Rare Alan Turing postcard fetches nearly £30k at auction
A postcard written by World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing has sold for £28,000 at auction.
41 at the time, Turing sent the postcard from Corfu in 1953, a year before he killed himself by taking cyanide.
The item was sold by RR Auctions, a US auction house that specialises in selling rare documents and artefacts.
The postcard was sent to Dr Franz Greenbaum, a psychiatrist based in Manchester, and is believed to have contained a hidden message.
It read: “I hope you are all enjoying yourselves as well as I am here at Corfu. It is tremendously hot and one wears bathing things all day.”
Instead of your typical island scenery, the postcard contained an image of a mathematical problem known as the suicide circle.
The postcard was sold to a private bidder in the United States.
Turing, who received a royal pardon in 2013, was considered an outcast for being convicted of gross indecency at a time when being gay was a crime.
He was chemically castrated, as an alternative to going to prison, following his conviction.
Earlier this year, the British Government pardoned up to 50,000 gay and bisexual men who were convicted of historic gay sex offences.
It was known as Turing’s Law after the Bletchley Park pioneer.
