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A mathematician and computer scientist, Turing was appointed a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1935 at the early age of 23. At the outbreak of war he was recruited to the Government’s code-breaking staff at Bletchley Park where he was instrumental in breaking the German naval codes. With Gordon Welchman he designed the Bombe decoding machine and then with Tommy Flowers he designed and developed Colossus, the world’s first computer. Post-war he was appointed to a chair at the University of Manchester, where he continued his computer developments. Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts in 1952, when such behaviour was still a crime in the UK. He accepted treatment with oestrogen injections (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He committed suicide in 1954 and was granted a posthumous pardon in 2013.

As laborious manual methods necessarily had to be used, the decrypting process was extremely slow. Turing and Welchman therefore set about developing machines which could undertake the work speedily and accurately. The first was the Turing-Welchman Bombe, of which a number were manufactured in 1941; in case Bletchley Park should be bombed, many were installed at outstations.

Then came the electronic Colossus computing machine, in whose development and manufacture Thomas Flowers, a Post Office engineer, was very largely responsible. It used some 1,800 thermionic valves – a substantial increase on the previous most complicated electronic device which had only used about 150. Some of the senior Bletchley Park management were unconvinced that Flowers’ idea would work, saying he was ‘squandering good valves’, and his funding was cut off, forcing him to pay for the subsequent work himself. However, the project did work, and the first machine became operational in December 1943, thereby enabling Lorenz messages to be read. By the end of the war there were ten in service; they were the precursors of today’s computers.