LEO editor

Valerie Grose Reminiscences
I have read the fascinating article (that mentions Nigella). Actually her grandfather Mr
Felix Salmon was our “in-line direct director” with secretary, Miss Patterson. One of
my colleague’s father was Mr Felix’s chauffeur and when a child she played with
Vanessa, Nigella’s mother. As previously stated, other than Mr Frank Land I knew
most of the other ‘names’ (Messrs Simmons, Pinkerton, Thompson, Caminer). I
believe Mr Oliver Standingford had just left the company prior to my joining but I
knew Mr Geoffrey Mills with whom he co-wrote “Office Practice” I certainly cannot
claim to have known them well (being considerably younger) but my office was in the
same corridor so saw them all frequently. To measure their success is
difficult: obviously, as things eventually panned out I suppose wrong decisions were
made but they were surely the “brains” of the time. By way of comparison, “medical”
knowledge extended to patients having leeches set upon them to draw out blood but as
time passed with newer developments this soon become consigned to history. Mobile
phones were the size of bricks, became very small but curiously are now larger (albeit
slim and lightweight) but have the capacity to offer many more functions. Life has
changed beyond all recognition over the past half century with so many new
inventions, and all new technology in the future will surely pale into insignificance
with yet more inventions. Fax machines and music cassettes for instance, (good
inventions that were relatively short-lived). LEO though was of great significance
and I feel very privileged to have been an employee at J Lyons during those early
years. Even the style of dress of those gentlemen would not suit modern times: grey
suits, short back and sides hair, most smoked. Most certainly Miss Margery Slack,
secretary to Mr Simmons did, and Mrs Maureen Henley, secretary to TRT. When
entering their offices you could barely see them through the smoke! I recall walking
through the bakery department once with trolleys of bread rolls open to the elements;
people walking past coughing. Swiss rolls, as I recall were all rolled by hand as no
machine had been put together that could roll them without cracking. Imagine what
Health and Safety would say about that nowadays. The internal telephone exchange
was fascinating, headed by Mr Calder. Each call had to be individually
connected. The two dozen or so telephonists sat at terminals with thick flex to insert
into the connecting plug. When lifting the receiver to make a call, the telephonists
were trained to ask by name “Which number, Mr Simmons” but ‘ordinary staff’ were
greeted with ‘number please’ to which you replied ‘extension 645’. Daily office life
was very labour intensive with reports and minutes of meetings having to be typed
using carbon paper to produce extra copies. I was a very light typist, only being able
to produce about four readable reports so, if ten were required I would have to type
each set three times which was very time-consuming. How different my life would
have been with a modern computer/keyboard, email facility and the holiday
entitlement of today. Ten days only, plus Bank Holidays and New Year’s Day was a
working one at the time. Mr Samuel Salmon gave a New Year address over the
tannoy, “Hello and good morning, Cadby” and thanking all for their contribution to
this great company. It was just that at the time and I am pleased that aspects will have
historical significance. I rather suspect those in LEO had their heads down busily
engaged in developing the new machinery and knew rather less of what happened on a
day to day basis, as described above. Mr John Andrews has a file of LEO memorabilia
that, being somewhat of a hoarder, I have kept from my early days at
JL. Unfortunately I could not download this
(http://leo.settle.dtdns.net/LeoCode/LeoIIIdemo2.zip) Please forward this on and feel
free to ask any further questions you feel I may be able to assist with. Best rgds
Valerie
Dear Frank,
Having heard your name for several years (I have attended quite a few reunions (sadly
seeing Mr Caminer in a wheelchair at one) it surprises me that our paths never seem to
have crossed. Mr Simmons, to me, was the epitome of the perfect gentleman and
always addressed me as Valerie (no others did so)*. Geoffrey Mills smoked a pipe, as
you may recall, and somewhat amazingly lived less than five minutes from where my
son and daughter in law now reside. His address sounded so romantic (Beechcroft was
the name of his house) and to me it sounded so far away (Claygate, Surrey). * my own
boss of course used my Christian name and, to my total amazement, announced one
day that as he used mine, then I should use his. I found that extremely difficult. It just
was “not done”. Mr Simmons’ address. Hyde Park Gate. A quick Google now shows
today’s asking price, £13,000,000 but perhaps modest against the £40m of the
Beckhams! Holidays: one year my boss went to a Butlins Holiday camp (!) as felt
suitable for his two young children. Upon return he reported the children had loved it
whilst he and his wife grinned and bore it. My colleagues and I – Torquay, Isle of
Wight, Camber Sands. Miss Slack, secretary to Mr Simmons went to Tangier. We
considered either she, or the rest of us, were on another planet. I have no recollection
of the destinations of the LEO gentlemen. Not LEO but might amuse. Mr Mark
Bogod (non-family director?) due a new company car, invited his chauffeur, Geoffrey
to choose. “How about a Rover 90, sir?, and he chose the colour:grey. Very
insightful psychology. Clearly, Mr Bogod was not overly-bothered and presumably
felt if Geoffrey was happy he’ed give good service, often being required to work antisocial hours driving to functions and returning at midnight. Looking back over the
years, at the time everything, everyday was so normal but now seems…..yes, like life
on some other planet. Oh yes, just thought of this. We girls wore gloves to work,
even in summer! In winter, obviously for warmth but in summer, lacy decorative
items and as for being bare-legged: never. Nylon stockings with nice straight seams
and I never saw the gentlemen wearing casual clothes as on “dress down Fridays” in
offices nowadays. Grey suits, black shoes, shirt and tie was their ‘uniform’. I can
clearly picture the vast LEO and wish I had paid rather more attention. Opening my
Daily Telegraph one day, on the Obituaries page sadly was Mr Pinkerton. I recognised
him straightaway before even seeing his name. Then Mr Caminer. May they all rest
in peace after giving valuable service to that once great company but more
particularly that wonderful invention, the Lyons Electronic Office.

Peter Guest b.1934, died 1995 aged 61, LEO Maintenance Engineer
Margaret Guest, his widow writes: Peter’s education badly disrupted during Wartime,
leaving Wm. Penn School, Peckham, London aged 16 in 1951. Attended Woolwich
Polytechnic 1951-55 for part time day release, obtained ONC in civil engineering while
working for Sir Murdock MacDonald & Partners as a trainee draughtsman. Further HND
studies but National Service in RAF intervened including training in communication
hardware preparing to be a wireless operator and then posted to Aden where he worked for
the Commonwealth Air Forces Communications Network with the rank of Corporal.
Came back and worked for Vickers Armstrong at a factory in Crayford, Kent. At the time
he joined they were building a valve computer for Powers Samas, the PCC, which had an
immense number of problems and not many people capable of solving them! He left
when the PCC was going to be superseded by a future design done by ICT.
Early 1960 (the year we were planning to marry) Peter was employed by LEO in London
(for a very small wage for the first 6 months) while getting a good grounding in all aspects
of this new invention; engineering, testing, commissioning, etc. He was sent out to
maintain computers at Ford Dagenham (LEOII/4) and Ilford Films (LEO II/9)
while we lived in a caravan on the outskirts of Romford. He was also training on LEO

111. At the time the head office of LEO Computers was in Bayswater.
     Then, about 1964, after LEO amalgamated with English Electric, we moved to the South
     Coast where he was sent to commission a new English Electric computer for Lloyds Bank
     at Durrington, Worthing, while also troubleshooting other installations in London and the
     South Coast.
     After the merger with English Electric he spent a lot of time up in Kidsgrove on the KDF9
     commissioning and troubleshooting.
     Our next move was to Long Ashton, on the outskirts of Bristol where he was Assistan

Gloria Guy, LEO Computer Society Committee member
My very first employment was in 1952 with Jo Lyons at Elms House and have a loose
connection with Coventry Street Corner House. Sadly, I wasn’t a Nippy but once Lyons
had trained me to use a calculator in their own training school, my job consisted of adding
up all the bills from Coventry Street Corner House – all day long! I found it fascinating
and got quite cross with Lyons when they decided to promote me after 16 months to a job
which I didn’t like and with people that I didn’t get on with!
After several moves – Bakery Sales office using comptometers, then LEO doing data
entry in 1954 I had no idea I was working on a piece of history. During this time I was
studying shorthand and typing at night school and eventually worked in their Works &
Engineering department at Spike House before leaving for a secretarial career, which
stood me in very good stead for the rest of my working life.
My mother also worked at Cadby Hall and my grandfather worked at Henry Telfer
(the meat pie company owned by Lyons). See:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8km6dav1cr5wlq9/Gloria%20Guy%20brief%20bio.docx?dl=0

Michael Guy LEO Master Routine – The Birth of Software Engineering?
Michael Guy joined LEO straight from Wadham College, Oxford in 1962 with a
mathematics degree. After two years working on the Master Routine he left to do a PhD
at Newcastle University in integer programming. After two years working for Wiggins
Teape in their systems development department he rejoined what was then ICL. He
worked on VME for many years, progressing from programmer to designer, project
manager and OSTECH. When a team was created to pursue the UK Alvey projects,
launched as a response to the Japanese 5th Generation project, he seized the opportunity,
working mainly on persistent programming with the universities of Glasgow and St
Andrews. He ended his career with Teamware in what had become Fujitsu. On retirement
he went back to university, taking degrees in theology and biblical studies at Birmingham
University. After gaining an acquaintance with at least a dozen programming languages
he had no desire to program any more until twenty years later, when he found himself
helping to debug his grandson’s Python programs on a Raspberry Pi.
I worked on the LEO III Master Routine from 1962 to 1964, going straight from
university with a maths degree. It was nearly sixty years ago and my memories of that
time have been paged out and archived, and have probably been corrupted on the way.
Also I do not have a wide knowledge of the wider world of computing at the time. But I
have been encouraged to write this article in the hope of generating discussion of a very
important subject – the development of the discipline of software engineering.
John Daines writes “I have listings of the master routine and it was written in Intercode.
Intercode itself was a level above machine code and, although a instruction looked to be
an equivalent to a machine code instruction, it was often expanded by the translator
into several machine code instructions.
However, Intercode instructions 100/0/0 to 131/1/3 were one for one equivalents of
machine code instructions 0/0/0 to 31/1/3. That meant that the master routine
programmers could program at the lowest level and use specialist low level instructions
that weren’t in the Intercode set e.g. input output, interrupt handling, setting store
protection tags .etc
Interestingly, Cleo allowed for routines to be written in Intercode and, by implication
from the above, that Intercode might include machine code.”
LEO was the first computer to be used for business purposes. This meant a change in the
priorities of computer design. The first change was that it was used for data processing. It
spent relatively little time actually calculating and a lot of time reading paper tape,
printing and reading and writing magnetic tape. The role of the Master Routine was to
manage the computer efficiently and attempt to keep everything going full time. This is
what multi-programming is about

Michael Hancock I was Shell Mex and BP’s chief programmer when we acquired our
first Leo III in 1963 (no 6) and was involved in the studies and decisions which led to its
acquisition. We later acquired another Leo III and 2 Leo 326’s which were considerably
faster. Our computer centres were in Hemel Hempstead and Wythenshawe. Leo were in
competition with ICL and IBM and succeeded first because they had the most suitable
machine and second because of their skill in persuading our management that they were
right for the job. ICL had a grand machine on the stocks then but typically, it never saw
the light of day. I designed a massive sales accounting system with help from John Aris.
Such a pity that Leo did not have the resources to create the next generation. I was lucky
enough to be in another area while a traumatic transition to Univac took place.
The Leo users group brought me into contact which such as Dunlop and Imperial
Tobacco. The latter was worth a visit to Bristol as they gave away a box of cigarettes to
their visitors. An extended version of the career and memoirs is available in Dropbox at
https://www.dropbox.com/s/22dwf6tv7cid0ui/Mike%20Hancock%20Memors.docx?dl=0

Douglas Hartree and LEO (from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hartree)
Hartree’s fourth and final major contribution to British computing started in early
1947 when the catering firm of J. Lyons & Co. in London heard of the ENIAC and sent a
small team in the summer of that year to study what was happening in the USA, because
they felt that these new computers might be of assistance in the huge amount of
administrative and accounting work which the firm had to do. The team met with Col.
Herman Goldstine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton who wrote to Hartree
telling him of their search. As soon as he received this letter, Hartree wrote and invited
representatives of Lyons to come to Cambridge for a meeting with him and Wilkes. This
led to the development of a commercial version of EDSAC developed by Lyons, called
LEO, the first computer used for commercial business applications. After Hartree’s death,
the headquarters of LEO Computers was renamed Hartree House. This illustrates the
extent to which Lyons felt that Hartree had contributed to their new venture.
Hartree’s last famous contribution to computing was an estimate in 1950 of the
potential demand for computers, which was much lower than turned out to be the case:
“We have a computer here in Cambridge, one in Manchester and one at the [NPL]. I
suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that’s about all.” Such underestimates of
the number of computers that would be required were common at the time!

Presentation Friday 26 April, 2024 at 17.00 BST  by Andrew Herbert on the EDSAC Rebuild at TNMoC. A recording is available here Zoom Recording.

Andrew commented the following in the abstract.
While EDSAC can justifiably claim to have been ‘the world’s first practical digital electronic stored program computer’, as is well-known to the LEO community, Pinkerton, Lenaerts and colleagues had to address many of the ‘inadequacies’ to produce in LEO a robust machine that could take on the information processing needs of the Lyons company and be the world’s first successful business computer.

Denis Hitchens. Operator on LEO III/15 at Shell Australia
Neil Lamming interviewed me and conducted the aptitude test. But the person I was
really trying to dredge from my memory was Bill Cheek who along with Jack Dankert
encouraged me to return to full-time study. I was 19 and 20 at the time, turning 21 about
a fortnight before I went to RMIT — imagine a 20 year old shift leader with the fate of
SCO in his hands!! So for me as a whippersnapper training 35+ year olds was a life
defining experience and one which a bit later in life when I was President of the Students’
Representative Council (elected leader of some 12,000 students) I was able to refer to
when addressing Melbourne Rotary ( yes, all the big wigs). A fuller version of the
reminiscences are available in the LEO Dropbox archive at
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bqgrbhxh9cp4s4k/Denis%20Hitchens%20Reminiscences.docx?dl=0

Brian Hobson: I am glad that you, (Hilary Caminer), were able to attend our recent
“LEO do” as chaotic as it was! You asked if I would explain the origins of our group and
also to help you understand our Lyons/LEO relationship as it seemed rather confusing.
I will do my best. The meeting started when Norman Beasley retired from Lyons
in/around 1982. Norman had been a member of Lyons/Leo from the early days and was
Operations manager on LEO 1, LEO II/1, and LEO III/7 before becoming Computer
Consultant to the Lyons group of companies.
Norman lived in Chalfont St Giles (I think this is correct) and Peter Bird (Lyons
Programming Manager) and Alex Tepper (Lyons Operations manager) would go to visit
him fairly frequently. Carol Hurst, who was at our meeting, also lived nearby and had
also left Lyons would join the others making a foursome. In my Lyons career I started in
Operations as an operator (employed by Norman) and later became a consultant working
with Norman. When Alex Tepper was promoted to Head of Computing for Lyons I
became Operations manager and joined the gathering.
All Lyons computer staff are quite a close knit group and various members moved into
senior positions within other companies within the group as Accountants or Head of
Computing, etc. Tony Thompson, who you met, became Chief Accountant for various
companies, Alan King (now passed away) became head of Lyons Maid computing. They
joined in our meetings and gradually as time went on our group has continued but with
varying members, as old ones passed away others came to know of us and joined. Peter
Bird was the mainstay organiser as he had the most contacts. Cyril Lanch is a fairly
newcomer to our group but did not step back quick enough when volunteers were sought
to carry on Peter’s organising! Hopefully that explains our group, now for the
LEO/Lyons feelings – difficult!
History of Lyons and computers. Lyons built a computer to do work for Lyons Electronic
Office (LEO), staff working on the computers were Lyons staff. With the success of
computers Lyons formed a computer company LEO Computers Ltd but the staff although
working for LEO were still Lyons staff at heart. When the company LEO was sold the
computers remained at Lyons and were operated by Leo staff until they chose to remain
at Lyons or were replaced by new Lyons staff.
Lyons computer history goes from LEO I through Leo II/1, LEO III/7, LEO 326/46 and
eventually to IBM computers. Our attachment to LEO may be explained by the fact that
the original computers were still in use at Lyons long after LEO had been sold and in
many instances the staff working them were the original staff. When LEO was sold the
computer department became LEO and METHODS, then Lyons Computer Services Ltd
(LCS My best analogy would be: If you had a daughter and she got married she would
still be your daughter and a member of your family although she would have joined
another family, you would continue to be proud of her. The same is how our computer
department feel.
When LEO was sold the computer department became LEO and METHODS, then Lyons
Computer Services Ltd (LCS), and finally Lyons Information Systems Ltd (LIS).
As you may now gather we were very proud of our heritage but so was the computer
industry. We as a Computer Bureau (which we had been from day 1 of computers)
strived to continue to be at the forefront of computer usage and computer and peripheral
manufacturers were very keen to be associated with us offering us very competitive deals
to use their equipment. Our computer department was frequently put under the
microscope by the main Lyons Board as the newer family Board members felt that
computing was expensive but on every occasion the auditing companies, including IBM,
were in awe as to how we are able to do so much with so little and still lead the
world. An example of this was back when Lyons had a fire on the Xeronic Printer in the
LEO III/7 computer room. We made an arrangement with the Post Office (as it was then)
to use their LEO III (overnight) in Charles House which was just across the road from
us. Our shift of 6 operators replaced a shift of 20+ operators.
I cannot remember the trade magazine that did a piece on us as we were the first company
to wire an entire building with various departments on different floors to use Local Area
Networks linked into the mainframe. Also, one of our external customers was a large
American personal tax company which had a large computer centre in the States but
wanted a worldwide centre based in London. We installed a duplicate of their system
onto our computer, they provided no computing staff as all maintenance etc. would be
done from the States we only had two user/managers with us. Their system was difficult
for their users to manage and I spent a lot of time supporting them because of the
complexity of their system.
Eventually I volunteered to improve it for them and wrote a few simple programs
and restructured their system making it much more efficient (saving hours a day of
machine and their input time). The computer staff in America were interested in what I
had done and came over to see for themselves, they were amazed and the CEO asked
permission to adopt our version of their system to replace their own!
My own involvement with Lyons started while I was at school. My brother, Colin, whom
you met was an operator at Lyons on LEO II/1 (but employed by LEO Computers) and I
used to go with him to work some evenings or when I was not at school. I was able to
help operate the LEO II computer (unofficially of course) and met the engineers on the
LEO III/7. When Colin moved to Hartree House I also used to go there as well and
helped out on the LEO III installed there. I loved the job and it really appealed to me so
when I left school (in 1966) I went for interviews at Lyons and ICT (as it was
then). Norman interviewed me and offered me the job (it helped that I knew several of
the staff by name which impressed him!). I worked my way up from trainee operator to
Ops Manager until the closure of the company in 1991. I won’t bore you with my life
history of the roles I held and of the changes in company structure that I made over the
years as most of this was during our IBM period.
I hope that this gives you some insight into our little group and our attachment to LEO
and why we feel a little side-lined when at the LEO Computer Society gatherings Lyons
seems to be irrelevant. Maybe that is changing now but at the few meetings I went to
over the years that is how it seemed which is why I have never bothered joining