Abstract: After a career in the Merchant Navy achieving his Masters certificate ‘discovered’ computing, studied programming and applied for Jobs in computing. Interviewed by J Lyons & Co for an operator job and joined Lyons 1964 as an operator on the LEO III. Promoted rapidly to Operations Manager, then overall Systems Manager. After retirement became interested in the history of Lyons and in the LEO story resulting in the publication of his books on LEO and subsequently on Lyons: the First Food Empire.

Transcript :

 LEO COMPUTERS LIMITED - Oral History Project
 Interview with Peter Bird by Tony Morgan

Tony Morgan: It’s the 6th of September 2016 and I’m Tony Morgan and I’m inter viewing Peter Bird to give us the story of his involvement with Lyons and LEO from the early days. We are recording this interview as a part of the LEO Computers History Project. This transcript will be lodged at a central archive and made available to researchers and members of the general public. Good morning Peter. Perhaps you’d like to introduce yourself and tell us about where and when you were born, your parents, what your education at primary and secondary school was and what qualifications you got.
Peter Bird: I was born on 7th December 1934 in Walthamstow, London and on the 19th of September 1940, at the start of the Second World War, the family house was completely destroyed by two parachute mines and we were left homeless. At that time I was put into care of the W. V. S. (Women’s – now Royal – Voluntary Service) and my parent’s went off and were treated in hospital. After that period my brother and I were evacuated three times to three different locations and obviously my schooling was not properly dealt with. At the first two locations we were mistreated and were taken away by the authorities and then placed at a farm in Suffolk, which was totally suitable for me, consequently my education suffered seriously. I was in nine different schools during that period and was not qualified to go to University which my parents wished me to do. At fourteen II was sent to the London Nautical School in Blackfriars and at sixteen was indentured to Sir William Reardon Smith to serve a four year Cadet training apprenticeship on their tramp ships. My first year wages were £82.00 rising to £210 in the fourth year. At this time I took my Second Mates Certificate and joined an American tanker company. I remained in the Merchant Navy taking various qualifications until 1964. I achieved a First Mate’s Certificate and travelled worldwide. At the end of 1964 I was at Sir John Cass College studying for Master’s Certificate. I met a girl and decided to leave the sea and seek a career elsewhere. At this time computers were being given wide publicity and thought this might be a suitable career. I enrolled at the Fich Institute to study programming following which I sent several applications to businesses advertising for such staff but it seemed nobody wanted the skills that I had. However, I did get a reply from J. Lyons & Company. They interviewed me one day and within a day or two I was offered a job as a computer operator on their LEO III computer. This was 1964 and at the time the LEO I, LEO II and LEO III were all in use at Lyons. I was on operator for a few months and then became the Manager of the Operating Department. From there I progressed to Manager of the Computer Department followed by responsibility of the European businesses At this time Lyons were only operating their own systems but shortly thereafter started to run bureau services and Norman Beasley was heavily engaged in that operation. Norman was the person that interviewed me at Lyons.
TM: Was that a sort of role reversal?
PB: Yes. I was promoted very rapidly within Lyons and became a Systems Manager servicing companies overseas. Lyons formed company called Lyons Information Systems Ltd and I became a Director of that company and that company not only provided help and advice to companies within Lyons but also subsidiary companies in Europe and elsewhere, notably in Holland and Germany. We also had subsidiary companies in the States and Australia. In the mid-1980s the Company was taken over by Allied Breweries Ltd. And at that time many people were made redundant. In those days they called it early retirement and I was made redundant in about 1985/86 and at that time I was still fairly young and I tried to get employment elsewhere but at that time no one was interested in employing you so I got some temporary work with the Imperial War Museum as a field researcher. This was an unpaid job and was something to do at the time. I used to go around cataloguing the war memorials in Berkshire and later on I did parts of the country where we were holidaying. I also decided to write a history of the LEO computer and I did this early on after retirement. The research took about four years and the book was published in 1994 I believe.
TM: I think it was 1995.
PB: Then I became interested in the history of the Company (J. Lyons) and studied that and published that in about 2000. Both have been quite successful. I get quite a lot of enquiries about the LEO book particularly from graduates and researchers who are interested in that period of computing. With David Lawrenson who worked for Lyons as a design engineer we set up a website and on that website we basically put the history of the Lyons Company in a condensed form. It is still in operation and is used by TV companies and radio companies who often get in touch with me to find out and elaborate on some of the more interesting aspects of the company. Frank Carstairs who worked on the IBM computers which replaced the LEO computers was systems programmer and he left and set up his own company in Wokingham. As a result he hosted the website that David Lawrenson and myself had produced and that website is still running.
TM: What is the URL of that website?
PB: The URL is www.kzwp.com/lyons/. David Lawrenson as a clever engineer used to design projects for Meccano for competitions they set in the 1970s.
TM: Can I go back to the book because it was published under the name of Haslar or Hasler publishing because Haslar was the name of the Naval Military Hospital in Portsmouth.
PB: The LEO book that was not accepted by any of the major publishing houses in the UK and nobody seemed to be interested in publishing it and so I established a company under my wife’s maiden name which was Hasler. I funded it myself and bought book designers to go through it and find the best way to get it published. I got a good editor to go through the book and got a lot of good advice and then proceeded from there.
TM: I got involved with you on the number of LEOs built because some of the numbers are in the nineties. (insertions in the production schedule) The actual number is 71. Because then you went to the book, The First Food Empire: J. Lyons & Co. Phillimore published that for you and it’s another excellent read.
PB: Yes, they did. The second book, it can best be described as a coffee table book. It has some good pictures in it. (see page 124, top. Lyons road vans above a Lyons canal barge above Lyons rail wagons at Three Bridges, Windmill Lane, Osterley) It was published by Phillimore, as you say, this was a successful book but one of the problems associated with it was that Phillimore thought that there was too much in it. There was too much history in it. I thought that you could not expunge history at a stroke. History is history and it should be published, but their view was, that unless I reduced it in size, they wouldn’t publish it, so that how I got it published.
TM: Not a case 'Publish and be Damned’?
PB: That’s it. Some of the LEO people at the time who were still live, Gosden, Lenaerts and one or two others, gave me a lot of advice and help. Sadly these guys have died but their contribution to the book lives on.
TM: Ernest Lenaerts, or Len as he was known was the man that Lyons put in at Cambridge to see what the EDSAC (Electronic Digital Storage Access Calculator) was all about lived quite near me and we used to travel back on the train together after Reunions and I used to see him locally after his retirement.
PB: He was, as you say, posted to Cambridge University as a contribution to giving advice to Lyons on building this LEO machine. At the time materials were very short and I remember him telling me, and indeed showing me, some of the materials Lyons gave him to write his reports on. They were the backs of advertising material for Lyons Bakery. He couldn’t even get a notebook.
TM: There a thing called the Lenaerts Diaries which went to about 25 volumes hat have been microfiched but Lenaerts writing, like Caminer’s, is very difficult to read.
PB: What’s happened to his original documents then?
TM: I believe the Society has access to them.
PB: I remember that when I left Lyons I had access to many systems reports I wrote on my visits to foreign subsidiary companies and nobody wanted them and they were thrown away. Some of them may have ended up at Manchester University.
(at this point a general conversation developed on why no LEO still exists, LEO III/33 in store in Scotland, scrapping value, the Science Museum’s interest and their new Information Age Gallery which Peter has visited)
TM: We’ve just been reminiscing. One area I want to cover is Lectors, Autolectors and Xeronic printers. What involvement did you have with them?
PB: Well, the Lectors, Autolectors and Xeronic printers were almost unique to Lyons. They designed documents which went out to the salesmen who returned them as order forms and the result was automatic input to the computer. The Lectors were quite a successful innovation and this was followed by Autolector. The Autolectors were very much faster than the Lectors. I forget how much paper they read per minute but it was fairly rapid.
TM: 300 documents per minute.
PB: They weren’t very successful because of the paper jams that used to happen quite frequently. I think the Royal Naval Dockyards used them and one or two other organisations but for Lyons they were a very modern and efficient method of input to the computer and almost did away completely with data preparation to paper tape.
TM: The Lector was a mark sensing device that produced paper tape off-line and the Autolector was on-line straight into the store .I became an expert on Autolectors. My last assignment as Commissioning Manager was to work overnight at Lyons to proving their second Autolector on LEO III/46 was compatible with the first one on LEO III/7. What I found was that the first one was no longer set up mechanically. All the wheels and pulleys had to be perfectly aligned. If the engineers had understood it mechanically properly… I got it working and Lyons were quite pleased. They now had two working Autolectors.
PB: One of the innovators on the Lectors and Autolectors was a chap called Dan Broido. He was heavily involved. I don’t know if he was involved with the Xeronic printers but that was an operation set up by the J. Arthur Rank Organisation and that was a masterful bit of printing. It was about four timed the speed of a line printer on the computer and produced heaps of paper which was really newsprint paper and special guillotines had to be designed in order to cut the mark-sensing forms produced by the printer. The problem was that if they had been miscut by a small fraction they could not be read. Sometimes spots appeared in the little boxes on the form which the Autolector read and spurious information was recorded and so the two were not compatible but they could work extremely well. The Xeronic printer used a fusing assembly to burn the carbon images into the paper and one night when this was happening the operator fell asleep when he should have been watching the paper and it caught alight and this caused quite a serious fire that crippled both LEO III computers (particularly LEO III/7) operated by Lyons.
TM: I sent Dave White who had commissioned LEO III/7 up there for about a week to get it back on the air.
PB: It was debatable as to whether or not Lyons would recover from this. The LEO company sent in a army of engineers and stripped it down and got it working within about 10 days. The printer was a more serious problem because without that we could not print the output that was required by the business and so we had to convert many of the programs from Xeronic programs to Anelex printing. But meanwhile there was a Xeronic printer being assembled in the factory at Shepherds Bush where J. Arthur Rank had their offices and production line and this was earmarked for Lyons, and so two birds were killed with one stone really.
TM: There was also a temporary arrangement with Charles House across the road (the Post Office/British Telecom computer centre) who had just installed a Xeronic printer and you moved the operation temporarily over to Charles House.
PB: That’s right.
TM: Of course as a result of that fire the Post Office never used that machine in anger because of Union safety objections.
PB: We already had an arrangement that we would run their work, if there was a problem, and we would run theirs if there was a problem. So much of the work was transferred overnight and printed on their Anelex printers.
(at this point I do update Peter on my six month secondment in 1975 to sort out Charles House and their magnetic tape and many other problems and my involvement right to the end of their LEO operations)
PB: Of course one of the problems was they had specified extra special characters for the Xeronic printer as had Lyons specified ours, for examples little soup bowls that the sales staff would mark.
TM: A bit like the Lenaerts character on the Powers printer on LEO II. (it looked a bit like the Euro sign and was used for setting up print quality)
PB: The other thing was that the Xeronic printer in the factory at Shepherds Bush was being assembled for GCHQ and it had Chinese characters and other specialised characters and they had to be changed. I think that printer at GCHQ is still in operation.
(at this point I tell Peter about Eastcote's (where I live) involvement in wartime and the immediate post-war period, of being an outstation of Bletchley Park with 100 Bombe machines, operated by Wrens and serviced by RAF Northolt technicians and the foundation of GCHQ there prior to the ‘flying saucer building’ at Cheltenham and the plaque commemorating it 150 yards along the road from me)
PB: Another odd thing was that when I was evacuated to Buckinghamshire, my mother used to visit and she wanted to get a job at High Wycombe and she got offered a job at Bletchley Park. She didn’t know what Bletchley Park was. Now she was quite good at maths. She had to refuse it because they hadn’t got any facilities for children so she turned it down.
(because of Peter’s Imperial War Museum involvement I then briefly mentioned my own military interests)
TM: Well, Peter, I think we basically covered the interview framework, and unless you’ve got anything else to add…
PB: I did write two more books. One book was in respect of the Lyons War Memorials. I researched all the names on the Lyons War Memorials, both the First World War and the Second World War, and this was a result of when the new Lyons Company wanted to sell the Greenford site and they wanted to move the memorials which were located there, and they wanted to move them to a small site down the road and put a metal fence around it just to protect it. I and other people objected to this because many of the people were prisoners of war and it didn’t seem right that this memorial should be protected in this way, and so I wrote to the Hammersmith Council I found out that one of the managers there had worked for Lyons and that Hammersmith Council would take the memorials and put them in a cemetery, because Lyons was located in the Borough, and they would do that. And I managed to persuade J. Lyons & Company to give them 40 thousand pounds as an amount of money to keep them in perpetuity. They’ve put them in Margravine Cemetery and made a very, very good job of locating them. Following that I researched these memorials and there were names on them, and on one of them, in particular there’s a name that appears there and he didn’t die and there are many, many names missing who did die. So I wrote a book on this and documented it, where they were killed, how they were killed, where they are buried, if the body wasn’t found, what memorial their name is on. It wasn’t published because it wasn’t of sufficient interest to the general public. What I’ve done is edit it all and I will send electronic copies to both Hammersmith Council and the Imperial War Museum, because I still work for the Imperial War Museum, as I’ve said earlier as a field researcher, and I think they will keep it in their records.
TM: Can I suggest anther place you might send it is the London Archive which where I went to hear Neville Lyons, because they keep the Lyons records and that is where he did his research. Well that’s terrific.
PB: The other book that I had published. I mentioned the steamship company I worked for, William Reardon Smith and Sons Ltd. I’ve documented all their ships that were sunk and all the people that were killed thereon. That will go down to the Cardiff Museum for them to keep.
TM: The Society is sorting out a granite plaque which Hammersmith Council will install in Lyons Walk. Unfortunately that is being delayed by the main-road construction of a cycleway. The other thing is we’ve been to the Queen’s Head in Brook Green and they’re going to put photographs either side of the mirror over the fireplace where in the area where they have their historic photographs. One will be of the Guinness Book of Records Certificate and the other will be of the plaque.
PB: I think it was one of Frank Carstairs favourite pubs.
(there followed talk of other watering holes in the area, notorious and otherwise)
TM: Well, unless you’ve got any other reminisces, we’ll wound it up. Far more has come out than I ever hoped for. I’ll do the transcript of it and we’ll agree it.
(at this point I made sure I had recorded the interview successfully. Off microphone I thanked Peter for everything and his time and trouble doing the interview)

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