Tommy Flowers and the Bletchley Park Cipher-Breakers

Event information

Former “Sunday Times” journalist turned bestselling author Andrew Smith explores the achievements of the little-known Cockney genius, Tommy Flowers (1905-1998), who led the team that created Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer. This revolutionary machine that enabled the wartime boffins at Bletchley Park to crack the previously impenetrable Lorenz ciphers used by the German commanders. Yet Tommy Flowers’s extraordinary achievements remained top secret event after the war.

In telling the story of the world-transforming technological revolution that Tommy Flowers unleashed, Andrew Smith will draw on his recent longform “Guardian” feature about Flowers, and his most recent book, “Devil in the Stack”, which explores the history of computing and the ways in which coding is transforming the way we think and behave.


Andrew Smith wrote for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, and The Face before publishing the bestselling book, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell To Earth which, appropriately enough, received a dustjacket quote from David Bowie. His most recent book is Devil in the Stack: A Coding Odyssey, which The T.L.S. described as “dense, prickly, and rewarding.”

Matthew Worley is Professor of Modern History at the University of Reading. His books include “No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–84”) and “Zerox Machine: Punk, Post-Punk and Fanzines, 1976–88”.


This event is being staged with the support of the National Lottery, Fitzrovia Noir, and the Tommy Flowers Foundation.