174 | 16 THE TESTERy
Wellington or Marlborough achieved. Without those three great minds, and the many support-
ing personnel at Bletchley Park, Europe would be a very different place today. Britain was lucky
to have these brilliant men in the right place at the right time to break Tunny.
So were they rewarded? Marlborough was given Blenheim Palace for his military achieve-
ments, and Wellington was given No. 1 Piccadilly. Turing was given a bonus of £200 and an
OBE. This was more in those days, but doesn’t compare with the massive bonuses and gongs
given to top civil servants when they retire. They have kept their desks clean for twenty years—
not quite the same as saving the country! Tommy Flowers did rather better: he got an innova-
tion award of £1000 for introducing the technology that has totally changed the way we work
and play worldwide. He was already an MBE for his other work. Yet Turing and Flowers were
lucky in comparison with Bill Tutte: he got nothing, absolutely nothing! No wonder he went
off to Canada. The whole thing is a national scandal. Any other country would be proud of
these people and would shout their achievements from the rooftops. I don’t understand why
cryptographers who did such astonishing things get no official credit, nothing. Why aren’t there
statues of the three heroes in Whitehall, and a memorial on the Thames Embankment for all
those cryptographers who contributed so much to the Allied victory over Hitler?
I am lucky to be the last survivor of the nine leading cryptographers who worked on Tunny. I
was pleased to be presented to HM the Queen in July 2011, when she and the Duke of Edinburgh
visited Bletchley Park (Fig. 16.2). Three months later, the BBC made a film about the Tunny
story called Code-breakers: Bletchley Park’s Lost Heroes, which many of you may have seen. It is
not perfect, but it is good, and it tells the story accurately—and it does do justice to Tunny, Bill
Tutte, and Tommy Flowers.
After the filming, I drove to the BBC in Cardiff with my wife Mei to see the first cut. There
were several errors that Jack Copeland and I put right, and we also asked the producer, Julian
Carey, to strengthen even further the coverage of Tutte and Flowers, which he did. To date,
television audiences for this film are in excess of 10 million.
In 2012 the film won two BAFTA Awards, and in 2013 was listed as one of the year’s three
best historical documentaries at the Media Impact Awards in New York City. Word is getting
out at last about Bill Tutte and Tommy Flowers.