#PrideLondon & Alan Turing: The Gay Man Who Won World War Two

When the Authorities found out about his sexuality, they forced Turing to have horrific hormone treatment. He was labelled a security risk and he lost his job. In the end, Turing committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

A desperately sad end for a genius.”

While remembering Alan and his massive contribution to both historical and present day situations may we also remember Mr Tommy Flowers, the “silly man from the post office” who pioneered the use of valves and Strowger switches taken from GPO stock to build the world’s first electronic programmable computer.

You can see a rebuilt (not a replica) Collossus at Bletchley park near Milton Keynes. If you have never seen it, go and do so.

Without Tommy, Alan’s vision would have remained just that – Just as a point of interest, such was the narrow minded thinking of the War department at the time they pooh poohed the whole idea, but Tommy went ahead anyway, spending £1000 of his own money on the project. After the codes had been cracked and the war won, a grateful nation gave Tommy a cash reward for his pioneering work. The award was £1000.

Collossus machines were used right up to the 1960s in breaking Russian codes, they were really that astonishingly good.

Until the 1990s, the work that went on at Bletchley was still classified under the official secrets act and before that not one man or woman who worked there spoke a word of what went on.

Churchill himself described the men and women of Bletchley as “My golden geese who never cackle.”

“Alan wouldn’t have been able to crack the codes if it wasn’t for the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Bull Dog finding the enigma machine when they captured a German submarine , that part of the story is always eliminated when Turin is mentioned in the media .”