We were welcomed with a cup of tea or coffee, a short introduction talk, then were let loose to find our way around the centenary exhibition and the ICANDO activities upstairs.  One of the first things some of us did was to write a Guiding memory on a postcard and tie it to a noticeboard.  Apparently they plan to enter all the memories into a database.  I wrote of my Brownie and Guiding experiences in South Africa (camping was the best fun).  The exhibition featured artefacts from the archives including log books, badges, a toy from the Guiding extension unit (disabled guides making handicrafts to sell) and a brick!  The most poignant log book was of a Brownie Unit in a Chinese concentration camp during WW2.  The brick was from an anonymous young Guide who wanted to contribute to the building of the Girlguiding HQ in London.

We had our packed lunches then a quick look around the Guide shop before going upstairs to the council room where the archivist was waiting for us.  She gave us a fascinating talk about the archives, illustrated with artefacts she had brought out for us to see.  We were allowed to handle them.  There was a Guide uniform of 1910 with the original wide brimmed hat, the little handbooks given to the earliest Guides about how to conduct themselves and all about the Guide movement, and more log books, the most amazing of which was that of the 1st Chorlton cum Hardy Guides in Cumbria who had close links with a certain Mrs Heelis – Beatrix Potter.  The log book included an illustrated card she had sent them, as well as an illustration of Peter Rabbit with the Guides.  Truly priceless.  I took photos of these to show my daughters, but will not publish them online because of Copyright.

We tore ourselves away from the archives to be rewarded with cream tea and each Guild signed the special 2010 visitor album by creating a page to go in it.  I drew a very wonky looking ‘cow’ on our page (referencing the Milton Keynes Concrete Cows).  We had one more trip to the shop (where inevitably we bought things!), then caught taxis to take us back to Euston station.

Our outing wasn’t quite over though, as when we got back to Milton Keynes we went to Mary’s house for a cup of tea before having a meal out together.  For me it was a pleasure to have a relaxing day with friends who love Guiding, a good little interlude in my usual headlong and busy life.

The event was held in the Park Inn Hotel, near Russell Square in London. We had an easy drive from home and parked right outside the hotel (no parking restrictions in Southampton Row on a Sunday). The first people I spoke to in the reunion did not remember my mother, they had worked at different times or in different locations from her Hartree House office. However John Hume and Gloria Guy had interesting recollections of the Leo. There was a small exhibition of articles and items related to the Leo – it was fascinating looking through the little booklet that was issued to every Leo employee when they started working for the company and reading through the 4 week training programme that they were given to familiarise them with the Leo operations. The attention to detail was amazing.

Peter Byford welcomed everyone and introduced the guest speaker, Daniel Hayton of the Computer Conservation Society who spoke about some of the work of the society. Frank and Ralph Land, the twin brothers who had been involved with the Leo from 1952 spoke for a short period about the foundation of the Leo, then Mike Hally, who had created the BBC radio 4 programme ‘Electronic Brains’ in 2002 spoke about that radio programme and his book which was available at the reunion at a special reduced price. A whole episode was about the Leo computer. Peter Byford then announced that if anyone remembered Wendy Forward, her daughter was at the reunion and would be pleased to meet them.

There was a buffet lunch, and during that time we showed the photo slide show of my mother to a few people, some of whom had known her, others who hadn’t but were kind enough to show interest in my story of researching her association with the world’s first business computer. We had good conversations with Bob Melling and Daniel Hayton. Bob Stevenson, the society’s webmaster, introduced himself as having known my mother, because she brought her programming to him to run through the computer for testing. He had been a shift leader, then Operations manager of the Bureau Leo 111 / 1 at Hartree House during the same period that mum had worked there. He pointed out a group, mostly women, who he said had definitely worked with my mother, so we approached them with the laptop and showed them the photos of mum. They all recognised her immediately and gave me the news that for some of them she had been their team leader programming code for Wedd Durlacher Mordaunt, a stock exchange company that purchased Leo 111 / 45 for business operations. This machine was delivered to the company in 1966, which was when my mother finished her Leo work. At the age of 24 she was leading a team of young programmers fresh from school, and had seemed very experienced in their eyes. They described her as tough enough to cope with London living, hard working (and expecting everyone else to work hard too – so no surprise there then – this was the ethos I grew up with!) but also happy to have fun. In fact this was the message I got about many people’s memories of Hartree House – they enjoyed working there, were willing to put in (often long) hours to get some programming right (and were paid appropriately) but also had fun socialising and playing practical jokes on colleagues. We heard some funny stories of pranks from Alan Hooker (Jnr) and Peter Byford.

I was asked a couple of times today why I was so interested in the Leo and my mother’s role, and I explained that I hadn’t known much about her London life (she had talked a lot about her subsequent travels and we had enjoyed the slide shows of that when we were young, but she took no photos of the Leo). Also, I have regular contact with modern programmers as part of my job at the Open University, where computers are put to many complex uses for the purpose of education and I find it fascinating to learn more about the early computer pioneers.

Putting the slide show of mum together last night was time consuming but worthwhile – I will always regret that my mother died so young and that when she died I was only just starting to know and show an interest as her as a person, beyond her mother role, who had been to University and worked before her marriage. I do not remember her saying the computer was a Leo, it was just a big computer that filled a large room. I think her recollections had been triggered by seeing a new Apple Mac personal computer at a friend’s house and wishing she could justify buying one, and when I showed an interest in her past she had told me a little. My research 3 years ago had given me something tangible, but finally meeting her colleagues and discussing with them what the work of a Leo programmer involved has been a tremendous thing to do – I can recognise similarities in her attitude to work that have come through in me and which I had not understood so well until now. She has been dead for 26 years, but revisiting her past, and looking at the photos of our joint memories (my childhood) has brought her closer to me again. I would like to thank all her Leo colleagues who were so friendly and kind today for their part in making this quest so special.

The photos I took are shown in this post, for the ‘official’ photos of the event, see http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/parkinnphotos.htm

COME TO THE PARTY GUIDES!

Today was a BIG day for Girlguiding. We celebrated 100 years of the movement with lots of parties in the UK where Guiding started as each county had its own celebration.  Soon there will be more all over the world in the countries where the movement was adopted soon after it was founded.

My girls are both in the movement, and nearly 3 years ago I joined the Trefoil Guild – which is the movement for old Guides or Guiders (I was a South African Guide).  A few Guides from my elder daughter’s company were attending the Bucks Party, but my little one’s Rainbows weren’t going, so I arranged to take her instead, partly because I wanted to join in the fun too!  There were 46 of us from the Wolverton District who joined the rest of Ouse Valley crowd as part of the huge crowd from all across the County at the Buckinghamshire party, which was held at Cottesloe School in Wing.  Most people who attended travelled there and back in coaches – 40 altogether (about 2,500 people).

The day had started clear and sunny, but by the time we arrived in the early afternoon it had clouded over, and at times was quite cool (fortunately it didn’t rain).  Each Division had an area at the rim of the field, and activites were placed in between the Divisional areas around the central Arena (where there were displays of the Chesham All Girls Band, Falconry, and Sheepdogs herding geese!).  In fact the variety of activities laid on for the girls to enjoy was quite staggering, my girls tried out Circus skills, giant slide, bouncy assault course, Climbing wall, Steel band, bouncy castle and a magic show, and there was loads more (they watched but didn’t do the Archery and the Steam Traction engine rides, there were also several other things they didn’t have time to try).  After the picnic the whole arena was covered with parachute games, this was followed by a disco in the big tent.  We then returned to our coaches for the 30 minute journey home, very tired but happy after an active and fun filled day in which both girls got to try out new skills and burn off some energy.

Steel drumming

Climbing wall

One of the nicest things about the day was the chance to meet up with Guiding friends, including the lovely surprise of spending time with my elder daughter’s former Brown Owl, who now lives overseas but had returned to celebrate with friends and family involved in Guiding.

Magic Show

Parachute games

Here are some links to some references to 100 years of Girlguiding:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8232480.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8238956.stm

http://www.girlguiding100years.org.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/21/brownies-girl-guides

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/6027583/100-years-of-the-Girl-Guides-interview.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/glad-to-have-been-a-girl-guide-1776169.html

http://girlguidesandgirlscouts.blogspot.com/

The second reason for today being special is that it is of course St George’s Day, and what better way to celebrate than watching some Morris Dancing outside a Pub. One of my colleagues has recently joined a female group of Morris dancers, and this was her debut performance, so a group of us from work went along to support her. I took my elder daughter, but didn’t tell her why we were going to Stoke Bruerne, only that we were going. The Old Mother Redcaps took their turn amongst the other sides who were dancing, and did some really good dances (Chetz had no reason to feel nervous as she didn’t make any mistakes).

Eleanor really enjoyed watching the dancing , the bright costumes (some of them slightly eccentric, and therefore all the more interesting), the musicians and the enthusiasm of the crowds of spectators. She was intrigued to learn that her Godfather used to be a Morris Dancer.  It was a great way to introduce her to a good English tradition (she took some photos, and video which unfortunately came out too dark).  However for video of the event, and other photos, see the following links:

Video

Photos

Rose and Castle Morris Dancers - St George's Day 2009

Rose and Castle Drum

Old Mother Redcaps - shoe

Old Mother Redcaps dancing on St George's Day

Old Mother Redcaps dancing

Old Mother Redcaps

Woad Works dancing - with child drummer

Woad Works at Stoke Bruerne dancing for St George's day

She read mathematics at Reading University, and graduated from there in July 1963 (her degree certificate says ‘Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Geography, resulting in a BSc Honours 3^rd class). Her first job was in London, and she went travelling in 1966. After her marriage in South Africa to my father, she became a housewife and stepmother to my brothers. My younger sister and I were born, but later, when we were older (I was about 9 or 10 I think) she took up mathematics again and became a maths coach for children who were struggling with the subject at school. This she did to keep her brain active and also to earn some cash for our after school activities of music and ice-skating. She died young of a brain haemorrhage in February 1983 a week after her 41^st birthday.

Two years ago I went in search of her computer programmer history and discovered the following: She was a programmer on the Leo III business computer from approximately September 1963 until about August 1966. The Leo was the first business computer in the world, invented during the early 1950s for the Lyons Teahouses (Leo stood for Lyons Electronic Office). See: http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/newphotos.htm for photos of Leo I, Leo II and Leo III. My mother worked in the Lyons main bureau computer at Hartree House, Queensway, London http://www.leo-computers.org.uk/newphoto3.htm and there are some wonderful photos of the installation of this machine – by crane through the window! This machine was in use from 1962 – 1972.

My mother lived near to the computer, in Leinster Square, and then later she moved to Fitzjohn’s Avenue in Hampstead. I succeeded, via the Leo Computers Society, to get in touch with one of her former colleagues who confirmed that she had been a Leo programmer. Her colleague, Peter Byford, told me “We all had a great time at Leo although we worked long hours. We all got on well, your Mum was a nice lady, good programmer, sometimes worried more than most when things went wrong but an important part of our programming team. She would have worked on CLEO and intercede” (programming languages).

My mother’s first dog in Cape Town was called Cleopatra was a Great Dane, the runt of the litter (Cleo for short). We had always thought that Mum had named her for the Egyptian Queen (though we didn’t know why), however CLEO stands for ‘Clear Language for Expressing Orders’ and was the plain English programming language developed for Leo computers (but which ultimately lost out to other programming languages – see pages 164-165 ‘A Computer called Leo’, by Georgina Ferry). To me this just shows Mum’s quiet and ironical sense of humour that she named her dog after the programming language she used, especially as dogs are (hopefully) controlled by commands.

Leo Computers merged with English Electric in February 1963, in October 1964 EE bought out Lyon’s holdings and the computer company was renamed English Electric LEO Marconi, in 1967 it merged with ICT to form International Computing Limited (ICL). These first two events would have taken place while my mother worked for the company. ICL later lost out to IBM and the USA market and then the Japanese has predominated the computing world ever since.

I remember my mother’s reaction to the first Apple home computer that friends of ours acquired in the early 1980s. She so wanted a reason to justify the expense of acquiring one, but despite the fact that it could have helped with the household accounts, the accounts for her mathematics coaching and the weekly letters to her parents and sister, she resisted the urge to buy one as she saw it as a luxury and was very careful about saving money. I so wish that she had bought one, though she would not have had long to enjoy getting to grips with programming again because of her early death.

My mother was an inspiration to me in so many ways, although I only had her for 13 3/4 years. She would have been pleased with my achievements at the Open University (both as a student and member of staff), as I am proud of hers at Leo: what a great technology role model to have in my family.

Wendy and Cleo, 1968

Published as part of Ada Lovelace Day 2009:

http://www.pledgebank.com/AdaLovelaceDay

http://findingada.com/