Mike Josephs: Beginnings
This is in the nature of a bit of self – indulgence. I want to talk about my early days in the
fledgling computer industry back in 1957 and thereabouts. Before doing so I want to
welcome a new recruit to our circulation list: David Caminer, who must surely be the most
senior of us all, as he was a warrior in the Desert Rats back in 1942. His name, you can be
sure, will appear in what follows.
While the rest of you will probably have been doing something conventional, like medicine
accountancy or ordinary business, I joined a new subsidiary of J Lyons & co which had gone
into the trade of making and selling business computers. I will now admit that with my
freshly minted maths degree, I had hoped to join IBM but they quickly spotted that I lacked
the necessary skills in dissimulation to suit their style of operation.
To me the whole thing was like a job and a hobby and a high pressure trade school all
wrapped into one intriguing parcel, made all the more so by David Caminer’s role as king of
the systems and marketing areas. The business was so young, but he and his managers
seemed to know so much about everything. They were an incredible gang of people, full of
unexpected talents.
I never really understood how the whole thing had come about. We were given some briefs
on the company’s short history, and various names were mentioned in tones of awe, but we
were too busy worrying about where we were going, to concern ourselves with what was
already long past. Anyway I left LEO Computers after 8 years, during which it had been
merged with English Electric and Marconi, and effective control had passed out of the hands
of the original senior team.
So why am I suddenly rambling on like some old codger reflecting on the errors of his youth,
when as everyone knows I am supposed to be writing a deconstruction of the Financial
Ombudsman Service to submit to the Commons Treasury Committee? The fault lies entirely
with an authoress, Georgina Ferry, whose field is the history of various significant
enterprises. She recently published her latest entitled “A Computer Called LEO”, and to my
surprise it is very good indeed.
It is not just a picture of the exciting days of a new technology which in the space of 50 years
we have all come to take for granted, but simultaneously it charts the decline of a massively
successful family owned food business which could not adapt itself to the demands of that
new era. Although I encountered some of Lyons’ strange ways, I knew too little about
business elsewhere to put them into an overall context, but the book makes clear just how
feudal and paternalistic the whole operation was. When push came to shove, the youngest
family spriglet ranked above the most senior ‘employee’ director. And those senior
employees wanted it that way. They saw themselves as squires to the family knights, not
ambitious for themselves and devoted entirely to the family interest.
As a result, a degree of real humility percolated down through the ranks of the management
and was imbibed by the fractious juniors like myself. If John Simmons, hyper-competent
administrator and famed initiator of the whole Lyons computing enterprise, saw himself as no
more than a capable family servant, who was anyone else to put on airs and arrogance? The
contrast with executive culture and self promotion at the start of the 21st century could not be
greater. I suspect that many of those old Lyons managers (though not us LEO people) would
have fitted into Ancient Egypt without a ripple.
The Lyons company’s self-image was of an immensely competent enterprise which had
forgotten more about running food businesses than anyone else had ever learned. At its heart
was an administrative machine that kept rigorous track of every bit of raw material and every
hour of labour, and reported profit margins on a weekly basis. They, like the Marks and
Spencer of the same era, were always looking for better, cheaper, more effective ways of
doing things, so they found room for men of imagination and energy who would challenge
established practices and propose better ones.
Unfortunately, marketing, finance and business strategy were not subject to the same types of
intellectual discipline, but they were the fiefs of family members who reigned like Dukes
over major parts of the whole empire and whose word could not be gainsaid.
As I read the book, I came to understand the strange conjunction of circumstances that led
this food company into pioneering the application of digital computers to the operation of
major businesses, both their own and other businesses with forward looking management.
Simmons (also a Cambridge maths graduate) had come to realise that the process of
administrative improvement was blocked by the lack of suitable office equipment:
everything available up to 1950 was just too damned dumb, and needed the work broken up
into excruciatingly small stages. He realised that the new-fangled computers, just emerging
from the labs of leading universities, could offer the solution to his problems.
His solution was simplicity itself: offer some funding to the Cambridge computer wizards,
and in return get their advice and co-operation in designing and building Lyons own machine
which would be tuned to business work the way the academic machines were tuned to
scientific computations. Lyons and Simmons were even more ‘can-do’ than the American
Marines.
As I think about this unlikely set-up into which I so innocently plunged, I realise that even
today, after all the vicissitudes, some of my good friends date from that era: Frank and Ralph
Land, Alan Jacobs, and perhaps one or two more whose origins I have forgotten. I might
even include Robin Fairlie who made a huge success at Remington Rand/ Univac after David
Caminer refused to be persuaded by my recommendation that Robin be taken onboard.
Now the engine of this unlikely subsidiary was not Research or Production, but was indeed
the Systems Department run by David Caminer, who had learned his trade under Simmons in
Lyons own Systems Department. That is where I started as a humble programmer, learning
at the feet of people like Frank and Alan. These strange but clever people cared about only
one thing: ‘Did it work?’, by which they meant ‘Did it do the job we had promised the
customer?’ This was a very strange idea in the computing world of the day, where it was
taken for granted that nothing would ever work first time, and certainly nowhere near the
original budget.
But this was the philosophy of the Lyons people and we imbibed it from them like mother’s
milk. Neither intricate requirements nor unreliable equipment could be allowed to stand in
the way of doing the job properly. They were just obstacles to be surmounted. If you didn’t
know how, then ask. If no one knew how, then work it out for yourself. The product of all
this was a remarkable type of person, not so different from what you might find in a
university engineering department. LEO people were unassuming but intimidating in their
confidence that they could solve any problem that was capable of solution. And they proved
again and again that the confidence was justified.
Looking back, it is easy to see that what was really special about LEO was the systems knowhow, and that ‘attitude’. It today’s parlance we would say that they were without equal as
systems and project engineers, and however good the youngsters were David Caminer was
even better. Of course, he had the advantage of the right sort of basic training, which we all
skipped because there wasn’t time for that old fashioned ‘organisation & methods’ stuff.
That was the business that LEO should really have tried to be, but the directors had got the
computer building bug and could never throw off the habit. Other people picked up the idea
of systems consultancy and made fortunes doing badly what LEO could do well, but LEO
wanted to be in the production business as well, which is something that burns real capital.
Of course the mergers went badly, because the paternalist Lyons Board had cut their losses
and cut their ties with LEO with the ruthlessness that would make a 21st century capitalist
quite proud. None of the LEO directors even knew what was going down – they were sold
out without warning!
I always seemed to be dragged into the strategic errors that senior management insisted on
making, like setting up an operation in Johannesburg when we didn’t have enough of ‘the
right stuff’ to cope with the UK market. It was only when I read the book that I realised that
DC and I thought the same about that little jaunt, even if it did give me a year in the RSA.
Reverting back, to when I returned from South Africa, I had to serve a two year stint as
Caminer’s technical fixer, which was sometimes a non-job because he was his own best fixer
as all the rest will gladly testify. It also meant that I was under his feet a bit too often, which
was widely regarded as something to be avoided if at all possible. Anyway, as a reward for
sticking it out, and helping to get some advanced computers into production (something
which Georgina talks about while neglecting to mention me by name for some reason) I was
promoted into product planning in the Research Division, which I now learn from Georgina
was a bit of merger politics that was not expected to produce anything.
There I turned myself into a pale copy of David C. and ran around like a demented bluebottle
making enemies in all directions, but coming up with a credible scheme that unfortunately
was just a bit before its time. Meanwhile the real version saw which way the corporate
politics were going and espoused the proposal that the English Electric brigade wanted to
hear. Our work in Research wasn’t entirely wasted, because ten years later after yet more
mergers, it was incorporated into a line of machines under the ICL label.
That was about as close as I got to corporate glory, but as they say, it was a great learning
experience and helped prepare me for the rough and tumble of management consultancy. But
what I didn’t realise was how much of British industrial history in the 20th century was
encapsulated in the strange case of Lyons and its LEO computers. Do read Georgina Ferry’s
book if these things interest you at all.
