Digital audio of a recorded interview with Roger Emsley, who joined Lyons in 1960 working as a programmer on LEO I.

Interviewer: John Forbes
Date of interview: 10 September 2019
Length of recording: 32m57s
Format: 1 original .mp3 recording 30.19MB (transferred to .mp4 video for presentation on YouTube 105.45MB)
Copyright in recording content: Roger Emsley and LEO Computers Society

Transcript editor: unknown

Abstract: Joined Lyons as a programmer to work on LEO I, before switching to LEO II/1 and then LEO III. Left Lyons in 1964 to work for Cerebos on LEO III/18 but moved to the Sales Promotion Department of International Computers & Tabulators (ICT) later the same year to work on the ICT 1900 series, before emigrating to Canada in 1967 to work for Canadian Pacific Airlines based at Vancouver Airport. Established a computer consulting company in Vancouver in 1970 but returned to Canadian Pacific in 1971 to work in systems design on their newly acquired IBM 360, later becoming an assistant director. Moved to Geneva, Switzerland when he set up a management consulting company working on contract for the International Air Transport Association.

Transcript :

LEO COMPUTERS LIMITED - Oral History Project

Interview with Roger Emsley by John Forbes

John Forbes	It’s the 10th of September 2019.  And my name is John Forbes (JF).  I'm interviewing Roger Emsley (RE) to give us a story of his involvement with LEO Computers in the early days.  Good morning, Roger. We’re recording this interview as part of the LEO Computers Society oral history project.  The audio version and transcript will be lodged in a central archive and made available for researchers and members of the public.  

Perhaps you would like to introduce yourself, Roger.

Roger Emsley	My name is Roger Emsley (RE).  I was born August 11, 1942.  My parents are Stan and Ruth Emsley and I was born in Ealing, West London right in the middle of the World War II.  I was the second of three, my older sister having died before I was born, but only 18 months old, of a heart condition.  My youngest sister was born in 1947.  

My father worked for the Ministry of Defence and was also a special constable in the London Police Force.  Because of his work at the Ministry of Defence, he did not join the Armed Forces during the war.  He spent many nights as a special constable patrolling the streets of London, also during the air raids.  

My mother and I moved from Ealing not long after I was born because of bombs dropping nearby. I moved with my mother to grandparents in Brighton, her mother and father.  And then when Brighton was bombed, we moved to Shepton Mallet which is a small town in the county of Somerset.  My earliest memory of the Second World War is an Italian prisoner of war camp in that area where I used to go stand at the fence and talk to the Italian prisoners.  Sadly, I didn’t learn much Italian.  

After the war ended, our family was reunited and we moved to Northolt West of London.  Then when I was 12, we moved to East Molesey in Surrey, very close to Hampton Court.   
 
JF	Can you tell us of your education?

RE	My primary education was at a private school, a private boys school, Quainton Hall in Harrow.  And then my secondary education where I started at the age of 12 at Kingston Grammar School. At that time, it was an independent boy’s school. It is now co-ed [coeducational, for male and female students together].

I was in the jazz club, stamp club, rowing club and played tennis. I was also in the Combined Cadet Force  in the army section rising to the rank of staff sergeant and drum major at 18.   I graduated high school at the age of 18 with six O-level passes and one A-level pass.  
	
I didn’t have sufficient O and A-level passes to get into Dartmouth Naval College which was where my parents wanted me to go so, I started looking for jobs.  At that time, 1960, jobs were plentiful and I applied to some overseas banks, and to UK Customs and Excise, and I had a job offer from them. But then I saw an advertisement for a trainee programmer at J Lyons and Company.   I went and took the aptitude test, which I found very strange indeed, but to my surprise I was offered the job of trainee computer programmer for the sum of eight British pounds per week.  

I started work at Cadby Hall, September 1960 in what was then called the Organisation and Methods Office.  The head of the department was George Robbie.  I was under the direct supervision of Des Studdart and was mentored by Mr Webb.  I also enrolled in a management training course at Ealing Technical College because that was part of the condition of employment.  After some training, I was put to work as a programmer on LEO I .  

Programming with machine code , I was assigned to do simple program amendments.  I was also dispatched to work in the bakery division, checking results of one of the LEO I programs.  This involved sitting in an office in Cadby Hall surrounded by baking machines.  I spent days adding up reams of slips on the calculator, a hand calculator at that.  And the intent of that was to try and prove whether the LEO I program was working properly. Programming with the machine code, I recall that we used to handwrite the program on coding sheets then review it to see how we could condense it given the small computer memory that we had available.   Tricks of the trade were passed on by more experienced programmers and as well of course at the LEO training courses. 

I then moved on as a programmer on LEO II/1  to work on payroll.  I took a number of training courses at LEO’s training centre at Hartree House in Bayswater.  At that point our office moved across the street from Cadby Hall into Elms House where LEO II/1 was located.   

During that time, I recall one embarrassing incident.  I was making an amendment to one of the programs and those were stored on punch cards.  Rather than re-punch the card, I put the chad  back in as a temporary measure but promptly then forgot about it.  Not long after I got a call from operations to say the program wasn’t working.  The chad had fallen out.  I was admonished, but nothing further was said about it.   

JF	You were not the only one who fell into that trap!

RE	Indeed.  We had mostly free access to the LEO II computer room.  And I can remember one day when the LEO was down and the engineers had difficulty finding the fault so the chief engineer took a piece of wood, wrapped a cloth around it and went down the cabinets bashing them until they found the fault and that tended to be the way that faults were discovered in those days.  

I learned a lot about flow-charting which of course is one of the prerequisites before you actually wrote programs.  (I still have the plastic LEO template for flow-charting). One lesson that stayed with me and still is with me was forms design and learning from Bob Mumford who taught me so much about the efficient forms design. 

JF	And then did you also work on LEO III  ?

RE	Yes in 1963, I was sent on a LEO III programming course. I was put on a team designing a new payroll system for J Lyons.  I was assigned the tax routine and can recall spending days and days flow-charting the routines before we got down to programming.  The team members that I worked with in my Lyons career included John Carey.  He was our manager.  Des Stoddart my immediate supervisor who aside from working at Lyons, played the violin in the London Philharmonic Orchestra.  Cyril Lanch, who I'm still good friends with. David Lowie, John Sterkx, Gillian Elliot, Adrian Garden, Alan King, Eugene Jacobs and Brian Marshall.  And then on the organisation and methods side, I remember and worked with John Mortimer, Bob Mumford I've mentioned before, Ken Dawe, Bob Woodruffe and Colin Minto.  All these people added to my knowledge and helped tremendously as I progressed.

JF	And how long were you with Lyons?

RE	Well, I stayed there until early 1964 and then I made a career move, which was a huge mistake.  I left Lyons having been offered a job as a systems analyst at the Cerebos Salt Company who had recently acquired LEO III/18.  It was like stepping back into the Dickensian Era.  Their offices and factory were located in Willesden and it was very much like a Dickensian factory, huge brick building and our offices were in that building.  The computer team that I worked with were very friendly, but the company management was something else.  The systems analysts were considered as management, but outside the department, we were not regarded as such.  And I recall one silly incident. I went into the management washroom one day only to be challenged by one of the managers who was already in there saying, “Hey kid, this is for management only.”  I resigned from Cerebos after only six months on the job.  

JF	Perhaps at this stage, Roger, you can tell us a little of your home life.

RE	Well, I lived with my parents in East Moseley just close to Hampton Court and Kingston Upon Thames until I married my first wife, Angela on 5 April 1964.  We bought a small four-plex (maisonette) in Shepperton, West of London very close to the film studios.  We had our first child, a daughter in May 1966 whilst still in the UK. Then we emigrated to Vancouver, Canada on June 3, 1967.  We setup house there in South Delta in a town called Tsawwassen and an area called Beach Grove, 25 kilometres south of Vancouver.   Our second daughter was born in 1969 and then in 1970 we moved to our home on the Beach Grove waterfront on Boundary Bay facing Mount Baker.  

As soon as I got into Tsawwassen and started to get to know the community, I joined the Delta Fire Department as a volunteer in 1968 at hall number two, which was in Beach Grove at that time.  At that time the hall was staffed on nights and weekends totally by volunteers.  We were on call from 6p.m. at night until 8a.m. in the morning and all weekend.  And we were a busy hall dealing with cardiac arrests, motor vehicle accidents as well as small and large fires.  I attended two fires at the high school in the close by village of Ladner.  Living close to the hall, I would very often drive the first truck, we had two fire trucks.  We practiced every Thursday night and we were taught industrial first aid as well as firefighting and driving.  I stayed on as firefighter until 1984 when the fire department ended its volunteer program.  

In 1984, we moved from Beach Grove to a 10-acre farm nearby, where our daughters had horses. We boarded horses and we also grew and sold hay and chickens and sold their eggs.  Later we also ran part of the house as a bed and breakfast.  In 2007, we sold the farm and moved back to another waterfront home very close to our first one in Beach Grove, and that’s where I still live.  My first wife sadly died of cancer May 13, 2016.  I married a close friend of my wife in December of that year.  Marilyn, my second wife, was born in British Columbia and we are happily living in the house on the waterfront to this day.

JF	Perhaps we can take up your career after you left Cerebos.

RE	I was pleased to put Cerebos behind me in 1964. I got a job in the sales promotion department of International Computers and Tabulators, ICT .  And we were based in Putney, West London.  ICT was just launching its 1900  series computer and my role was to develop promotional literature and documents outlining the applications that could run on the 1900.  I began working with a colleague pretty much as a side-line in developing what came to be called the systems development life cycle .  He subsequently wrote a textbook about it. 

In early 1967 my father had shown me a small job advertisement for an organisation and methods practitioner with Canadian Pacific Airlines in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.  We weren’t even sure where British Columbia was.  I applied for the job, was interviewed by the department manager at the airline’s London offices in Trafalgar Square and offered the job on the condition that I agreed to work in Vancouver for a minimum of two years.  We emigrated to Canada, June 3, 1967, flying from London to Amsterdam which was Canadian Pacific’s most northerly destination in Europe.  And there we boarded the Canadian Pacific DC8 ‘Empress of Rome’ for our flight to Vancouver.  All our possessions were packed in eight tea chests and flew with us.  Some of the tea chests probably even came from Lyons!  Within a few weeks of arriving in Vancouver we knew we would never go back to UK to live. We became Canadian citizens after three years and I'm proud to say that I am a Canadian.  
	
I started work immediately at the airline’s offices at Vancouver Airport in the organisation and methods office.  I was one of six analysts in the department and several of those had also come from the UK.  Canadian Pacific did not have their 
own computer but used the CP Rail, parent company, IBM 1401 . This was located in the railroad station in downtown Vancouver.  My LEO and Lyons training was a terrific asset and I was soon working on various office and computer projects for Canadian Pacific.  I was sent to Europe to work on a computer system to manage worldwide aircraft parts, whereby airlines needing an aircraft part when away from their home base could obtain one from another airline.  I also started assisting airline representatives attending meetings of the International Air Transport Association.  The association has pretty well all the major international airlines as members and their focus is very much on standardising the way that airlines work including forms design. I started to utilise my forms design skills that I learned at Lyons.  One of my early projects was to work on a document with a small airline industry team where we were redesigning the international airwaybill used for recording cargo freight transactions. That same forms design is still in use today!
	
In 1970 I left the airline with a colleague to establish a computer consulting company in Vancouver.  Towards the end of that year, my manager at Canadian Pacific called to offer my old job back as a systems analyst.  And so back I went in early 1971 when Canadian Pacific acquired its first computer, an IBM 360 .  By then Canadian Pacific had a growing computer department with its own programmers and systems analysts of which I was one. I worked on systems design for various projects in the air cargo part of the business.  Around that time, I was approached by a senior instructor at the British Columbia Institute of Technology who asked if I would be interested in teaching a course on systems analysis.  I said yes and I asked where the course material was.  He replied, there isn't any, we’re expecting you to develop it!  Starting from scratch, I developed a course outline, teaching materials, case study, put together a 12-session evening course.  It was accepted and I began teaching one night a week at the British Columbia Institute of Technology where the course was offered as a credit course.  I did that for three years. 

At the beginning of 1973, I was offered the position of managing the cargo accounting in the airlines finance division.  In the early 1970s the airline had a 12-week strike of maintenance and airport operations employees.  Management was tasked with keeping the airline going and indeed we did.  In addition to running cargo accounting, I drove the catering trucks which brought the food up to the aircraft sitting at the airport and then brought the empty containers and remaining food back.  That was all because of my experience driving fire trucks.  

In 1978 I was promoted to assistant director, revenue accounting, responsible for both passenger and cargo revenue accounting.  I took on my first role as chairman for the IATA  revenue accounting committee during that time.  I also became project manager designing a new sales accounting system that we were developing jointly with Aer Lingus, and this involved bi-monthly trips to Dublin. 

JF	So, were there any hiccups in your career with CP Air?  

RE	Around that time there was a huge shake up and reorganisation and I was told I no longer had a job.  They were abolishing the assistant director positions.  I was able to convince the transition team that they needed me to manage the joint systems development on the Aer Lingus project, so I kept my management position. We developed it jointly with Aer Lingus and the idea was to use it both in Canadian Pacific’s operation as well as Aer Lingus and also to sell it, which we did.  American Airlines later took that project on, enhanced it some more and sold to a number of airlines.  It was a very successful application.  

In late 1986, early 1987, Canadian Pacific, CP Air as it was named at that time, was sold by its parent company to a small airline, Pacific Western Airlines. They were a purely domestic operating airline in Alberta.  The merged airline was named Canadian Airlines International. I was assigned to the sales and marketing division where I became responsible for International Air Transport Association travel and cargo agent affairs.  I represented the airline at IATA meetings.  In 1985 I was asked to take on the chairmanship of the IATA cargo services conference and then the major IATA committee looking after travel agency financial management.  

JF	Then what?  

RE	I retired from the airline in 1998 and set-up a management consulting company, Emsley Management Limited and worked on contract for IATA as director in the financial and distribution services division.  I was also a project director for a major systems re-engineering project.  There again my Lyons training came to the fore.  During that time, I lived in Geneva Switzerland where IATA’s main office was and I also travelled extensively.  My consulting assignment for IATA lasted until 2002 when the project was finished. 
 
JF	When did you think of retirement? 

RE	I phased into retirement.  I don’t know that I'm, I really call myself fully retired now.  Come 2012 I decided to at least semi-retire although I kept the consulting company active just as a sole-proprietorship.  I've maintained my contact with a few of my LEO and Lyons colleagues, Cyril Lanch in particular.  And I've attended three reunions of the LEO Computer Society.  

JF	Now have you any final thoughts that you would like to share with us?

RE	Starting my career with Lyons as a computer programmer really shaped my life.  Although at the time I didn’t regard it as history making as I look back to the 1960’s it really was.  My four years working with Lyons and LEO set the foundation for my subsequent career.
  
I consider it a life and career well lived and enjoyed.  

JF	Thank you very much, Roger.  This interview of Roger Emsley has been recorded by the LEO Computer 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 and any other intellectual property rights of this interview in recorded form and any transcription thereof remains with the LEO Computer Society 2019.

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

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