Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [122]
In these first meetings, Flowers and Turing found that they had a certain affinity; certainly it appears that Turing found it easier to talk to Flowers than many others, possibly because of the other man’s unaffected enthusiasm, as well as his expertise. Respect was mutual; in addition to Flowers’s visits to Bletchley Park, Turing made trips down to Dollis Hill, to Flowers’s workshop.
In these initial encounters, one idea was that Flowers should look into the idea of building a machine that could decrypt Enigma by means of electromagnetics. Such an idea was not to prove practical at that time – the technology was not ready. But the principle lodged in Flowers’s head.
But however well he got on with Turing, Flowers found himself attracting the disdain of Gordon Welchman. This first became apparent towards the end of 1941 when circuit expert Charles Wynn-Williams was working on a new decoding machine called Mammoth, one of the forerunners of Colossus. It required electronic valve-sensing units, a task delegated to Flowers. Rather than work to the designs provided by Wynn-Williams, however, Flowers produced his own. These were deemed to be unsatisfactory. The result was friction. Welchman began to refer sarcastically to ‘Mr Flowers of Dollis Hill’. He openly showed preference for WynnWilliams’s expertise over that of Flowers.
This unpleasantness – seemingly over the use of relays as opposed to the more innovative and untested electronic valves – went on for some months, with Welchman leaving Flowers and this Dollis Hill colleagues in the cold, as he instead sought the expertise of the British Tabulating Machine Company and Harold ‘Doc’ Keen, who had been so instrumental in building the first British bombes.
This, it seems, was too much for the pride of the Dollis Hill contingent. At a meeting, Flowers, according to Welchman’s account, declared that Keen should not be ‘allowed to get away with it’. What he appeared to be referring to was the fact that since those first bombes, BTM had failed to make any steps forward.
The more assertive Flowers grew, the more disdainful Welchman became. In a memo dated 4 June 1943, he wrote:
Dr Wynn-Williams has found it difficult to get on with the Dollis Hill people, and feels that Mr Flowers’s idea of co-operation is to run things himself … It may be that Mr Flowers honestly thinks that he is better able than Mr Keen, Dr Wynn-Williams and myself to direct the policy of bombe production, but if so, I am quite sure that he is wrong. He is probably very good at his ordinary work, and also very good at designing apparatus for a definite problem that he can understand, but I have found him slow at grasping the complications of our work and his mind seems altogether too inflexible.7
Possibly so. Yet one can also hear a trace, possibly subconscious, of another sort of resistance going on; that of a Cambridge mathematics lecturer to the ideas of a partly self-educated, bumptious East Ender. Out of the senior figures in Bletchley Park, it was Welchman who always seemed most interested in tight control of both research and day-to-day operations; to have this Dollis Hill contingent come in and cast aspersions on Welchman’s own home-grown talent was apparently almost too much for him to bear.
Indeed, Welchman’s ill-will towards Flowers grew and grew – he wrote, ‘the influence of Dr Radley and Mr Flowers must be completely removed’ – to the extent that he approached the Admiralty supplies department and told them that Flowers was recklessly squandering good valves in the name of his research; and that he and the Dollis Hill team should be excluded altogether from such matters.
The Admiralty chose not to heed him. In due time, Welchman was promoted and set sail for the United States. This might have made things a little easier for the Dollis Hill team. But the remarkable thing, according to historian Paul