Ernest Lenearts – 1910-1997 Despite an interest in things technical his parents persuaded him to take a clerical job at J. Lyons starting in the late 1920s. Bored by his job he asked for more technical training in the hope of getting a job in the Lyons laboratories. His chance to progress came during World War II. In 1941 he became a wireless mechanic in the RAF rising to the rank of sergeant before demobilisation. He returned to Lyons, but was now appointed Radio Mechanic working on innovative microwave technology. On the inauguration of the collaboration between Cambridge University and Lyons on the EDSAC/LEO project he was sent to Cambridge for the year 1948 both to learn about computer technology and to help in the design of EDSAC. When Lyons commenced building LEO he joined John Pinkerton in the design team. He made many contributions and also helped in the writing of many technical papers including one selected as the best paper of that year. He subsequently took an interest in the man-machine interface including working on speech recognition. He retired in 1969. A biographical sketch of his career can be found on pages 206 to 207 of Peter Bird’s LEO: the World’s First Business Computer.
http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res17.htm#f
A biographical sketch by his sons Paul and David is provided below and in Dropbox at https://www.dropbox.com/s/rq527ow3d8kkgak/Ernest%20Lenaerts%20recollections%20from%20sons.docx?dl=0
Ernest Lenaerts Biographical sketch by his sons, Paul and David.
Dad met Mum (Gladys Minnie Buckledee) when they both worked in the Joe Lyons accounts office at Cadby Hall in the early 1930’s. They married at Kew Green Church on 20th June 1936 and set up home in a new house at 2 Pavilion Way, Eastcote shortly after.
The war years were clearly difficult but typical for a young couple in the London suburbs with a Morrison shelter in the living room and a lodger (Aunty Enid – who would become a lifelong family friend) as company for Mum. Dad was in the RAF but his eyesight precluded him from flying duties and he ended up untypically as a round peg in a round hole operating and maintaining ‘beam-bending’ machines in Alexandra Palace. He told us stories of looking out over London and seeing ‘buzz-bombs’ coming straight at him and being powerless to do anything ! He could play the piano by ear and often entertained his unit playing the huge organ. He said that when you hit the bass notes, glass could be heard tinkling down from the broken windows!
We grew up in the family home when Dad was working on Leo in the early days. We didn’t see much of him except at breakfast and week-ends as he rarely got home before our bedtime. Sometimes he wasn’t even home for breakfast. He had a camp bed at the office and when Leo was doing all night runs he was there to do running repairs. He loved his job and often commented how lucky he was to be able to combine work with his interests.
He tried to teach us binary arithmetic with limited success. One particular memory was when he came home with one of the first ferrite core memory ‘blocks’ and explained that this brick sized object could actually store 1kB of binary information ! Compared to the mercury delay lines, this must have seemed awesome.
We did have week-ends as a family and our favourite day out was to the Lyons sports ground at Sudbury Hill. We would have a swim in the outdoor pool, practise tennis at the tennis ‘wall’ and Dad would often play cricket – he was quite a capable spin bowler.
In the ‘60’s we were in our teens and becoming more independent (difficult ??). Dad’s work became more managerial but he hated meetings and politics. When English Electric arrived there was talk of moving to Kidsgrove, but retirement came to the rescue and he took up golf. It wasn’t long before he was programming his home computer using machine code to produce the weekly handicap list !
Mum and Dad had a long and happy retirement and stayed at “No 2” until Mum died in 1990. After that Dad struggled on for a few more years but he suffered from dementia and ended up in a nursing home, where he died in 1997.
David & Paul Lenaerts – 15th April 2019