Tommy Flowers

Thomas Harold "Tommy" Flowers, (22 December 1905- 28 October 1998), British engineer and scientist, played an important part in the Allied victory in World War II through his valuable contribution to the code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park. He led the team that designed and built Colossus - the first electronic programmable computer - to break the complex encoded communiques between the German High Command and the field. The first model was demonstrated at Bletchley Park, the British forces' Intelligence Centre, in December 1943, with a faster version in operation by June 1944, days before D Day. Historians believe that the codebreaking facilitated by Colossus shortened the war by two years.

Early life

Born in Poplar in the East End, the poorest part of London in 1905, the son of a bricklayer, Flowers gained a scholarship to technical college, enabling him to stay in full-time education until aged 16, which was then very unusual for a working-class boy. He served a four- year mechanical apprenticeship at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, gained a London University degree in Engineering through evening classes, and then joined the Post Office as an electrical engineer in 1926, aged 20. Besides his involvement with electronic telephone transmissions, he also did sterling work in the forward line of the DH hockey team in the immediate pre-war years.

Wartime Code-breaking Work

As the war progressed and the volume of enemy encrypted radio messages intercepted increased, it became evident that the manual method then in use for deciphering this material was woefully inadequate. The Post Office Engineering Department at Dollis Hill in London was involved in many different projects designed to further the war effort, and an approach was made by Bletchley Park for assistance in devising equipment to speed up the decryption process.

Flowers had joined the staff at the Research Station at Dollis Hill in the mid-1930s. A team-player with unconventional technical ideas, he had established himself as a man of considerable foresight in the field of telephone exchange switching design, and was asked to find an answer to this problem. He devised a machine, called a "Robinson" (as he described it later, it was "a Heath Robinson affair held together with string and sealing wax").

The use of thermionic valves was felt by many of those concerned to be a weak point in the design of this kind of machine. Flowers made the revolutionary claim that a valve left on all the time, and not switched on and off as required, would have a very long life. The Staff Engineer in charge at DH had faith in Flowers, and backed him. A small design team was formed in great secrecy to work on the first and subsequent machines, the last of which were the 10 Colossus machines, having 2,500 valves apiece, which were so successfully employed at Bletchley Park.

Colossus was designed to deal with the complex intelligence known as Fish, with messages sometimes 10,000 characters in length sent between Hitler's High Command and commanders in the field, and containing vital information on troop dispositions, ration strengths, and even details of leave arrangements for generals. The Morse-transmitted Enigma code, on the other hand, although very complex, was used for messages of a purely tactical nature, which were never more than 250 characters long. This work had no association with Colossus.

Colossus was engaged on the statistical analysis of the enemy teleprinter intercepts. A separate machine to use this data to decipher each message was needed, and Flowers arranged for a former member of the DH staff, then in the Army in North Africa engaged on another DH-backed project, to be posted home to join his team. Busy though he was, Flowers made a daily visit to his small band working in a small laboratory to observe progress.

The new machines, code-named "Tunny", were to be fed with an enciphered message tape, and after being set up according to the Colossus data, were to produce a printed output on a teleprinter in clear German. To facilitate the testing of Tunny, one of the design engineers devised a certain set of code wheel patterns, and on his next visit Flowers was invited to type in the message "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party". He and his team worked a 12- or 14-hour day throughout the war without complaint.

Later career

After the war, Flowers continued his work at Dollis Hill, applying his expertise of electronics to telephone switching and signalling systems.

He was appointed MBE for his contribution to the war effort along with a rather meager £1,000 award, but, since the code-breaking activities at Bletchley Park were kept secret for 30 years, Flowers remained largely unknown to the public. Only later did his work receive recognition - he was presented with an honorary doctorate from Newcastle University in 1977, and another in 1993 from De Montfort University in Leicester. A reconstruction of Colossus is now on view at the Bletchley Park museum.

Flowers was awarded an MBE in 1943. He died in London on 28 October 1998.

Personal Life and Posthumous Reputation

In 1935 Flowers married Eileen Green and they had two sons.

He is one of World War II's unsung heroes. Until recently he remained virtually unknown and has never received the public recognition he deserves.

A recent article has argued that Flowers is "The Forgotten Father of Computing". "Imagine spending years of your life working on a cutting-edge new invention for the government - which incidentally you have to part-pay-for out of your own pocket - only to be told to smash it to pieces and burn all evidence. This is exactly what happened to Tommy Flowers and even now, nearly 70 years later, his first computer, Colossus, is still far more well-known than he is.

A dapper man [YouTube] walks down an institutional corridor, turns right into a room, flicks on the light switch and shuts the door: “This was our Battersea Bridge Laboratory,” he says, making his way into the large grey and white space.

“And [this is] where we assembled the first Colossus…”

This is Tommy Flowers, father of computing, and under-celebrated hero of World War II code-breaking. In recent years the fame of Colossus has grown exponentially - a quick Amazon search reveals numerous books on the subject. Yet far less is generally known about Flowers himself, the man behind the idea, who put both his back and his cash into the project.

Unlike Turing, Flowers was happily married and lived to the ripe old age of 92. And while his life remained unencumbered by scandal it has, even now, lacked deserved recognition. “The great extent of public interest now in Turing is in part due to the drama and controversies about his life, his treatment after the war and his tragic death,” an expert, who would prefer to remain anonymous, told IDG Connect.

This has led to numerous biographies, films and other dramatic portrayals of Turing. “[Yet] there has been nothing comparable for Flowers, for whom words like ‘kindly’, ‘modest’, ‘self-effacing’ are as appropriate as ‘brilliant’ and ‘inventive’.” '''

There is an online campaign to hold an annual "Tommy Flowers Day" in his honor.