Abstract: Born in Liverpool, educated at grammar school, took Mathematics at Kings College, Cambridge. Then National Service finishing with rank of Captain. Joined Lyons as a Management Trainee in 1949, rose to management rank in the Lyons Work Office as cost accountant. Selected to join LEO in 1956. Long and distinguished career with many roles including education, staff selection, sales and marketing finishing as head of marketing before retirement. Active sportsman, including playing soccer for Cambridge University.

Transcript :

LEO COMPUTERS LIMITED  -  Oral History Project
Interview with Doug Comish by Martin Garthwaite on 6th December 2011

 This interview of Doug Comish has been recorded by the LEO Computers Society as part of an Oral History project to document the earliest use of electronic computers in business applications.  Any opinions expressed are those of the interviewee and not of the Society.  
Copyright of this interview in recorded form and in transcript remains with the LEO Computers Society, 2012.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.  Editorial inserts in the text are in italics and in brackets.
Martin Garthwaite [MG]: Doug, firstly tell us a little bit about your family, where you were born, the occupation of your father and mother and your earliest memories?
Doug Comish [DC]:  I was born and bred in Liverpool.  I went to Quarry Bank School, which was famous as it was one of the ordinary Grammar Schools run by the Liverpool Education Authority.  The most notorious old boy was John Lennon and The Beatles were founded as a group called The Quarrymen.  And we also had a number of politicians, people like Peter Shaw [editor: Labour Party Politician and Member of Parliament] was an old boy of the school. He represented Putney for a long time, and was in the government, of course.  
	My father, before the war, was a manufacturer’s agent; he represented three companies and when that folded at the beginning of the war he got a job working as a salesman for a London firm that sold haberdashery and that sort of stuff.  My mother, of course, didn't work after I was born in 1926, which seems an age ago.  But she was very bright, very intelligent, and my father was bright as well though he left school at fourteen, in the Isle of Man.  Comish is a Manx name.
[MG]:  So tell me about your further education.
[DC]: After leaving Quarry Bank I went to Kings College, Cambridge and read mathematics, took a degree in mathematics, coming out with a Second Class Honours. I chose Kings largely at the instigation of my headmaster who was an old Kings’ man and he wanted me to go to Kings.  He persuaded my father to let me have a third year in the sixth form in order to prepare for the life at Kings, and particularly to go to the level of mathematics that I needed.  I didn't attend normal classes in that final year but members of the maths department gave me private tuition, sometimes in school, sometimes at their homes, sometimes on fire watching duties [during World War II] and things like that.
[MG]: So a lot of extra help in maths to get you through the exam; the entrance exam?
[DC]: Well to get an entry.  And I got an entry but I didn't get a scholarship, though I had a State Scholarship and a Liverpool Senior City Scholarship.
[MG]: So in those days there weren’t grants that we think of today or student loans. Does that mean you had to pay the college and if you didn't have the money you couldn't go?
[DC]: Yes, I had a State Scholarship that paid the fees.  But I had to pay board and lodgings, that sort of thing.  I played football for the university while I was at Cambridge, in one year anyway. In the first year I was in the side all year.
[MG]:  Did you do National Service?
[DC]: Yes, I did that after I was sent up to Cambridge for one year to add electronics to the curriculum.  And at the end of the first year we either went into the forces or into industry. They had nowhere for me to go, so it was suggested that I should stay on, and so I did the full three years of study.  And then went into the army afterwards in 1947.
 [MG]: And what did you do in the army?
[DC]: Eventually I was in the Education Corps and I worked as my last job at district headquarters in the North-West district of Western Command.
[MG]: You were a teacher?
[DC]:  I was supervising the teaching of education in an area. And I was very lucky because the post carried the rank of Captain, so I had the rank of Captain, which was unbelievable really.  I started as Second Lieutenant, but when I got moved to the job before that job I was promoted to Captain.
[MG]: So finding a career, going back to your school and university days, was there ever any kind of structured advice as to what you should do once you finished school or university?
[DC]: I made up my mind whilst I was in the army that I was going to become an actuary, and I got myself a job with the Royal Insurance Company in Liverpool, who were going to pay me three hundred pounds a year in 1947 and give me three afternoons a week off to study for the actuarial exam, which you had to do by correspondence course.  But I failed the medical: they said I had high blood pressure.  And that really threw me slightly because I was then left chasing a job.  
	I applied to go into Martin’s Bank, but they failed me as well, without giving me the chance to prove otherwise. My doctor said there was nothing the matter with me, and my blood pressure was perfectly all right.  But they had access to the Royal’s medical records and they said ‘no go’.  
	So I was on the market and I shopped around a bit and I went to the appointments board at Cambridge and they put me in touch with, amongst other people, Joe Lyons, and Joe Lyons offered me a job as a management trainee. So I joined them in December 1949.  I just got some sort of work experience for about three weeks with them and then I went on a three months management training course.  
[MG]: Had you heard of J. Lyons before you took the job there?
[DC]: Only to the extent I knew they had teashops and restaurants too.
[MG]: And was LEO mentioned as part of your interview process?
[DC]: They were working on LEO then. But it wasn't in operational use.  And I was put into the Statistical Office and I was sort of shoved very quickly into the job of interpreting the management accounts of the Ice Cream Department, which was a very vital one to Joe Lyons, and one which was changing very quickly.  So I did, because the guy who had been doing the job prior to me got a job in the civil service and he resigned to join the civil service. He got a very good job there.  So I got shoved in very quickly to take over at the end of the training course.  And it was a great job, taught me a lot about accounting and management and that sort of thing.  
After about two and a half or three years I was promoted to management status and I went into one of the other cost offices: what they called the Works Office, which dealt with the engineers, electricians, and so on, of whom there were a vast number in Joe Lyons.  
[MG]: How did you get involved in the LEO project?
[DC]:  After I'd been in the Works office for about two and a half to three years, LEO had got itself established a bit by then, it was doing regular work for Joe Lyons, big jobs.  It was doing regular payroll work for Fords.  And they'd even got orders to build a number of machines for blue chip industry organisations.  They were scouring the organisation and also outside for people they thought might be suitable to go into the computer side.  And I was selected, I didn't volunteer, and in fact I told them I thought it was a waste of time because I couldn't see a future way ahead there.
[MG]: Of computers?
[DC]: Of computers and what my role would be.  But anyway I joined LEO in April ’56 and I went to work in the programming office, I was trained on a programming course.  
[MG]: Who interviewed you for the LEO role?
[DC]: A guy called Lionel Gregory who was one of the deputy controllers of J. Lyons at the time and he'd been my old boss in the Statistical Office.  TRT [Thomas Raymond Thompson, later Managing Director of LEO Computers Limited], whom I'd met on interview anyway, and Mr. Simmons [JRMM Simmons, Comptroller of J Lyons who initiated the LEO project] I also met on that interview.  That was in 1949.  I also met David Caminer who became head of systems and programming at LEO.  
But I didn't work to David Caminer in those days:  I was given odd jobs to do, bits of programming and so on.  And I took on responsibility, fairly quickly, for selecting people for Lyons to work in their programming office, and also selecting staff for customers, because we used to put them through an aptitude test for which we charged money.
[MG]: Ah, so the training programme again for the companies that you were selling to.
[DC]: I did some, I did things like lecture on the training courses and so on and so forth.  And then, I was gradually feeling my way in because I had management status and I was the only one, apart from David Caminer in the programming side, who had management status.
[MG]: Ah, so a manager in Lyons was a senior...
[DC]: Manager, well it wasn't all that senior but you got perks as a manager: you were provided with free lunch every day.  And if you had the free lunch you didn't really need a lot more to eat in the day.  But the important thing was to try and integrate with the guys in the programming side, who were absolutely tremendous.  I mean those guys were so dedicated.  They worked so hard.
[MG]: Was there a big age gap, relatively speaking?
[DC]: There was an age gap yes - I worked for a guy who was about twenty. And he was brilliant.  He was absolutely, he had ‘A’ Levels and hadn't been to university, and he was absolutely brilliant, as a programmer.  And I thought I can never catch up with him – Bob Brett, worth seeing.  You'd get him at, well I don't know where you'd get him now.  He'd be in his seventies now, I am eighty six now.
[MG]: So what, do you remember about your very first job with LEO?
[DC]  It was an amendment to the teashops program, L2, ‘L’ stood for Lyons job, two was a number, ‘L1’ was Lyons payroll. L2 was the teashops orders, every day.   And I did a modification to it. It seemed huge to me.  And when it’s done, outside the system, seeing it running, and you think God if they send steak and kidney puddings instead of salads we’re in real trouble.  But it was okay.  It was only a modification, but nevertheless you had to go through lots of trials and put in lots of test data to prove to yourself that everything was okay.  But that was the first sort of job I had.
[MG]: What was the biggest challenge to programming in those very early days?
[DC]: Well it was really keeping up with the guys who all seemed younger than you and all seemed better, and probably all were better.  I wasn't what I would call a natural programmer, and some of them were absolutely superb at it; I mean Peter Hermon for instance, he had tremendous ability.  And he did the Wills job and he knew more about the operation of that company than anybody in Wills.  And it’s a very complex structure, it required invoices to be produced, and packing documentation produced by about 9.30 each morning, from post received that morning, so it had to work.  And the way in which they calculated the terms on which the goods were supplied was very, very complex indeed and required lots of reference to previous history from the customer and all that sort of thing.  It was really an extremely complex job. Not only was there a LEO II but there was a Samastronic printer.
 	[The Samastronic Printer was produced by the Powers Samas company. Powers Samas merged with Hollerith’s UK division to form ICT [International Computers and Tabulators Ltd] in 1959.  The Samastronic was a fast, 300 lines a minute, alpha-numeric printer.  It was the first printer attached to a LEO computer that could print alphabetic as well as numeric characters. ] 
[MG]: What sort of company was Wills?
[DC]: The tobacco people, W.D. and H.O. Wills of Bristol.  They bought a LEO II, might have been number 2 or it might have been the third [it was LEOII/2, delivered September 1956].  I'd need to look at the list.  They were a reference sale site; we used to take potential customers down to Bristol and we’d show them the installation and they [Wills staff] explained what they were doing and so on and so forth.
[MG]: Tell us about the Samastronic Printer?
[DC]: That was made by Powers; Powers-Samas and Hollerith were separate at that time, they hadn't merged.  And it was a new development, a Samastronic printer with new electronics and new technology.  And really the LEO people debugged it, and got it so that it became commercially viable and a reasonable standard of production so that, you know, if the printer went down you were finished in terms of getting a documentation to the despatch operatives.  And that was a fantastic job.  
	But the Lyons jobs were all good jobs; there was L2, which was the teashops orders job. That was a wonderful job really because previously, there'd obviously been a time delay in getting the orders in through the [clerical] system, the time delay being a couple of days, from what the teashops manager wanted.  It wasn't necessarily that it took that long but in fact it had to go through processes.  And the teashops job when it was designed, they (actually David Caminer-ed) had this brilliant idea that they have a standing order which would be changed every month and the teashops manager could ring up and just give the changes to the standing order, so the input was significantly reduced.  Every day, that was done for Joe Lyons and there were two hundred teashops in the London area; the London area going to Brighton and Oxford and places like that, but there were two hundred teashops. They were like a national institution and the Board of Lyons thought very hard and pondered for a long time whether they would increase the price of a cup of tea by a halfpenny or a penny.
	Then there was the bakery invoicing job, which was known as L5, where orders received for bakery goods for Joe Lyons were put through the despatch scenario at Lyons and it was a brilliant job.  And both of those could be used as very good references for sales promotions.  
 [MG]: So take us through your LEO career, which computers you worked on, what your role was, and your most memorable incidents, the funny ones, the sad ones?
[DC]: Well I worked on Leo I and of course on LEO II because LEO II was derived from LEO I, I mean the basic difference it was four times as fast and the mercury delay tubes are only fifteen inches instead of five foot odd.  And LEO I was machine code.
[MG]: And the mercury delay tubes were the memory of the computer?
[DC]: The memory, absolutely - with a quartz crystal at each end of the mercury filled tube.  At the head end the crystal converted the electric pulse into a sonic pulse flowing though the mercury and then the reverse happened at the other end.  
Gradually, I had been getting more involved in the selection of people, so I handled the University Appointments Boards, with whom we had very good relations, because we would occasionally take an odd ball that they were finding difficulty in placing.  And if you did that then they would produce somebody out of the hat for you, a sort of a bit of recompense.  So I got involved in that side as we grew the business.
Then one of the first outside jobs I got involved in was Ever Ready TheUk’s primary manufacturer of electrical batteries – ed) where we did a service job for them.  And the guy handling it was a joint managing director of Ever Ready, and he hadn't got any computer staff really, he'd got some punch card staff, a couple of ladies, who were very good at the punch card side.  And we did his stock control on a service basis.  And I remember him coming along to watch the first run, which failed.  It was a program error, and he didn't mind.  We had to rewrite part of that, I remember having to rewrite the part of the program and I said to David Caminer “what do I do, David?”  He said, “I will just go along and tell him and we will see. I will give him a bit of a story.”  I asked him to contribute a hundred and eighty quid.  And he said,  “That's all right Dougie, no problem”.  Ever Ready was a battery company, they could afford a computer.  
It was, at that stage we were moving on, of course, towards LEO III.  And then I got involved with a number of accounts in LEO III.  Initially the ones which, in a way, were akin to Lyons: Cerebos Salt. They'd got other businesses as well but they were famous for their brand “Cerebos Salt”.  They were very, very good and they said “what sort of a person should we have to run the computer?” We said “well, ideally you should have a director”, so they appointed one, and he was very good.  He commanded respect of the board and that meant there was no nonsense going on about the computer system.  
H.J. Heinz, which was the first time a decision had to go to America to be ratified to buy LEO because in America they were IBM.  They weren’t IBM in Britain at the time, but obviously, they were IBM in the US, and gradually I was, without a career development path, getting involved in sales.
In those days we did quite a detailed sales proposal, which was a systems specification really.  Not at a detailed level, not at the detailed level that the Wills one was.  But we did a sales proposal which would show them how their work could be done on the applications if they wanted to do it.
[MG]: So you were doing systems analysis, what we now call systems analysis?
[DC]:	Systems analysis, yes.  I had a small team working with me by this stage, one of whom was Ninian Eadie, who later became one of the three joint managing directors of ICL.  [The other members of Doug’s team were Mike Finlay, Ray Hennessy and R.V. [Tim] Holley who later ran Dataskil, ICL’s bureau arm, then became CEO of Camelot.]
Later on I was moving into the sales side and I’d got involved in the London Boroughs Scheme, the Joint Computer Centre, which was based down in Greenwich for six London boroughs, sharing a computer.  Makes excellent sense when you think about it, good economically; they've got to agree to use the same systems so there was not duplication of effort.  At that time a lot of utilities were duplicating effort and writing and designing billing programmes, for instance, where really you could say that the case for a common billing programme was pretty strong.  And there was a grave shortage of people who could design that sort of system to work on a computer.  
So I got involved in local government after the London Boroughs System.  We had no customer base in those days, so every sales campaign that we started on, we started against an existing supplier who might have been IBM, it might have been NCR, and it might have been Burroughs. All those companies had got their own computer department as well.  So there was a lot of competition, there were a lot of suppliers.  And frequently there'd be seven or eight people tendering for the job, which again was very nice for the people who are choosing the system, because they enjoyed it.  But we had to do it. 
For instance at Cerebos we knocked out NCR.  And at Heinz, I think we knocked out NCR. In fact so much so that NCR came chasing after me, they offered me a job, and they said they'd put me on commission, but we [at LEO] weren’t on any commission, we were just paid a fat salary, a flat salary, not a fat one.  It wasn't fat.  And I remember them saying to me, “You will earn in commission what will make your salary look like small potatoes”. I remember, that's the way they talked.  The interviewer was Canadian.  And I said, “Well, what's the commission scheme, then?”  And he couldn't explain it to me.  
I didn't join NCR.  But one of our ex guys was there, a guy who had worked with me rang me and said, “They're after you and they want to get you”, and I said, “Well okay but I don't really want leave LEO”. I didn't want to leave LEO and I wouldn't leave!  That was the first time I was head hunted, you know.  
And then we, LEO, were onto LEO III, and of course, we’re going past LEO, we became part of English Electric. It was a takeover, but it wasn't sold as a takeover to the staff.  I happened to find out about it from somebody who shouldn’t have talked, but he did when I was having to see them about some contractual point.  And I said, “What about this merger?”  And he said “what merger?”  And of course they'd got fifty one percent and the right to appoint the managing director.  So it wasn't a merger, but it was sold as a merger.
[LEO Computers Limited, the computer subsidiary of J. Lyons & Co. was amalgamated with the computer interests of English Electric in February 1963 and in April 1963 the new company with the name English Electric LEO Co. was announced].
[MG]: You mentioned earlier that, in your very early days of LEO, you didn't think there was any future in computing, or more importantly a future for you in computing.  That obviously changed as time went by?
[DC]: It did change as time went by; it took about two years to really change.  Because you've got to remember that LEO was a large computer and there were a limited number of organisations that could afford it.  The technical developments of LEO were truly astounding in relation to the amount of effort that could be thrown at them.  For example, it [LEO III] was the first computer in the world to work using multi programming. It was the first computer in the world that solved the problem of getting data into the system and results output, by a system of buffers so that in fact the exchanges [with the processor] were done electronically, at electronic speed.  But that wasn't patented: I don't think that concept was patented.  And in fact when IBM came round I believe that the guys talked, you know, explained it all to them, and they thought “what a wonderful idea”, so I'm told, but I don't know whether that's true or not.  
 	But, also the big plus point of LEO in those days was the ability of its staff to plan systems and this country ran very short of system developers and system analysts - good system analysts.  And when the market got flooded with a number of machines, which it did do, and smaller machines, the basic concept of customers was to take what was being done and put it onto a computer, as it had been on a bunch of punch card machines or something like that, whatever it was it was being done on.  
 	The LEO concept was completely different because you started off thinking about the requirements of the user and you weren’t inhibited by what was being done at that point of time.  The teashops job is a wonderful example of that because it wasn't simply taking the inputs that were coming in and mechanising them, it was redesigning the system [Editor: now often called systems re-engineering].  David Caminer was probably one of the best systems designers in the world.  He was really a tremendous guy.  I worked for David for twelve years - I worked until the merger with ICT in 1968 [Editor: in 1968 the Government sponsored the merger of all the major UK computer manufacturers to form ICL].   By that time I was running all the public sector stuff for English Electric LEO.  And, David was not the easiest man to work for but he was probably the most brilliant guy and most dedicated guy I've ever come across.  He really was dedicated to the LEO project, and he felt very strongly about keeping the image of LEO good.  And, well, he got some tremendous results.
[MG]:   Tell me about David’s personality.  I hear he was a very, very determined, strong man with lots of opinions?
[DC]: Yes, he was determined? Well of course he was.  Was he a strong man?  Yes, but he had a soft side too.   When he got annoyed he was, as often as not, annoyed with himself rather than the individual he was maybe haranguing at the time.  It would cause him to do some odd things and it made life extremely difficult.  But he took responsibility for everything his staff did, he didn't say “oh it’s so and so, and so and so done that one”.  He would take responsibility.   And he was a very strong leader. 
He also had a great gift of, a natural gift of writing, so if you wanted an advert or a write-up for a magazine or something, he could do it better than anybody else and quicker than anybody else because he would just write it straight off.  He had his certain eccentricities, but on the whole working for him was a really good experience and it was not to be missed.   He knew so much about all the projects that, he got really upset personally if things went wrong on a project, and they did from time to time, because there was a shortage of resource, of skilled resources.  You couldn't get the skilled resources, and that’s why the LEO people, of course, were such attractive propositions to outside organisations.  And they were sought after by them and all the key LEO guys, in the end most of them, moved on to other things.  Peter Hermon moved on [to BOAC], and so on.  Jack Warner, who was the chief operator, moved on to Dunlop’s.  But that was a move that we probably helped to design getting him in on the first LEO III going to a customer. 
You mentioned that the guy from Google had said, “Where did it all go wrong?”  Well where did it all go wrong?  There's the fact that only two percent of the world markets in this country, probably not that.  There was fifty percent in America.  And the Americans would support innovation and go for innovation in a way that companies in the UK would not.  This became apparent, for instance, later on with the Distributed Array Processor, which was a brilliant development by ICL it was by then.  But I was told to - I was running Marketing at the time - cut the spend on it. But I managed to hide a little bit of money and we kept the development going.  But, when it came to trying to sell the product, you could sell it in America but you couldn't sell it over here.  A subsidiary company was set up to sell it but they really hadn't got a hope in hell.
[MG]: Was that because they didn't have enough salesmen on it?
[DC]: No they had salesmen, they tended not to be what I would regard as the world’s best salesmen.  And the problem was that there was a too restricted a market. But later on, when I got involved in international things, ICL had got the odd thing going in America, a few installations. But it was really stupid, if you think about it: it was haemorrhaging cash, but it would have been a brave man who would have said, “we want to get out of the American market”.  
I really built up my career working on the sales and marketing side, getting involved with customers. I think probably the moment when I was shocked was when we’d been pitching for Coventry Corporation, who were the site of the first IBM 1401 in the UK.  And I'd reviewed it with David Caminer. I said, “Look David, we’re putting up a good show but we haven't got a cat’s chance in hell of getting the order”.  And one afternoon the phone rang and my secretary said, “It’s Doctor Marshall”, who was the Treasurer of Coventry Corporation.  And he said “Douglas, I thought you ought to know we’re having a meeting of the finance committee this afternoon and it will be made public that the decision and the recommendation is that we buy a LEO III.”  I was speechless, I really was speechless.  I just went into David and said, “We got Coventry”.  And he said “Really?  Bloody good”.  I said, “I don't know how we did it.” It was because I'd a decent guy working with me  doing the legwork on the systems analysis and so on and so forth.  But it was the first machine to be manufactured in the English Electric factory as opposed to the LEO factory, it went late: It was three weeks late.  T.R.Thompson saw the Treasurer and we’d made special arrangements to handle his stuff, so the Treasurer went away happy.  No, there were those things, they were big .

Editor:  Rather an abrupt end.  Would Comish be prepared to round this off by going on to the end of his career up to retirement and even beyond?  This could be done by a further interview or by him adding a text addendum to the interview, followed by a short reflection on his LEO career and what made LEO special.  One further paragraph might say something about the social milieu  at Lyons and LEO and his participation in it.

[End]

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