Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [121]
On 25 November 1943, the first Colossus machine was given a test run. By the beginning of 1944, this machine and its ilk were proving invaluable to Bletchley.
Among those who worked with the machines was Harry Fensom, who recalled:
The Colossi were of course very large, hence their name, and gave off a lot of heat, ducts above them taking some of this away. However, we appreciated this on the cold winter nights, especially about two or three in the morning. When I came in out of the rain, I used to hang my raincoat on the chair in front of the hundreds of valves forming the rotor wheels and it soon dried off.
Of course it was essential that the machines were never switched off, both to avoid damaging the valves and to ensure no loss of code-breaking time. So there was an emergency mains supply in the adjoining bay which took over automatically on mains failure.5
The machines had an element of the mad scientist’s laboratory equipment to them – not merely because of the extraordinarily long message tape that had to be carefully threaded, but also the ever present hazard of electrical danger. In an echo of a previous incident with one of the ‘bombe’ machines, Fensom continued:
One day I heard a shout from Gillie Sutton, one of the Wren operators … I rushed over; she had rested her vanity mirror on a convenient part of the control desk, there was a flash, and it melted away. She had placed it across two terminals, very big brass-looking knobs. Unfortunately this time she had used a metal mirror and the terminals were live.6
It was not fully appreciated at the time how much Tommy Flowers had invested in all this work. And Captain Jerry Roberts still feels that Flowers has never received an ounce of the recognition that he should have done. Although Flowers was discreetly awarded the MBE after the war (and also given an Award to Inventors in the sum of £1,000), Captain Roberts feels that a man of his talents and achievement deserved, and should have received, far more attention.
But there was another dimension to Flowers’s work, and that was the scepticism and occasional hostility with which he was treated by Gordon Welchman.
Thomas Flowers was born in East Ham, the beating heart of London’s East End, in 1905. He was the son of a bricklayer. His story is a powerful and surprising illustration of the power of education, in a period long before the term ‘social mobility’ became common currency.
As a boy, Flowers showed a precocious talent for mechanics and science. Thanks to this, he won a scholarship to a technical college. In the 1920s, this in turn led him to enter an open competition for a job as a trainee telephone engineer, a competition in which he came first. Early telephones came under the aegis of the government-run Post Office, and as it turned out, thanks to technological progress, it was an exciting time to be joining. The telephone network was becoming more automatic – with direct dialling, as opposed to going through an operator – and the Post Office’s engineers would be expected to keep up with the latest innovations.
To do so, Flowers had to take evening courses, for the generosity of his new employers did not extend much beyond giving him a job. So he worked by day and studied theory by night. This industrious – and enthusiastic – approach meant that by 1930, he was seconded to the Post Office Research Establishment at the top of Dollis Hill.
The nature of his work was now advanced research, into such matters as how international telephone calls might be made by direct dialling. This led to work with electric circuits, and probing the various uses of electronics, a science very much in its infancy. Several years later, the matter of electronics would also come to fascinate Alan Turing at Trinity College, Cambridge.
The two men met for the first time at Bletchley Park in 1939. Flowers had been asked