[SIGCIS-Members] Tommy Flowers

Tue Oct 21 01:19:56 PDT 2025

The "forgotten hero" trope is interesting. It's a good media hook, and 
it doesn't obey common logic. Very often, publicising a "forgotten hero" 
doesn't force a revision of the perceived forgotten-ness, but actually 
intensifies it.

This effect can't go on indefinitely, but its limits are only 
occasionally reached: Alan Turing is an example. Since /The Imitation 
Game/ came out in 2014, the narrative "once forgotten, now recognised" 
has become dominant. Yet I remember there were still "forgotten" 
narratives appearing as late as the centenary commemorations in 2012, at 
which point Turing was already one of the most famous scientific figures 
in history.

Tommy Flowers, who was honoured in his lifetime and has received about 
as many formal tributes and commemorations as any other important 
innovator in his home country, looks set to remain one of the famous 
forgotten. It's not a case of being known to specialists but not the 
general public: he makes a good public hero, fitting the narrative of 
skilled working man made good that was laid down in Dava Sobel's 
/Longitude/, and it's usually for general audiences that his 
significance is being newly discovered at any given date.

Notably, he was – alongside Bill Tutte, likewise a permanent revelation 
– the subject of a 2011 BBC documentary on "Bletchley Park's Lost Heroes 
<https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/7fd3fb55e462db0867b183729c5ed27c>". The 
comment here (#17) 
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Ftv%2F2011%2F10%2Fww2-documentaries-agent-zigzag-dambusters.shtml> 
from a 2011 viewer describing it as "a better-late-than-never tribute" 
sums up the general air of a historical wrong finally righted.

The odd thing is that the new piece by Andrew Smith 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/move-over-alan-turing-meet-the-working-class-hero-of-bletchley-park-you-didnt-see-in-the-movies> 
that re-rights this wrong is, for most of its length, relatively 
attentive to the scale and complexity of the project and the 
inappropriateness of "lone hero" judgments. With two or three 
exceptions, the problematic framing is confined to the first two 
paragraphs – though these, of course, are what prime the reader's 
response. It sometimes feels like the "forgotten hero" hook is a tax 
writers pay in order to be allowed to deliver the detail.

I was interested to see a letter from Jonathan Michie 
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/17/the-teamwork-behind-bletchley-parks-colossus-computer>, 
son of Donald, responding to Smith's piece. He points out – as is also 
clear from the piece shared by Morten – that Flowers himself framed 
innovation as a group and incremental effort, and ties this 
understanding to a defence of broad humanistic education against the 
"relevant skills only" approach, which certainly relies on the 
assumption that heroic innovators Just Are.

Best
James

On 20/10/2025 21:08, Morten Bay via Members wrote:
> Just adding this to Thomas's list, in case someone less steeped in 
> this particular history joins later and wants even more sources.
> Here are Flowers' own words on the subject from 1983 (IEEE is down 
> right now, likely due to the AWS outage):
> https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5488650/4640706/04640709.pdf 
> [ieeexplore.ieee.org] 
> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5488650/4640706/04640709.pdf__;!!PDiH4ENfjr2_Jw!F21idSc2gdmfspE5FUyXNBtNdMu6hQ9KxNbtJxC-ECLoGEJlX3Egazh8hrGW9kIuet3tm7k59XA0JX6ItvIxfGK2FNF-QQ$>
> /Morten
>
> Morten Bay, Ph.D.
> Lecturer
> Research fellow, Center for the Digital Future
> Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
> University of Southern California
> On Oct 20, 2025 at 12:56 PM -0700, thomas.haigh--- via Members 
> <members at lists.sigcis.org>, wrote:
>> The Guardian piece is nicely written, but I sighed a little to see 
>> another retelling of the story that adds nothing new. There’s also 
>> something ironic in attempting to challenge the long genius myth of 
>> Turing by squeezing Flowers himself into
>>
>> The Guardian piece is nicely written, but I sighed a little to see 
>> another retelling of the story that adds nothing new. There’s also 
>> something ironic in attempting to challenge the long genius myth of 
>> Turing by squeezing Flowers himself into the lone genius narrative 
>> template as “the real father of computing.”
>>
>> So as a PSA for the work I did a few years ago with Mark Priestley on 
>> this topic, those looking to learn more might consult:
>>
>>   * /Contextualizing Colossus/. That’s the organizational side of the
>>     story in /Technology & Culture/, based in the archival materials,
>>     focused on the relationship between Bletchley Park and Dollis
>>     Hill. The clearest effort to pull back from individuals to look
>>     at this as an institutional relationship.
>>     https://muse.jhu.edu/article/763592
>>     <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://muse.jhu.edu/article/763592__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqSh8elCch$>
>>   * /Colossus and Programmability/. From /IEEE Annals/, this one digs
>>     in to the questions of whether Colossus was programmable and
>>     whether it was a computer. There’s a British stamp that says it
>>     was both, but we conclude it was neither. But we couldn’t find an
>>     existing definition of “programmable” so we had to grapple with
>>     what that even meant at the time.
>>     https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2018/04/08509146/17D45WgziNe
>>     <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an/2018/04/08509146/17D45WgziNe__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqSgt11rdJ$>
>>   * Tommy Flowers biography from /IEEE Annals/.
>>     https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8356180
>>     <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8356180__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqSlAYKXzT$>
>>   * /Colossus Genius: Tutte, Flowers, and a Bad Imitation of Turing/.
>>     One of the my CACM contributions, written in a more general way
>>     and also taking aim at the Imitation Game movie.
>>     https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3018994
>>     <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3018994__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqStUPVAWp$>
>>   * Colossus the Missing Manual. That’s the technical report with the
>>     in-depth description of the Colossus architecture, its sequence
>>     of operations and what all the controls did. There are also
>>     several documented Colossus configurations.
>>     https://mediarep.org/entities/book/f1548ef2-2420-4c93-9b09-4fadcc847bd3
>>     <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://mediarep.org/entities/book/f1548ef2-2420-4c93-9b09-4fadcc847bd3__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqSvHmb_I4$>
>>
>> Perhaps unsurprisingly the world mostly shrugged at these and went on 
>> with the ritual retelling of the story of snubbed genius. It was 
>> nice, though, making my first visit to Bletchley Park earlier this 
>> year to have the chance to introduce myself to the volunteer Colossus 
>> operators who turned out to have been making extensive use of the 
>> Missing Manual. Rather a specialized audience, but a committed one!
>>
>> Best wishes,
>>
>> Tom
>>
>> Thomas Haigh
>>
>> Professor & Chair, UWM History Department
>>
>> Chair, IEEE Computer Society History Committee
>>
>> Director, ACM History Committee Turing Awards Project
>>
>> See more at www.tomandmaria.com/Tom 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.tomandmaria.com/Tom__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqSgRgMYXa$>
>>
>> *From:* Members <members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org> *On Behalf Of* Dag 
>> Spicer via Members
>> *Sent:* Monday, October 20, 2025 12:49 PM
>> *To:* members at lists.sigcis.org
>> *Subject:* [SIGCIS-Members] Tommy Flowers
>>
>> A great story… Flowers’ career was full of brilliant inventions.
>>
>> <image001.jpg>
>>
>> Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park 
>> you didn’t see in the movies 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/move-over-alan-turing-meet-the-working-class-hero-of-bletchley-park-you-didnt-see-in-the-movies__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqSt_1EG6a$>
>>
>> theguardian.com 
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/12/move-over-alan-turing-meet-the-working-class-hero-of-bletchley-park-you-didnt-see-in-the-movies__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!uNOcMVJs9rathWpIiGQHwn6FsR-I3hUTvgyR8xG6xHVUQAV4CjsiCg7GhO8Z_cJ2GVEGlRTQSsHqSt_1EG6a$>
>>
>> Dag
>>
>> -----
>> Dag Spicer
>> Senior Curator
>> Computer History Museum
>> Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
>> ACM History Committee
>> 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
>> Mountain View CA  94043
>>
>> “History is a vast early warning system.”
>>
>> — Norman Cousins, American journalist (1915-1990).
>>
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>>
>>
>
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