Abstract: Helen joined LEO Computers in 1962, having previously visited Cadby Hall to see LEO I as part of a careers trip. She first attended Hartree House on a programming course, on which were many women. She then started work at the Minerva Road factory doing programming before switching to training at Hartree House, producing training manuals and lecturing and where she met her husband Richard. She remained as LEO Computers merged with English Electric and Marconi, later moving to Radley House. Helen moved to Australia for 3 years for Richard's work with LEO, becoming a teacher, remaining in that career on return to England.

Transcript :

Elisabetta Mori:	I’m going to read a brief introduction and then we start.
Helen Clews:	Okay.
EM:	It’s the 1st of August 2022, and I am Elisabetta Mori.  I am interviewing Helen Clews to give us a story of her involvement with LEO Computers from the earliest day.  Good morning, Helen.  We are recording now.  I am in Tuscany, in Elba Island, and Helen is in the UK.  Would you like to tell us where you are?
HC:	I am at home in Amersham in Buckinghamshire.
EM:	Great.  So, we are interviewing this interview as a part of the LEO Computer Society: Oral History Project.  The audio version and the transcript will be locked at the central archive and made available for researchers and members of the public.  So welcome, Helen.  Perhaps you would like to introduce yourself; your name, your date of birth?
HC:	Well, I’m Helen Clews – I was born Helen Garsed in April 1941.  I was born in a country house called Fulmer Chase, just outside a village called Fulmer, not far from here.  It was during the war, and my father was an officer with REME in Europe at the time.  Fulmer Chase had been requisitioned as a military hospital and maternity home for the duration of the war. 
EM:	Have you got any siblings?
HC:	Yes, I’ve a sister who’s 13 months older than me, then there’s a gap of six years (because of the war), and then I have two younger brothers.  One is six years younger, and the other is eight years younger.  
We lived on the outskirts of Slough, and I went to school at St Bernard’s Convent in Slough.  The junior school was private, but I got the 11+ to the senior school, and there I was reasonably successful, getting eight O-levels.  I wanted to study sciences at A-level.  My parents moved to Ealing about this time and St Bernard’s wasn’t a good school for science, so I moved to the Sacred Heart Convent in Hammersmith and travelled from Ealing to Hammersmith each day on the underground while doing my A levels.  This was an academic Catholic grammar school where I was very happy.  (I’d been happy at St Bernard’s too).  

From there, I went to Leicester University to do a Maths degree, which I enjoyed, but I also enjoyed the social side of university.  Afterwards I went to the careers’ office and said: “I’ve just done a Maths degree.  What can I do?”  They told me I could teach, go into the aircraft industry or go into the new computer industry.  
I remembered that when I was at school in Hammersmith we’d been taken on a careers’ trip to Cadby Hall and I’d actually seen LEO I working, and looking back on the history of it, I’m quite proud to feel that I’m one of the relatively few people who actually saw LEO I working.  We were taken round the programming offices, and I saw all these people at big desks with loads of paper in front of them and I was told that they were giving the computer instructions.  I thought, what do they mean?  I mean, how do you do that?  In a very short careers trip, you can’t really understand what’s going on, so I came home fascinated by the computer but with little idea of programming as a job.  
And then on the careers’ board at Leicester, a notice went up asking for people to join LEO.  And I thought, well, I don’t want to go to university and then straight back to school to teach.  I had one interview with an aircraft company where the ratio of men to women was about 100:1 and I thought “well, that’s not for me.  I don’t mind being outnumbered, but not by that much, so I’ll try LEO”, which I remembered from the school trip.  I applied, was invited to come for an aptitude test and interview, and then invited to join.  My starting salary was £750 a year but having been living on £2 a week at university, it seemed like riches.
EM:	Let’s go back to your time at school.  So, did you have any influence on your early life or like your parents, what inspired you to study sciences?
HC:	My father was very supportive of anything to do with academic work or sport.
EM:	Can you describe your parents, what were their occupations?
HC:	My father was the managing director of a factory making roofing felt in the East end of London.  He was the eldest of eight children and had always wanted to go to university, but his father had a heart attack when he was 50 and so Father had to leave school at 16 to help support the family.  And he really encouraged me academically.  He didn’t push me, but since fairly early on, I showed an aptitude for numbers he really encouraged me.  I think he wanted to give me all the opportunities that he hadn’t had himself.  
Of the eight children in my father’s family, only one was a girl, and my mother had four brothers.  So, I had 10 uncles and nearly every one of them was an engineer or an accountant.  So, I think a facility with Maths. was in my genes, I just found it easy and interesting.  
My mother was very supportive of everything I did.  She was lovely, and a great reader - she encouraged me to read, and she taught me dressmaking.  I made nearly all my clothes when I was young, even making my wedding dress.  She was a natural teacher without being a teacher, if you know what I mean.
EM:	What was her job?
HC:	Well women in those days didn’t work, or if they did, they had to give up when they married.  After school my mother did a course in interior design at the Bartlett School of Art in London and worked for a year as a photographer’s assistant before getting married.  My sister inherited all her genes - she’s very artistic.  I like art, but I was no good at it.  So, yeah, it was a very happy childhood.
EM:	Okay, so let’s go back to the day you saw LEO I.
	How much did it influence your subsequent career?
HC:	Well, seeing that notice on the university board reminded me of LEO, and I suddenly remembered it as something I’d been fascinated by but hadn’t fully understood, and I wanted to know what all those women, and men, were doing sitting at programming desks.  And I thought “This is wonderful, I can go back there and find out what they were doing”.  No other options seemed as exciting as computing, which at that time was a very new industry.
I’d not known what I wanted to do after university and here was something new, different, exciting.  So, it was worth going for the interview, wasn’t it?
EM:	Can you tell us a bit more about how the structure of this interview.
HC:	Well, we were given a short introductory lecture on programming, and then set some exercises, which felt like logic puzzles. For example, you were given some numbers in three boxes, and you had to manipulate them in the way you had been told in the lecture, to put different numbers in the same boxes.  You had to be careful to make sure you didn’t overwrite a number you might need again.  Do you see what I mean?  There was quite a lot of logic in it.  Then they took us for a three-course lunch, and then we had another programming lecture, which was a little more applied to commerce, followed by another exercise.  Then (I had totally forgotten this until reminded recently), we were asked to write down the detailed stages in making a cup of tea.  And I remember thinking, “I don’t drink tea”.  I’d hardly made tea in my life, and I remember thinking, “Do they want me to warm the pot?” 
It’s quite likely I failed that bit of the test.  Then I had an interview in which I was asked the usual sort of questions - why did I want to join LEO? How did I find the test? What was I interested in? etc.
A few days later I got a letter to say they’d be pleased to offer me a job, starting on the 24th of September 1962.  
When I got to LEO on that day, it was not at Cadby Hall, but at Hartree House in Queensway, which was a brilliant place to work.  There were, I think, 25 on my course of which 13 were women.  They were nearly all recent graduates employed by LEO, rather than by LEO’s customers.  LEO were recruiting programmers to programme for their customers, but many customers were building their own teams of programmers, who were sent to be trained at Hartree House as well. 
As far as I remember, the trainees coming in from customers tended to be more male biased, but LEO’s attitude was:  If you passed the aptitude test and the interview, it didn’t matter who you were.  And, even more importantly I think, they didn’t mind what subjects you’d studied at university.  I had three friends, one had studied French, another English and a third Philosophy.  A lot of the others, of course, had done maths. and science, but I thought LEO were brilliant by having no preconceptions about people they accepted except, you know, that they were suitable for the job.
EM:	So, you started in September 1962, so, can you describe how your career evolved?
HC:	Well, I started off being sent to Minerva Road, to the factory, to do some mathematical programming.  But it was that awful winter of 1962/3. I was trudging to work in snow for a lot of the time, travelling on the underground in smog, and the factory was not a nice place to work compared with Hartree House. 
EM:	Can you describe Hartree House and the factory at Minerva Road?
HC:	Hartree house was in Queensway, which is a lovely part of London near Kensington Gardens.  The offices were above Whiteleys department store.  So, I mean, that was brilliant - in the lunch hour you could go into the store and buy clothes and books and records or whatever.  The offices were quite large and as far as I remember, there were three big commercial programming offices.  One I know was headed by Helen Jackson and I think they were programming LEO II, and then there were two big offices programming LEO III.  I can’t remember the names of the people in charge of those.
EM:	What time did you go to work?
HC:	Normally 9:00 till 5:30 I think it was.  Oh, there must have been another office of software programmers working on the Master Programme, (which would now be called the Operating System), and translators and compilers, converting from higher level languages into Intercode, which is what I was mainly programming in, and from there, to computer code. 
It was a lovely place to work and of course, being a new industry, employing lots of young graduates, and a few who’d done A-levels —the social life was lovely.  There were loads of young people enjoying themselves at the beginning of their careers.
EM:	Do you have friends there?
HC:	A lot, yes.  I suppose I only keep up with three or four, but when we had those Zoom sessions recently, I recognised several names.  And in fact, eventually, later on in my career, I taught in schools, and one of the governors of the school came up to me one day and said, “Oh I remember you, you taught me on my basic course at LEO.”  He’d moved on to do all sorts of other things by then.
EM:	Do you remember Frank Land, David Caminer?
HC:	Yeah.  They wouldn’t have remembered me, they were the gods, you know?  But I do remember the Land twins.  I remember Caminer, yeah, in his office.  But they were faces you knew, the top people.   T.R.Thompson introduced my basic course.  But Minerva Road was where they were building the computers and so that was a factory, and nearly all men.  Four people from my course went to work there but after a very short time, the project I started on was abandoned and three of us were sent back to the training department - it was training and technical writing.  We produced all the training manuals as well as lecturing on the courses.
EM:	This was 1963?
HC:	Yes, it was early ‘63 that I would have been sent back to Hartree House.
EM:	So, we’re talking about the time when LEO was merging with English Electric.  Do you remember anything of that?
HC:	Just that it happened within a year of my starting, and it was said to be a merger, but we wondered.  But it had no effect at all on what we were doing.
	And then, I remember we merged with Marconi the following year.  So, it was English Electric-LEO-Marconi. The fact that English Electric came first rather suggested it wasn’t an equal merger.  But again, I’ll just note, they were selling loads of LEO IIIs and I think I calculated that 35 LEO IIIs went live in the three years that I was in London, which is just about the lifespan of LEO III, because the first one went live in April ‘62 and I joined in September ‘62.  And then, I left LEO in London in 1965 just as System 4 was coming in – though I think the last LEO III was installed in 1969.
EM:	So, you think your little bit like memories, you say that you remember also giving the course to the office in the Barbican?
HC:	Yeah.   LEO’s biggest customer was the General Post Office, and they bought several machines.  I’m not sure of the exact number, but they bought an awful lot.  They had big offices in the Barbican.  There was a CTO building and another one, and I went to give two courses there to their own staff.  
You see some customers wanted LEO to do all their programming for them, while other customers built up their own programming teams, usually with senior and/or chief programmers going in from LEO to guide them at first.  And so, I went to give two basic courses to GPO employees at their offices in the Barbican.  And unlike the courses at Hartree, they were nearly all men.  
And if I can do an aside:  I met a woman recently and we were chatting about our careers, and I said I’d been in the early computer industry, and she said: “Oh! you’re so lucky. I was working for a bank, and they asked for volunteers to train for the computer department they were setting up, but they wouldn’t let women apply”.  So, there was a lot of prejudice around in the country at that time, though not at LEO. 
Anyway, yes, I enjoyed going out to customers when I did, but that was rare.
EM:	So, what about private life?  So, where were you living at that time?
HC:	For the first year I had a flat in Earl’s Court with my sister and two friends, but at the end of that year my sister and another girl got engaged and wanted to go home to save money.  My parents were living in Ealing from where it was an easy journey to Hartree House on the Tube, so I went home too.  
Then in 1964 the Training Department moved to Radley House, which was in another part of Ealing, so I only had a mile to walk to work.  And there’s a bit of an anecdote there as well, because in the winter it was a cold walk in a skirt, so I asked the head of training if I could wear a trouser suit to work, and he said:  “Well, if it was just us, I’d say yes, but since you’re coming into contact with customers, I’d prefer you not to”.  It just shows how social attitudes have changed in our lifetime.

HC:	I met my husband Richard at work.  He was on the basic course following mine.  I joined in September 1962, and he joined in October ‘62.  He went through the more usual route of programmer, senior programmer, chief programmer working for customers on their sites, eventually becoming a systems analyst.  He stayed with the company, you know, including ICL right to the end of his career, ending up as a project manager.  
EM:	Where did you meet at work?  
HC:	At Hartree House, because in the first days he was on a basic course and then his first job was in Hartree, before he was sent out to customers.  So that would have been in later ‘63.  And then the customers he was sent to were London based, so it was easy for us to meet after work.  We also played tennis a few times at the Lyons social club.  We were married in June 1965.
EM:	What happened when you got married?  Because you told me a lot of women quit.
HC:	Oh, no, that was the generation above - my mother and aunts.  No, I could go on working, no problem.  We got married at Ealing Abbey in June ‘65 and at that time LEO were asking for volunteers to go and help set up Australian Computers Ltd., which was a branch of English Electric- LEO-Marconi in Australia.  We’d just got married, we had no children, we had no house, no mortgage, no chattels, we thought this is an ideal time to go.  So, we volunteered and were flown out to Melbourne in November 1965.  Richard was on a three-year contract, but I wasn’t, and the contract was: We fly you out, you stay three years, at the end of which either you can stay, or we will bring you home by air or sea.  After three great years there we chose to come home by sea in January 1969.  We were on one of the last of the P&O working liners as opposed to cruise ships.  But it was like a cruise.  It was lovely.
EM:	What’s your impression of Australia when you move?
HC:	I absolutely loved it.  I have Raynaud’s syndrome which means that I feel the cold badly and my hands go dead easily.  So, I loved the heat, life was easy, driving was easy, we lived near the office.  We used to go to the office by tram, which was a bit different.  I just loved the space.  We were newly married which helped the magic.  We travelled and saw as much as we could.
 	In three years, we had three big holidays.  We drove across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth before the road was properly surfaced.  We went on a two-week coach-camping trip to Queensland, up to Darwin, and back to Alice Springs and Ayers Rock - as it was called then.  And the third year we went by train up the coast to northern Queensland and the barrier reef.  So, we saw quite a bit of Australia.  And I would have stayed, but Richard’s hobby interests were history and architecture, and there’s not a great deal of either in Australia.  His potential job prospects were better in England too, so we came back.
EM:	Can you describe your workplace in Australia?  Were you working in the same building as your husband?
HC:	No, there was the company office in St Kilda, and I was based there.  I’d just been on a System 4 course before we went, so my first job was to get all the Australian company’s training materials up to scratch.  I was officially ‘training officer, Melbourne’ and was on my own.  I then taught a System 4 course for all their employees.  Meanwhile, my husband was working on a LEO machine for a bank in Melbourne, but we had a flat six miles out of the centre of the city, on Port Philip Bay, and after work we could have a five-minute walk down to the bay for a swim. It was super.  
So, he was working in the city and I was in the relatively small office in St Kilda.  There’s a large war memorial in a big park there, and our offices were right opposite it.  But the company didn’t sell many computers, and so after I’d trained all the company people, I was underemployed.  We wanted to start a family and I thought that teaching would suit that better because I’d have the school holidays, and anyway, I was enjoying the teaching part of the job more than the actual computing part.  
So, after a year, I went to the State of Victoria Department of Education and said: “I’ve a Maths degree and I’ve been teaching in industry, but I haven’t actually got a teaching certificate.  Is there any chance of becoming a maths teacher?”.   The reply was: “If it’s maths, we’ll put you in a school tomorrow”.  I said: “Hang on, I’m going on holiday for the next two weeks”.  I started on the Monday after my holiday, which was six weeks before the end of the Australian academic year, and they paid me for that six weeks although the job vacancy didn’t start until the following year, so the school in effect gave me six weeks intensive teacher training, and I was able to work through all the syllabuses for the following year with the head of department.  
So, in February 1967, at the beginning of the next school year, I was up and running, and I taught there for two years.  I was out of computing until I came home.  But that’s something I wanted to talk about really because, as I say, LEO was superb for being open-minded in their recruitment.  Women were thought to be very good programmers, very careful and so on, and I know of a few women, who worked with my husband, who went on to make good, long-term careers in computing, but on the whole, the senior people were mainly men, and an awful a lot of the women left because in those days there was very little childcare.  
And this is a big social change that I’d like people in the future to know.  I mean, your choices were: If you were rich, you could employ a nanny.  You could have an au pair, some of which were superb, but they were mainly very young girls from Europe who came for a year to learn English.  Well, that was not the best person to teach a child to talk.  And, anyway, I wanted to teach my children myself.  If you were lucky, there were grandparents, but we lived a long way from our parents.  Childminders existed but they were not registered in those days.  The play-schemes movement developed at this time, but they were voluntary and run by mothers, and your child could go morning or afternoon, so they didn’t allow you to have a fulltime job.  
So, until Steve Shirley came along and set up F-International, allowing programmers to work from home, fulltime work was difficult.  All-day nurseries became generally available much later.
EM:	So, let’s go back to the story of your life.  So you were in Australia until 1969?
HC:	We came back in January ‘69.
EM:	And what was your feeling about coming back?
HC:	We came back to winter.  I immediately got glandular fever.  We had no house; we came back to stay with my parents for a bit.  I’d loved Australia, and didn’t really want to come back, but we did want a family and I thought:  “Well, if we don’t go back they won’t have grandads and grannies and aunties etc.”.  And in the three months between making the decision and actually sailing, I thought of all the things I’d missed about England.  So, I was content to come back, but if it’d been my decision I would have stayed. 
But we were happy back in England.  Richard got the best job of his career in Manchester, and we bought our first house and lived in South Manchester for the next three years.  His was a very successful, pioneering job for the TSB Building Society.  It was one of the first jobs allowing terminals in each branch, feeding into a mainframe.
 EM:		For ICL?
HC:	Still with ICL.
EM:	So, what did you do?
I did one year teaching maths in a very rough school in Manchester before we had the children, but then the next two years I was at home looking after them.  Then on the strength of what Richard had done at the TSB, he was promoted to a job in London, and we bought a house in Chesham, which is three miles away from where I am now.  We assumed it would be for three years because Australia had been three years, TSB had been three years, Chesham would be three years, but I sold it 46 years later to downsize, to Amersham.  We were very happy in Chesham.  
I stayed at home for seven years altogether, until my younger child went to school, and then I got local, mainly part-time teaching jobs for the next twenty- four years.
EM:	What did you teach?
HC:	Mainly maths.  I started off half-time in what’s called a non-selective school.  In those days, it was called a secondary modern.  It was for pupils who’d failed the 11+.
	I stayed there for two years.  It was a lovely school, and I had a superb head of department who taught me an awful lot about teaching less able children, which was very useful, even when I went to the local grammar school.  So, after two years, I got a job at Chesham High, which was a mixed grammar, and my ideal school.  Having been to an all-girls school, I wanted to teach in a mixed school.  Being a grammar school, the kids were very responsive and there were very few discipline problems.  
While I was there, I also did a bit of computer science.  I taught an AS in computer science for a few years, but I then found that computing was advancing so quickly that I was spending more time learning about new developments for one class a week than I was spending on my main subject.  So, I asked if the school would employ a computer science specialist so that I could just do maths.
EM:	Did you have a lab at school, with computers?
HC:	Well, a few years after I arrived the entire school of about 900 pupils went on a 10-mile sponsored walk, all round the local countryside to raise money to install a computer lab.  So, yes, after a few years we did have a lab.
EM:	Were there BBC Micro or other computers?  
HC:	The people using it would have liked BBCs.  But the county was contributing and was in charge of commissioning the computers, and wanted to standardise over all its schools, so we had computers made by Research Machines, which I think were made in Oxford.  But I mean the BBC was much better and much easier for the kids, and by then a lot of the kids had them at home.
For a while we ran a computer club in the lunch hour.  It was a while before computing became part of every child’s curriculum.  In fact, when I first went there in 1979, it was a six-form entry school, and the two top streams did maths O-level a year early, and then in their fifth year, they did an additional O-level maths., with one lesson a week computing with me.  For that we only had one computer and they were programming on marked cards, a bit like multiple choice marks, and they would spend the lessons programming.  I’d then collect up the batch of cards at the end of the lesson and run them on the computer ready for the lesson the next week.  For that, I had to teach myself BASIC, which was not difficult to do.  By then some of the students were really into it, as home computers were being introduced.  When I was running the lunch time club, some of them knew more than I did.
Later on, I was able to use computers to enhance my lessons on topics such as series and transformations.  In the final years I was in charge of teaching the children how to use graphics calculators, which we used extensively in the sixth form.
EM:	When did you retire?
HC:	At the end of the school year after I was 60, which was July 2001.  So, I’ve been retired over 20 years. 
EM:	What did you do in your retirement?
HC:	I went on coaching A-level maths for a few years, just because I enjoyed it and I wanted to keep my brain active.  And overlapping the last few years of teaching, I tutored on two introductory maths courses for the Open University.  I’d gone part-time again at school, and these courses were not a great deal beyond A-level, but it was lovely teaching adults again.  And I had the highest admiration for them.  After a full day’s work, they’d come for a two-hour tutorial to do quite hard maths, and some of them would come in and say, “I never could do maths at school, but I always thought I ought to be able to”, or “I was badly taught, but I’ve been convinced that I could have done it.”  And they were just so determined.  One woman came in on the introductory session and she said, “I’ve got four kids under five and I mustn’t let my brain go,” and I thought: “She’ll never last, with four kids under five”.  And she was one of the ones who got a distinction.  That was great.  
Anyway, I went on doing that for a year after I retired, and then I found the tutorials were restricting the time we could go on holiday.  My husband said: “Look, I’ve waited 25 years for you to give up teaching so that we could go on holiday in the low-season, and your tutorials are preventing this”, so I gave up everything.  But then, I thought: “I’ve done maths and science all my life, now I’ll see how the other half lives”, so for a year, I studied the Open University course: ‘Introduction to the Humanities’, which was terrific, fascinating.  And the two subjects I’d disliked at school, I found I loved.  I realised that you didn’t have to be able to do art to appreciate it, and that the awful way we were taught history at school was completely different from studying the French Revolution in the round with the Open University.  
EM:	Are you still in contact with your ex-LEO colleagues?
HC:	Some.  Anne Fowler and Chris Date in particular.  We were all on the same basic course in 1962 and were in the training department together. 
	Chris later became well known for the text books he wrote on relational databases.  His skill in technical writing was evident from the start.
I swap Christmas cards with another couple of friends and am in contact with people who run the LEO Computers Society.  
EM:	When you reflect on your life experience with LEO, what remains with you of that experience?
HC:	Well, I think I said in a note I sent you that they were the most exciting years of my life, but then I thought afterwards, actually, Australia was also extraordinarily exciting.  And then we came home, and we had the children, so that was exciting.  But I do look back on LEO as a superb time.  I mean, when you’re young and you have no ties and you’re doing a job you love, what’s not to like?  I’m immensely grateful for the opportunities it gave me. 
EM:	Is there anything that I haven’t asked you and you would like to talk about?
HC:	I will just mention that after that superb job in Manchester, my husband went on working for the company on several large and mainly successful jobs.  I’m most grateful to him and to ICL for his pension, which continues to support me in retirement.
Richard died in 2005, but we had three very good years together in retirement.  In those years, we joined the University of the Third Age.  It’s not a university, it's like a great big club for retired people.  I mean, I walk with them and go to a book group with them.  In the past I’ve been to groups studying Art, Architecture, Politics and French.  
In the three years between my retiring and Richard dying, we made many new friends in the U3A and they still form a large part of my social life.  
EM:	Thank you very much for your time with us.  So this interview with Helen Clews has been recorded by the LEO Computer Society, and the society would like to thank her very much for her time.  The interview and the transcript form part of the Oral History Project to document the early use of electronic computers in business and other applications, but particularly in business.  And the opinions expressed are those of the interviewee that is Helen Clews and not of the society.  The copyright of this interview in recorded form and in transcript remains the property of the LEO Computer Society.  Thank you very much. 

Provenance :
Recording made by the LEO Computers Society as part of their ongoing oral history project.

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