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Newman’s incredible factory of giant computers did not outlast the war, however. With
Germany’s capitulation, in May 1945, Tunny went off the air. The Newmanry and Testery were
out of work. Germany’s teleprinter cipher machines would define a new era in encryption
technology—the Tunny machine, and its fundamental encryption principle of Z = P + K, would
continue to be used around the globe for many years to come. But at war’s end, the British gov-
ernment saw no need to retain all the Colossi. In a hush-hush operation, two were transferred
to Eastcote, the codebreakers’ new headquarters in suburban London. A gigantic grabber lifted
the two computers aloft and they disappeared from the Newmanry through a hole in the roof.^12
The rest were dismantled. A lorry loaded with some of the parts drove in secrecy to Manchester
(see Chapter 20). ‘Suddenly the Colossi were gone’, Dorothy Du Boisson recounted, ‘broken up
on the orders of Churchill, we were told at the time’.^13 (Du Boisson is the Colossus operator with
her back to the camera in Fig. 15.2.) ‘All that was left were the deep holes in the floor where the
machines had stood’, she remembered.
So most of Britain’s secret stock of electronic computers, the most sophisticated machines in
Europe, were knocked to pieces. That this brutal reversal of scientific progress was unknown
to the outside world hardly lessens the magnitude of the blow. The Colossi might have become
part of public science. Turing, Newman, and Flowers would quickly have adapted them for new
applications, and they could have become the heart of a scientific research facility. With eight
massive electronic computers in the public arena from mid-1945, the story of modern comput-
ing would have begun very differently. Who can say what changes this different start would
have brought? With clones of the Bletchley computing centre popping into existence elsewhere,
the Internet—and even the personal computer—might have been developed a decade or more
earlier. Even before the new millennium began, social networking might have changed the
political map of the world.
keeping the secret
The secret of Tunny and Colossus was a very long time coming out—much longer than with
Enigma. Ex-staff of the Newmanry and the Testery scrupulously followed their orders to reveal
nothing of what they knew. Catherine Caughey, one of Colossus’s operators, even feared going
to the dentist, in case she talked while under the anaesthetic.^14
Caughey’s greatest regret was that she could never tell her husband about her extraordinary
wartime job, operating the first large-scale electronic computer. Jerry Roberts, too, regretted
that his parents died knowing nothing of his war work in the Testery—work of such importance
that, in different circumstances, he might reasonably have expected an honour from the British
Crown. Helen Currie, who produced the complete German plaintext after Roberts or one of his
colleagues had broken 15–30 consecutive letters of a de-chi, spoke of the immense burden of
being unable to share her memories with her family. During the ‘years of silence’, she said, her
wartime experiences ‘took on a dream-like quality, almost as if I had imagined them’.^15
Turing’s mother, Sara, wrote ruefully of the ‘enforced silence concerning his work’.^16 ‘No
hint was ever given of the nature of his secret work’, she said, complaining that the necessary
secrecy ‘ruined’ their communication. Max Newman’s son William, himself a leading light in
the computer graphics industry, said that his father spoke to him only obliquely about his war
work and died ‘having told little’.^17