Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [123]
The money, material and staff for the research into Colossus were therefore provided by the Post Office, though – thanks to wartime bureaucracy, and despite Churchill’s continued bias in favour of the codebreaking work in financial terms – Flowers often made up the financial shortfall for various pieces of equipment himself. The Heath Robinson may have had something of a makeshift genius character about it, but the string and the elastic came from Tommy Flowers’s pocket. Flowers himself said: ‘It was a feat made possible by the absolute priority they were given to command materials and services and the prodigious efforts of the laboratory staff, many of whom did nothing but work, eat and sleep for weeks and months on end except for one half day a week … the US also contributed valves and an electric typewriter under the lend-lease’.8
And so this monster, this Colossus, was delivered to Bletchley in January 1944; and with it, many argue, came the dawn of the computer age. For this was more than just a huge, elaborate counting machine; it worked to a program, via electronic valve pulses and delicate, complex circuits, at a rate hitherto unimagined, opening up the Lorenz messages at a terrific rate.
Tommy Flowers was vindicated; the work he did proved utterly invaluable. His nimble engineer’s mind had overcome extraordinary problems. And of course, he would not be allowed to tell a single living soul.
Adjusting to peace after years of war was extremely difficult for a great many people. It seemed almost cruelly so to Tommy Flowers. It wasn’t just that his boss Gordon Radley was knighted, whereas he simply received that discreet MBE and Award to Inventors. In those days, of course, £1,000 was a very substantial sum, almost enough to cover half the price of a house. But in a way, it was beside the point; for what would the money mean if Dr Flowers was not permitted to share his extraordinary and innovative electronic knowledge with peers and colleagues?
Worse than this, according to Paul Gannon, was that while a few of Bletchley Park’s decoders could, after the war, decamp to the States and join up with computing projects there, Flowers was stuck in a department where no such transfers would be possible. The Post Office Research Office was extremely respectable and offered the now unimaginable security of a job for life. But it was also excruciatingly limited for a man of Flowers’s talent. And his frustrations grew as the British government’s post-war insistence of keeping every single one of Bletchley’s operations secret further blocked off any advances that he might have made; advances in a budding computer industry to which he had claim to have a greater stake than most.
Not all accept the charge that secrecy held British technological advances back. Harry Fensom concluded a talk given to an Enigma symposium with this thought:
I know some of the Colossi were broken up: we smashed thousands of valves and I believe some panels went with Max Newman to Manchester University. But the know-how remained with a few and the flexibility and modular innovations of Colossus led to the initiation of the British computer industry, such as the work at Manchester and NPL. And also of course to the beginning of electronic telephone exchanges. I therefore give my tribute to Dr Tom Flowers, without whom it would never have happened.
However, Captain Jerry Roberts articulates what he believes that Britain lost, thanks to that insistence on absolute post-war security. He is still furious on behalf of Tommy Flowers today: ‘Dan Brown [author of The Da Vinci Code] wrote a book called Digital