…I’ll look up and read up some more when I get the chance, thanks for posting these stories, Glenn…
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…obviously Alan Turing, I would add to this…such a significant person in history…
Alan Turing was not a well known figure during his lifetime, but today he is famous and celebrated for the crucial part he played in the victory over Nazi Germany in WW2.
Turing was a mathematician who cracked something called the Enigma code, which is thought to have shortened the war by several years.
He was also a victim of mid-20th Century attitudes to homosexuality and in 1952 was arrested because being homosexual was illegal in Britain at this time.
In 2013 he was pardoned for this 'crime', and in 2017 the government agreed to officially pardon men accused of 'crimes' like this, meaning they will no longer have a criminal record.
This pardoning has come to be known as the Alan Turing law.
In 2019 Turing was named the most "iconic" figure of the 20th Century and his face now appears on the £50 note.
…Allan Horsfall is apparently often called the ‘Grandfather of the gay rights movement’, so I’ll add him also…
These days he's often called the grandfather of the gay rights movement, for openly campaigning as a gay man when homosexuality was still illegal.
In 1964 Allan Horsfall and a group of friends set up the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee, even giving out his home address as the base for the organisation. To be so open at that time was very brave.
It became the first campaigning organisation outside of London set up and run by gay men, and its work directly led to homosexuality no longer being illegal.
Later the North West Committee was transformed into the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), which was the largest LGBT organisation there has ever been in the UK, with more than 5,000 members and 120 local groups all over the country when it was at its biggest.
Its role in the removal of the stigma of criminality from homosexuality remained his crowning achievement.
…this is a good related article with those, plus more…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/55276399