and his general way of doing things (plus the fact that he had arranged his letters in labeled packets) still makes me think he could not have done it just on impulse.”

Believers of the accident theory point to unsent mail and an appointment for the day after his death as evidence of an accident.  Experts on suicide have told us that often the actual decision is made on an impulse.  With Turing, it seems he had thought about it for some time, but may have made the actual decision to carry it out in the spur of the moment.  Experts told us how the families of suicide victims often protest that the death would have made sense a few months or years before the fatal act.  Or that their loved one was not acting depressed.  In fact, they say there may have been a recent improvement in their condition.  The fact that some people who saw Turing in the days before his death were confused by his apparent suicide is not unusual when compared with other cases of suicide.  We will never know the exact reasons why he did it because suicide is often an inexplicable act.

3.  Professor Copeland theorizes that Turing accidentally ingested cyanide during an experiment.  It was known that Turing used cyanide in certain scientific studies such as an electrolysis experiment.  According to Hodges’ book, Turing’s mother had warned him at Christmas 1953 to be careful and wash his hands.  Alan told his mother, “I’m not going to injure myself mother.”  Two points:  a man of Turing’s high intelligence surely would be aware of the danger of cyanide in particular, even if he was untidy.  After all, he had been working with cyanide for some time, so he was experienced working with potentially deadly chemicals.  In addition, knowing his Mother’s warning, it created an ideal way to commit suicide while leaving his mother with the impression that it was an accident.

4.  Aside from finding a bottle of cyanide crystals in Turing’s home, authorities also discovered a glass jar filled with a cyanide solution.  This may be the solution from which Turing took his fatal dose.  The autopsy report shows that Turing’s stomach “contained four ounces of fluid which smelled very strongly of bitter almonds, as does a solution of cyanide.”  This detail is significant because it points strongly to a scenario where Turing consumed the cyanide orally.  In addition, a piece of apple was found by his bedside and John Turing believed that it was eaten to mask the flavor of the cyanide.  The fact that Turing often ate an apple at bedtime does not make this any less likely.

5. Turing’s body was found lying prone in bed, not in a position of struggle or of attempted escape as you might expect if he had died accidentally.  His body was found in a position that suggests he had made a choice to end his life.

6. It is important to remember an event that happened to Turing several weeks before his death.  Our film highlights the visit Turing made with Dr. Greenbaum’s family to Blackpool, an English seaside resort, because it demonstrates Turing’s frail state of mind in the weeks before his death.  Greenbaum’s daughter, Barbara Maher (nee Greenbaum), told us how she remembers that Turing had turned up wearing a school blazer and trousers that were far too short for him.  Of their trip to the seaside, she told us, “There was a fortune teller’s tent on the promenade and Alan decided that he would like to go in and see the fortune teller.  And he went in there and he was gone for a little while and he came out and we looked at him, and he was ashen faced, absolutely horrified expression on his face.  He wouldn’t divulge what had happened, what the woman had said to him.  He was desperately, desperately unhappy.  And he didn’t say anything more after that.”

7. Professor Copeland dismisses the effect of Turing’s hormone therapy on his state of mind at the time of his death.  CODEBREAKER includes a detailed examination of what the oestrogen is likely to have done to his body and mind.  Dr. Allan Pacey, an expert in male fertility from The University of Sheffield, confirmed that the drug Turing was likely to have been ‘prescribed’ was a strong synthetic oestrogen called Stilboestrol, which was in use at the time.  Dr. Pacey told us that Stilboestrol would have caused Turing to lose his libido, to have become impotent, to have put on weight, to have lost his body hair, to become extremely lethargic and to grow breasts. It also would’ve affected his mental acuity.  Pacey told us, “We know from the medical evidence that if you castrate a man then you change his ability to think and his ability to concentrate.  And if you take testosterone away, then the brain will become muddled.”  One of Turing’s letters to his friend Robin Gandy talks about his “shocking tendency at present to fritter my time away in anything but what I ought to be doing.”

In the year he was on Stilboestrol, Turing was hopeful that his symptoms would be reversible.  Dr. Pacey says the effects of Turing’s treatment are likely to have lingered after he stopped taking Stilboestrol.  “The theory is if you stop exposure of the male body to oestrogen, then slowly over time his testosterone levels will begin to rise,” said Pacey.  “That’s fine in theory.  It can take many, many months, six, seven, eight nine months, to recover sexual function, if at all.  Some men report that they never recover their sexual function after they’ve taken oestrogen therapy for that long.”  It is clear the chemical castration would have had an impact on Turing’s mental health that cannot easily be dismissed.

Professor Copeland says that Turing had come through his hormone therapy in good spirits.  Professor David Leavitt, another of Turing’s biographers, takes a different view.  He sees a change in tone in Turing’s writings after the arrest. “I think it was a demoralizing experience and embittering experience for him.  And he was never the same afterwards.”

Taken together, all these items create a strong case to support the coroner’s original finding:  Alan Turing committed suicide on June 7, 1954.

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Patrick Sammon and Paul Sen are the Executive Producers of CODEBREAKER.

The MK News featured an article about the debate: “MPs campaigning to clear the name of computer pioneer and Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing have secured assurances the matter will continue to receive ‘the closest possible attention’ from ministers and officials.

“At a Parliamentary debate about the war hero yesterday (Thursday) which included Milton Keynes South MP Iain Stewart, Crispin Blunt, a junior minister for prisons and probation, and whose own mother served at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, said the issue is being closely assessed.

“He said: ‘The matter has received the closest possible attention from ministers and officials. It continues to do so and will continue to do so in the light of the debate today and the contributions of honorable members.’” Read more.

Watch the entire debate here.