John joined LEO as a Trainee Programmer in March 1954 while he was still technically on Demob Leave from the British Army in which he had served for some nine years. His army service included time in Northern Ireland and long spells in the Middle East. The army sponsored him at St Peter’s Hall, Oxford for a Maths degree but before this finished he had the opportunity to go to Sandhurst from where he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery.
While John’s service in the J. Lyons group of Companies lasted till 1991, his stay with Leo was relatively short as he was transferred to the Works Department shortly before his marriage to fellow programmer, Mary Blood. He continued his training in other areas of the Lyons empire, including the Works Department, the Personal Transport Department, and the Ice Cream Department.
Mary Clare Coombs (néeBlood, 4 February 1929 – 28 February 2022).
Mary gained fame as the first women world-wide to write a business application on a computer – the LEO I installed by Lyons at Cadby Hall. Her fame was such that she received the accolade of full obituaries in the Guardian, The Daily Telegraph. The Times as well as the trade press and IT/IS institutions including the BCS the Register and Wikipedia. A full listing of tributes to Mary as at 22nd March 2022 is:
It is with great regret that we report that Mary Coombs, (née Blood), one of the LEO pioneers passed away on 28thFebruary 2022 at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, at the age of 93.
We print below the obituary written by John Aeberhard and then a personal tribute to Mary from her friend and fellow-programmer, Frank Land. On the LCS website you will find links to the very many printed and online national and international obituaries published after Mary’s death. There is also a link to the BBC4 programme ‘Last Words’ which featured Mary with contributions from Georgina Ferry and Frank Land.
Mary Coombs, the first woman to write programs for Lyons Electronic Office (LEO), the world’s first business computer, has died at the age of 93 in Stoke Mandeville Hospital following complications arising after a Covid infection.
Mary Blood as she then was joined J Lyons & Co in 1952 as a management trainee, just a few months or so after LEO had run its first business application and following a holiday job arranged for her by her father, the company’s senior medical doctor. Initially, she was put to work in the company’s statistical office operating a calculating machine, but following a stellar performance in an aptitude test, was offered the chance to join the LEO team which, she always said, she jumped at.
Well aware of her role as a computing pioneer – “We were all engaged in a big adventure,” she would say – she joined the computing team when there were just three programmers on board, all men, becoming the only woman in a class of twelve on an introductory computer appreciation course. From here, it was straight into payroll applications for a rapidly growing range of external clients as well as developing programs for internal company use.
It was a huge challenge. Not only had much of the work never been done before, but as Mary would point out, she was working on a notoriously unreliable valve computer, but also one that had just 2K bytes of computer storage compared to the “umpteen gigabytes” available to present programmers.
“When it was LEO 1 you had to know a lot about the machine itself because there was so little storage space that every instruction had to be essential, or it had to be knocked out,” she would tell interested friends.
As well as working on programming to handle payroll for companies such as Ford Motor and Lyons itself, Mary was also involved in such jobs as tax tables for the Inland Revenue, Met Office work and the calculation of ballistics for the Army. She went on to become a supervisor and worked to locate and repair coding errors in the programs created by others.
Family commitments meant that she ceased full-time programming in 1964, but continued to work part-time editing computer manuals and for a few months ran a computer programming course for severely disabled residents at the Princess Marina Centre, Seer Green, sponsored jointly by ICL and Buckinghamshire County Council.
It was not until late 1969 that she ended her formal connection with the LEO team.
Mary returned to full-time employment in September 1973 as a primary school teacher, completing a three-year postgraduate teaching course in 1976. She retired from teaching in 1985 and went on to work as a buyer in the water treatment industry.
Mary Clare Coombs, nee Blood, was born on 4 February 1929 to her doctor father, William, and his wife, Ruth. She was educated at Putney High School and St Paul’s Girls School. Her favourite subject at school was maths, giving a clue to her later occupation. She went on, however, to read French and gain a BA Hons degree at Queen Mary College, London University.
Mary married John Coombs (d.2012), himself briefly a computer programmer on the LEO team, in 1955. Together they had a daughter, Anne, who sadly died aged just six. Between 1965 and 1969 they adopted three more children, Andrew, Paul and Gillian. They survive her as do a younger sister, Ruth and three grandchildren, Grace, Jemma and John.
Transcribed by Hilary Caminer from the recording of the LEO Computers Society zoom on 25/3/2022. This zoom session was held in Mary’s honour.
‘I want to say a few words about Mary who died so recently and tragically. I knew Mary as a personal friend and much of my recollection is of her as a personal friend. I remember we met first at the Appreciation Course which Lyons gave to their own people to see how many of them might fit into the LEO team. At the time Lyons thought they could recruit most of the people they needed for their LEO team from inside and some of the first generation like the Hemy’s and so on had all come from Lyons.
On that course I first met Mary. I didn’t recognise her as anything special but she did exceptionally well on the course on her own. She had studied French, but she was a good mathematician and she liked mathematics and indeed one of her obituaries called her a mathematician though she never studied mathematics. We were both on the same course.
I survived the course because I had a wife who was a mathematician and helped me – I don’t know where I would be now if she hadn’t helped me! Mary managed it on her own and we two were chosen to join the LEO team.
She made an immediate impression, she was thorough, she was good – and we became friends. What I remember most about her was that she was kind. I remember she was always out to help the disadvantaged.
I remember our eldest daughter was the same age as her daughter, the daughter who later died – and I remember sitting on the lawn at High Wycombe with the two girls playing together. Then, on another occasion, they were playing and their daughter hadn’t progressed and ours had and we knew then that something was wrong.
Anyway, Mary was clearly a very thorough and good programmer. She always thought that she was kept at the supervisor level rather that at management level because she was too good at her job. But I think it was more because of the glass ceiling which affected most women.
What is perhaps ironic is that Mary, through her death achieved more for the LEO story than she ever did in her life, notable as it was that she was the first woman to write a commercial program. But that wasn’t her strength – her strength was her reliability, that she was good at her job, that she was able to deal with other people. The irony is now is that through her death, through the very many obituaries she has received she has raised the status of LEO and made the LEO story better known throughout the world in a way that would have been difficult without that happening. Ironic, but true.
I remember Mary as a kind person, even when she had problems with her own child, a little bit later on she would look after somebody with MS because she felt for them and throughout her life she had this particular kindness. Some people may have called her ‘scary Mary’ or ‘bloody Mary’ but these were just nicknames people used. I think we each had our moniker – I don’t know what I was called, but I am sure it wasn’t flattering.
So let me close by paying tribute to a person who was really a wonderful person for her ability, for her continued striving for what is right and good. She is a great loss to the Society and she is a great loss to humanity.
Let me close on that note as a tribute to Mary Coombs, née Blood as was. Thank you.’
Betty Cooper (better known under her maiden name Betty Newman), sister in law of Pat Cooper (Mrs Pat Fantl) Sadly Betty died on 31st August. She worked from 1955 to 1964 on both LEO l and LEO ll at Lyons. Her Oral History is noted below in the Oral History section. Applications she made programming contributions include L4, the Tea-Blending job, and the production control application for the Liverpool clock and watch makers J.D. Francis, an application specified by Oliver Standingford. She became a valued member of Leo Fantl’s payroll group including involvement with the Ford, Stewarts and Lloyds and Kodak payroll. After retirement from LEO she did freelance programming for LEO II and LEO III customers (including LEO Computers) and devised a system for writing programs in Braille for blind programmers .Betty Cooper
An earlier very comprehensive interview was conducted by Janet Abbate on 14 September 2001 as Interview # 585 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. and is reproduced in Engineering and Technology Wiki at https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Betty_Cooper
Alan Clarke died December 2019. Alex Woolard (LEO Engineer) reports:
I have to report the sad news that Alan Clarke who worked at Minerva Road, Kidsgrove and Winsford from 1962 until the Winsford plant closed, has died. Alan was a commissioning engineer working on Leo III peripherals, and subsequently System 4, and the New Range 2900 family. He had a long battle with Cancer and finally lost the fight on 9th December 2019 with his family around him. He continued to live in the same house that he bought when he moved up to Kidsgrove in 1965, after the English Electric merger, and leaves his wife Patricia and a son and daughter.I worked with Alan both at Minerva Road and Kindsgrove/Winsford and always remembered him as a smart guy, and a pleasure to work with.
Hilary Cropper, DBE, born January 1941, died December 2004. After taking a mathematics degree at Salford University, and a first job with an engineering company, Hilary in 1970 joined ICL, working on operating software for the System 4 range, Though initially working in part-time positions to help raise her children, she was later promoted to senior management roles, eventually becoming the male-dominated company’s most senior woman. In 1985, she was headhunted by FI Group, which later became Xansa, to manage its UK operations as Chief Executive, a position she served in until 2000; between then and 2002, she was the company’s executive Chairman During her tenure as Chief Executive and the Chairman, the company’s annual revenues grew from £7m to £450m. In 1991, Hilary led a management buy-out of the company and a large number of staff became the owners of company shares. It was in turn floated on the stock exchange in 1996 and many of those staff who had kept their shares (about 100 in all) became millionaires.She had been appointed a CBE in 1999 and was promoted to Dame Commander (DBE) in 2004. Her biography is published by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), in print March 2009 and online in January 2008, written by Martin Campbell-Kelly. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Cropper
Joe Crouch – Died 2018.Joe Crouch joined LEO as a trainee programmer and quickly rose to Senior Programmer/Consultant Status, working at Hartree House. When Ilford Limited acquired a LEO II Joe headed the LEO team helping to establish the computer’s systems. Subsequently he joined Leo Fantl in South Africa as head of the Programming group. (noted by Norman Witkin)
Leo Fantl writes “A key area (in our operations) … was production, which covered our operating, data preparation, and local mine data capture. Joe Crouch took the lad here. ….In many ways Joe was another Derek Hemy, incredibly quick to grasp a new point, clear thinking, and a good writer. His direction of the preparation and subsequent management of operations was outstanding. I had chosen Joe to succeed me but this turned out to be not to his liking. Later he did much difficult design work for the larger group, notably Sage Life, the group’s insurance company” Joe married a local Afrikans girl.
John Godwin writes; “I remember them (Bob Day and Joe Crouch) as being among the pioneers of computers in South Africa. In the nineteen sixties LEO III/2 at the Johannesburg bureau was the first commercial multi-processing machine in the country.
Along with Leo Fantl and their colleagues they changed the way the Mines and other large companies ran their businesses. Today everyone is a computer expert, but then they really were. I am glad I knew them, true 1930 trail blazers.”
Ian Stewart Crawford. Born 20th March: Died 20th August 2018.
Born in Eltham, Taranaki, New Zealand. Oldest of 3 born to Dan a doctor and Kathleen a nurse. Excellent sportsman and chess player. Won the Auckland chess championship. At 16 he left New Plymouth Boys High and worked for a travel company. When he was 21 he did a Bachelor of Science at Auckland University in Mathematics. He had his heart set on learning computers. He travelled to Sydney and approached IBM for a job but they required a PHD or an actuary. This would take another 5 years so Ian decided to leave Australia. Went to England in 1956 and joined LEO Computers and then joined PA Consulting as a computer consultant https://www.paconsulting.com/about-us/ before returning to NZ beginning of 1966 after getting married. He became an independent management consultant in NZ and had approximately 100 assignments in his 30 years before retiring in 1996. He set up the Long Range Planning Society in NZ but this organization does not appear to exist any longer. When he retired he began work on a computer program written in PROLOG on Natural Language Processing which he continued to work on until his health began to fail at the beginning of 2018. He is survived by his wife Virginia Crawford, his daughters Sue Crawford (Independent IT consultant), Kate Everett (Chemical Engineer) and Joanna Crawford (English teacher at Massey University). He had 7 grandchildren. His brother (a doctor and leprosy researcher) still resides in London.
Mike Daniels – died March 2018, worked in Service Bureau, Hartree House in Programming and Support 1962-1966. He went on to work with several companies, including UNISYS, RCA (in America), III, an American Company back here. He worked on computer systems all his working life, all over the world. He was mainly involved in print/newspapers but also programming with Concorde. That said, he never forgot the early days. He was a super guy, always cheerful. I’m so glad you had good memories. Please pass on to anyone who knew him (From Betsan Daniels).
