Dame Stephanie Shirley’s personal tribute to Tommy Flowers

In 1951, at the age of 18, I went to work at what was then the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill. It sounds rather quaint now, but at that time it was one of the leading research institutions in the world. I started as a humble research assistant, performing the most menial tasks and routine calculations. But among the men I worked for — and they were all men — were some of the most brilliant technical minds of the era. And none more brilliant than Tommy Flowers (1905-1998).
What sort of person was he? Flowers never spoke much about his private life, but he was not only an innovator, a workaholic and a team player — he was also a devoted family man.

Born in Poplar, the son of a bricklayer, he was a true gentleman of the old school. Educated locally with the help of a scholarship and at evening classes, he was a late developer, good at mathematics but not in English. He used to say he could think but not talk.

A role model

I was the only woman working on two of Tommy Flowers’ post-war teams. One team was engineering the first electronic telephone exchange at Highgate Woods. The other was developing ERNIE, the special purpose computer which generated random numbers for the Premium Bonds savings scheme.

Always dressed in a three-piece suit, Tommy Flowers was an unassuming but inspiring manager: ever polite, never sexist. He drew work of the highest quality from his loyal teams, always listening to harvest ideas. Given a £1000 bonus — which didn’t even cover his financial layout — he (typically) shared it with his staff.

Although my direct interactions were generally at the level of ‘good morning, Mr Flowers’ he became a role model for me, and his approach to leadership helped shape my own.

Flowers’ finest hour

As well as an inspiring leader, Flowers was a visionary, a pioneer and a national hero: an extraordinary British engineer and scientist, and a key figure in the history of computing.

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I believe even we juniors had a vague sense that this self-effacing man, three grades above us in the hierarchy, had done something remarkable — and his most remarkable achievement was one that, thanks to wartime secrecy and the Official Secrets Act, we knew nothing about.

In 1941, he was seconded to help the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. There, Flowers built an electro-mechanical device to crack the German Enigma code. That device developed into Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer (at one time, he even used his own money to develop it). Once installed at Bletchley Park, it enabled Britain’s codebreakers to crack the toughest German cyphers, and so provided vital intelligence to the Allied war effort.

After the war, 10 of the 12 Colossi were dismantled and the project kept completely secret for 30 years. At one point during those years, Flowers tried to get a bank loan to develop and build his ideas but was told that they were not feasible, and he couldn’t say he’d done it before.

You could say that Tommy Flowers helped change the course of history not once, but twice. His work on Colossus not only helped shorten the Second World War, but led in time to the development of digital computing, without which our modern world simply cannot function.
His achievement is marked on the Bletchley building in which he did his pioneering work by an English Heritage blue plaque. It serves as a reminder of his determination to push the boundaries of the possible. Let us hope that we too, like him, can harness the power of innovation to address the pressing issues of our era.

Flowers was awarded the Charles Babbage medal in 1998 and was the first winner of BT’s highest award, the Martlesham Medal in 1983. He is also commemorated by the Tommy Flowers Room at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and there is a Flowers Close behind the old Research Station. In 2015 Colossus made an appearance on a Royal Mail stamp. Plus — the ultimate glory — there is a Tommy Flowers pub near his birthplace in Poplar.

You can read tributes to the inimitable Dame Stephanie Shirley on the BCS website, and a special tribute in the upcoming issue of ITNOW.