Cynthia Reid, I was born in Headingley, Leeds in 1935 and from an early age had an
interest in science which was encouraged by my parents. I attended Brudenell Primary
School, Bennett Road Junior School and Leeds Girls’ High School. In 1954 I was offered
Exhibitions to both Oxford and Cambridge Universities and I elected to read Mathematics
at Newnham College, Cambridge. At the end of my first year I switched to Mechanical
Sciences and graduated in 1957 at which time I was recruited by John Pinkerton to work
in LEO’s engineering design department at Minerva Road in Park Royal, Northwest
London. I had little knowledge of electronics or computers but it seemed an interesting
challenge and I was there for four years until moving on to IBM. There were no other
women engineers at Minerva Road, but this was a situation I was entirely accustomed to
and never really thought about. I had been the only female undergraduate in the 2000-
strong Engineering Faculty at Cambridge, the first and only woman member of the
Cambridge University Air Squadron (I believe there were no more until the 1980s), the
only female pilot at Yeadon (now Leeds and Bradford) Flying Club where I got a
scholarship to attain my PPL whilst still at school and the only woman in the LEO motor
cycling group where I rode a scarlet Norton 600cc Dominator. I guess being ‘the only one’
was just a fact of life that I accepted without question – and I am happy to say that I have
never experienced prejudice on this account (although I did have to ceaselessly pester the
Air Ministry for 2 years before I was finally accepted into the Air Squadron – even with
my pilot licence). At Minerva Road I worked on the very early attempts at OCR (optical
character recognition) where we were trying to design an input device which retail
departments could use to order stock from a wholesale or central distributor. I think we
just about managed to detect a very thick black pencil stroke across a precisely
circumscribed quarter-inch square! It was an exciting time in that we were moving from
thermionic valves and mercury delay line storage to transistors, printed circuit boards and
solid state memory. I think I still have somewhere the soldering iron I was issued on my
first day at Minerva Road! The only names I recall of my days there were my immediate
manager John Bruce, our lab assistant Ernie Aylott and a couple of fellow design
engineers Ivan Boskov and Yoram Azar.
Cynthia Reid, a member of the Cambridge
University Air Squadron, at the controls of a De Havilland Chipmunk in 1956, shortly
before she joined LEO
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7laoprvaell0b1a/Cynthia%20Reed%20Memoir.docx?dl=0