was Tommy Flowers a radio amateur

[Jimmy Stewart ...]

was Tommy Flowers a radio amateur

[Jimmy Stewart ...]

sorry wrong group...again

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

on 25/02/2021, Jimmy Stewart ... supposed :

Yes and from memory he worked for the GPO telephones.

[Bob Eager]

Yes, he worked for the Post Office at Dollis Hill. A lot of what he built at Bletchley contained ex PO parts, which helped to hide what was going on.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Yesk I believe somebody who knew him is still on the air from Bletchley, the town not the park or the national radio centre which is also there of course. Brian

[T i m]

A lot of it looked familiar (Ex BT). ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Peter Able]

Flowers may have been interested in amateur radio, but where is the evidence of this - or of him being a licenced radio amateur?

PA

[The Natural Philosopher]

None that I have ever found. As I understand it he was really more into switching circuit design with his background in this at the GPO.

[Peter Able]

Indeed. Mind you, in those days when amateur radio was a more technical hobby, it might have appealed to such an active engineering mind. That said, I can't find his name in either a 1937 or a 1952 amateur radio callbook.

PA

[The Natural Philosopher]

As a professional engineer, once you have built a couple of radios as a teenager that's really it. One moves on.

And I very much doubt we would have been hamming the airwaves in wartime and working for a top secret establishment

[Peter Able]

You're at risk of falling into the trap of confusing the past with the present - and so being a bit hard on the Old Timers. As I mentioned Amateur Radio was quite a technical hobby at that time. Remember there was a class of licence - and a fair number of such licensees - at that time that permitted you to do as much as full licensees were permitted other than feed the transmitter output into an aerial. This would mystify the present generation of non-technical radio amateurs. What was the point of buying their black-boxes under that sort of regime?

The past is - indeed - a foreign country. For the record, radio amateurs were actively employed in government institutions and the defence industry during (and since) WW2. Plus there were others used to, in their spare time, take down particular axis transmissions of (encoded) morse code and send them - via Box 25 - to, eventually, Bletchley Park or the like.

But that was then.

PA

[The Natural Philosopher]

Precisely. Tommy was not in the game of operating radio at that time. Period.

His game was telephone switching. Using valves

[charles]

There is an RSGB site at Bletchley.