Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies

<p>The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of computing?</p><p>This is a story you know, right? It’s early in the war and western Europe has fallen. Only the Channel stands between Britain and the fascist yoke; only Atlantic shipping lanes offer hope of the population continuing to be fed, clothed and armed. But hunting “wolf packs” of Nazi U-boats pick off merchant shipping at will, coordinated by radio instructions the Brits can intercept but can’t read, thanks to the fiendish Enigma encryption machine. Unless something is done – and fast – Hitler’s plan to first bomb, then starve the country will succeed. Enter the genius <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/alan-turing">Alan Turing</a>, working as a codebreaker at the top secret Government Code and Cypher School&nbsp;at Bletchley Park, who, in a generational act of intellectual virtuosity, designs and builds the world’s first computer to crack Enigma, allowing the U-boats to be neutralised and the war ultimately to be won. This is why Turing is known as the father of computing.</p><p>It’s a great story. But, like a lot of great stories, it couldn’t be more wrong. The world’s first digital electronic computer, forerunner of the ones reshaping our world today, <em>was</em> built in Britain to revolutionise codebreaking during the second world war – a mind-boggling feat of creative innovation – but Turing wasn’t in the country at the time. Neither was it conceived by the mostly private school and Oxbridge-educated boffins at Bletchley Park. Rather, the machine Park staff called Colossus was the brainchild of a degreeless Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers, a cockney bricklayer’s son who for decades was prevented by the Official Secrets Act from acknowledging his achievement. Now, with h