Cumberbatch: Codebreaker Turing Must Be Credited

Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has said Alan Turing, the mathematician responsible for breaking the Nazi's code during World War Two, should be honoured further for what he did.

Turing's role was described by Winston Churchill as the single biggest contribution to winning the war, and yet for years most people were unaware of his work.

Cumberbatch, the actor who plays Turing in The Imitation Game, has told Sky's Entertainment Week the code breakers who worked at Bletchley Park during the war did incredible things and if the film gives them credit for what they achieved, it's doing its job.

"These are quiet heroes. They are stoic but quiet untold stories to a large extent and even now people don't speak about them, even though it's after the gestation of the Official Secrets Act.

"So I think to celebrate that on a broader spectrum and to have a larger audience made more aware - shamefully this man should have been on the back of our notes, he really should have."

Turing and the codebreakers were based at Bletchley Park during the war - once Britain's best kept secret where at the height of the conflict around 10,000 people worked deciphering encrypted messages and trying to break the enigma code.

A historian at Bletchley, Joel Greenberg, says Turing's contribution was far-reaching.

"The work here was hugely significant in the outcome of World War Two.

"It helped bring the war to a swift conclusion and saved countless lives.

"Much of the work here also laid the foundations for many technological developments and the birth of the computer and the digital age".

However, Turing's story is as much about tragedy as heroics.

In 1952 he was persecuted for being gay, convicted of indecency and forced to undergo chemical castration.

Two years later he was found dead, poisoned by cyanide.

It was believed he took his own life. For his family it remains a painful injustice.

"It's still pretty difficult to cope with," Alan's nephew Dermot Turing said.

"Having someone who commits suicide is obviously very, very hard to accept and I think even 60 years on it's still a wound that's pretty hard to heal."

Last year, Turing was given a posthumous pardon by the Queen.

His work and the contribution of the other codebreakers can be seen at Bletchley Park where there is also an exhibition of The Imitation Game.