MARKET INNOVATOR WHO OPENED UP EASTERN EUROPE FOR EARLY BRITISH COMPUTERS

For over 40 years as, first, a market innovator and then a public servant, Ralph Land, who died peacefully in his sleep on 23 July just weeks after his twin brother Frank, played a role in opening up the countries of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, to Western influence.  

He was in Prague in the Spring of 1968 as the export sales manager for English Electric Computers and witnessed the uprising. Despite a hostile environment, Western computers, much in demand at the time, played a part in, first, prising open and then sustaining the links that ultimately led to the collapse of Communist Europe with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Ralph Land was the elder, by 20 minutes, of twins born in Berlin in 1928 into a Jewish family comfortably well off from a business installing gas lighting. His father had branched out into making compressors for, among others, the motor industry and had under-estimated the Nazi threat thinking it would pass and the family was lucky to escape to England as late as April 1939, just months before the outbreak of war.  

Arriving with nothing, as their father’s business had been expropriated for a single mark, speaking only German and cast as “the enemy,” the Land brothers had a tough time in their early years in England.  They spent the blitz away from their parents as evacuees with a family in Bedmond, a small village near Abbots Langley in Hertfordshire attending elementary school there.  

Their headmaster thought they should join the Post Office as telegraph boys, but their mother, a forceful influence, had other ideas and somehow got them into Willesden County Grammar School.  From there the inseparable twin brothers went on, in 1947, to the London School of Economics and then, after a period as LSE research assistants following graduation, first Frank and then Ralph found themselves working for J Lyons & Co, the company that developed the world’s first business computer, the fabled Lyons Electronic Office (LEO).  

There they came under the influence of what Land described as “two impossible characters who made the impossible happen,” T R Thompson and David Caminer.

Pioneering with business computing

Ralph Land’s first job with LEO Computers was to run the service bureau company which was seen as the future of computers since the market for computer sales was judged to be limited.  Nonetheless a job running the City office followed and then one day Thompson, because Land could speak German, decided he should run export sales.

In this role, Land built a business in Eastern Europe from scratch to £30m a year, with, at its peak, some 90 staff, supplying equipment to the key sectors of the economies of the region.

“We out-sold all other computer companies,” he once said, “including IBM with its equivalent East European office of 250 people,” installing computers in, first, Czechoslovakia and then Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

In the USSR, despite the COCOM embargo at the time, Land ensured British computers were at the heart of Government and key industries and he was quoted as saying that the Russian economy could have been stopped in its tracks by halting the supply of spare parts.

Land’s success in export markets in East Europe with LEO, English Electric Computers and, after the merger with ICT, ICL (where for a while he was also marketing director for Western Europe and managing director of ICL Germany), led to jobs with, first, Rank Xerox as East European sales manager between 1976 and 1991 and then, having been tempted out of his first retirement, with Rolls Royce between 1991 and 1995 as director for Eastern Europe.  At its peak, the Rank Xerox copying machines business in Eastern Europe reached £120m a year.  For Rolls Royce, Land’s role was to develop a strategy for the marketing of aero engines and turbines for gas pipelines in the region.

Combining business with public service

Becoming an acknowledged expert in the region, especially in the rather different and perhaps novel trading methods required to succeed, Land developed a parallel career in public service directed at influencing British business to move more aggressively in taking advantage of opportunities, principally in the Soviet Union, but also other East European countries. The Department of Trade & Industry called increasingly on his experience to lead country working groups and trade missions and he became a member of the East European Trade Board as well as chairman of the Russo-British and British-Romanian chambers of commerce.  

Then, in 1992, he became a member of the advisory panel of the Know How fund run by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and created to assist the transition of East European countries in the wake of the collapse of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991 – events that Land described as “perhaps the greatest moments in my life.”.

The Know How fund dispensed a multi-million aid budget until it was closed by Clare Short in 1999. 

Earlier, from 1994-97, Land had also been appointed, first, governor and, later, deputy chairman of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which then had a budget of £4m to spend across 15 East European countries to help them move towards democracy. And he was also a member of the advisory board for Russia and Central Asia at Chatham House.

Later, as an enthusiastic pro-EU supporter, Land was chairman of a task force on EU enlargement set up by Brussels-based Union of Employers’ Federations of Europe, then called Business Europe. He also, as a trustee of the BBC World Service Trust, took part in a World Service initiative, described by John Tusa, then managing director, as “a Marshall plan of the mind,” dedicated to the intelligent use of the media to aid the transition of Eastern Europe into the post-Communist World. 

Sociable and engaging man

A sociable and engaging man of multiple interests and enthusiasms, Land continued to be in demand as a private consultant well into his eighties and kept active through several company directorships and as chairman of the British Consultancy Charitable Trust (BCCT), an organisation sending retired executives on assignments all over the world, and, as a trustee of Healthprom, in improving conditions for vulnerable children and mothers in the Commonwealth of Independent States made up of constituents of the former Soviet Union.  

He was also a friend of the Royal Society of Arts and London Symphony Orchestra, and president of the Rotary Club of London.

Ralph Land married his wife Jacqueline in 1954. She pre-deceased him after 55 years of marriage.

They had two sons, Bryan and Anthony, who survive him along with one grandchild. He was awarded an OBE in 1986 and a CBE ten years later for services to exports.

Ralph Richard Land, born Rolf Landsberger, 24 October 1928, died 23 July 2026

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Frank and Ralph in 2016

Inseparable twins in 2016 – Ralph to the right and Frank