A mural celebrating Tommy Flowers the little-known Cockney father of the modern computer, is due to be unveiled at Bletchley Park.
Born into East End poverty 120 years ago, Flowers began his working life as a mechanical engineering apprentice. His talents eventually earned him a job at the Post Office Research Unit. From February 1941, he began his collaboration with G.C.H.Q. codebreakers, based at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. He ended up leading the team that built Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. By helping to crack the ciphers generated by the Lorenz machines, used by the German military, it played a significant part in the defeat of Nazism.
Unaware of what had happened at Bletchley Park, the Soviet Union subsequently used Lorenz machines until the middle years of the Cold War, providing British intelligence with valuable insights into Soviet policy. Of course the inevitable secrecy surrounding Colossus led to Tommy Flowers’s crucial role in the world of espionage being long-overlooked.
The soon-to-be-unveiled mural of him, painted by the famous Australian street-artist Jimmy C. (best-known for the David Bowie portrait outside Brixton tube station), originally adorned the side of a community-run pub near his birthplace in Poplar. Opened in 2018,the Tommy Flowers pub is poised for demolition, so the mural has been moved to Bletchley Park – the place most closely associated with Tommy Flowers’s work, which laid the foundations for the present-day tech’ industry.
Short talks by David Abrutat (official historian at G.C.H.Q. – the Government Communications Headquarters), by Dr Andrew Herbert(former Chairman of Microsoft Research), and by Garry Hunter(founder of the Tommy Flowers Foundation, dedicated to preserving Flowers’s legacy) will accompany the unveiling.
