An interview with John Durham conducted by David Phillips on 22 February 2019, as part of the LEO Computers Society Oral History Project.

Transcript :

John Durham – Interview Transcript
Speaker Key
DP – David Phillips
JD – John Durham 

DP	It’s Friday, 22nd of February 2019 and I’m David Phillips and interviewing John Durham to give us the story of his involvement with LEO Computers from the earliest days. We are recording this interview as part of LEO Computers Society Oral History project.  The audio version and the transcript will be launched to the central archive and made available for researchers and members of the public.  The transcript of this voice recording can be the subject of subsequent editing with the agreement of the respondent, John Durham, mistakes may be corrected, and some clarification may be added within the text for terms that are not familiar to readers.  They’ll be explained in notes.  

DP	Let’s start, John.  First of all, may I ask how old you are?  Tell us that and a bit about your early days.

JD	I was born in late August ’39 and the beginning of September.  You know, we know what started then.  Anyway, that was me, so inevitably, I went through the second world war, went through everything, being evacuated into Buckinghamshire then back as a little boy living in an air raid shelter and the rest anyway, and so for me, it was almost an exciting war and my dad went in D-Day but we all survived.  Anyway, that’s the origins of me, and then I benefited from what we called the Butler Education Act.  I went-

DP	May I just ask a bit about the parents?

JD	Both my mother and father met through things like the Socialist Sunday School and the rest.  They were very, you know, left-oriented and I think they met and my father worked most of his career in the cooperative movement and second world war, he volunteered for the army and went in after D-Day and afterwards would never talk about it at all.  He wouldn’t tell me what he got his medals for, he wouldn’t go on any parade, he got no pride in his involvement in the second world war and I think in that, made me a committed European and as we go on, you’ll work out I speak fluent German and French.  So that’s when my parents met, the war got in the way, and then he had this major decision.  He’d been told to tell all his soldiers why they were fighting the war and he told them that that lot, they started the war, kicked them out in the 1945 election, and five million of them did and they elected the labour government and I asked my dad why he…because a lot his friends volunteered as MPs, labour MPs in 1945 and got elected … he didn’t stand.  He said it was…he owed it to his family, to us, not to get involved in something that was going to dominate his life.  Anyway, so great father.  My mother then became a teacher, took three degrees.  I have a diary sitting here where every page is in a different language.

DP	Why did she have that language capability?

JD	It’s…we don’t quite know.  I mean she was a natural at school but had to leave school early as my dad did because there was no money, but she taught herself. 

DP	He was called education secretary of the Cooperative Society he worked for and that meant he had 80 film societies.  At that time the cooperative movement played a big role in education of its members and all these activities he was involved in and I was hugely impressed.  He rented the National Film Theatre every year, just for the members of his group and things like that.

JD	And politics was spoken about at home?

DP	Yes.  It was a very strange situation.  Very much a Labour household so I go to a grammar school and I find that the rest of the other boys seem to have different political views from me.  They were all Conservatives so I would discuss at home and arguing with my dad what the boys have said so I listen to his answers and go back the next day.  And my dad took me to my first political meeting with Nye Bevan, Aneurin Bevan.  He came talking locally could I appreciate what he was saying but I could appreciate the passion and the fervour and the enthusiasm of everybody for Nye Bevan.  He’d just launched the National Health Service, things like that. So I found myself slightly left-of-centre.

DP	Well, they’re fine now.  I wasn’t saying I won’t do it but they conveniently just stopped it.   

JD	Excellent.  So, you went to Nottingham to read what?

DP	Industrial Economics.  I didn’t know why I chose that and I didn’t get a huge amount out of that course but I got a lot out of being in Nottingham for three years.  So, one vacation I worked in Vienna for six weeks and improved my German.  Another vacation I went to the States and represented the UK at a conference in the United States.

JD	What sort of conference?

DP	Yeah, it’s only international affairs and fine, I just- I tend to say, “Why not?”  And then hitchhike over the States, got one lift for 5,500 miles which I thought was quite good, and came back, finished my degree and that’s when LEO came into the scene.

JD	What did you know about computers?

DP	I knew nothing about computers.  

JD	Have you heard of computers like LEO or Lyons?

DP	I’ve heard of Lyons but not in this association nor had I gone out of my way to find out but it was the energy of this group who came doing the interviewing.


JD	They came to the university?

DP	Yes.  There was the pattern at that time and we called it the milk round.  It was when bigger companies came around in the universities and tried to choose who they wanted and I just liked the people who were interviewing me.  I can’t remember a name, but when I found one that studied drama and another who’d done classics I think I’d realised that the technical aspects of computing wasn’t essential, so I thought I’ll give it a go. 
I was also encouraged by the percentage of women in LEO at that time and my original boss was a German [inaudible 00:12:06] and she had 7 or 8 male graduates all working for her who are all particularly in love with her and the power of women.

JD	So what impressed you about that, the fact there was a number of women which sounded exciting or there was an equality of the sexes that you found appealing?

DP	I think there’s a bit of both.  I mean conventional business was very, very male-driven at that time and I found it so liberating to find somebody that does recognise women and recruit them.  I was hugely impressed with that.

JD	So you started at LEO.  Where and what were you doing?

DP	It didn’t work exactly like that.  Yes, I signed up to join LEO and I had already booked to go to Australia for three months at the end of my university, the three years and that was an invitation to go to Australia for three months and you could return.  They find you a job when you were there.  I found myself working for the Central Bank of Australia advising the attorney general.  But I did three months, got back to the UK.  When I was in Australia I met Peter Gyngell who was LEO Australia at that time, got back to the UK-…

JD	How did you meet him?

DP	I was told about him.  Yeah, we only had a fairly brief chat because I was insignificant.  I was a 24-year-old whatever.  When I got back to the UK and as you said found that it was now English Electric LEO so I started at Hartree House and that was-…

JD	So the three months you were away it had changed as being-…

DP	Completely, yes.

JD	…merged as it were with English Electric?

DP	Yes.  Yeah, so I’m only at LEO in terms of what I signed. 

JD	And what was the job, what were you engaged to do?

DP	Well it wasn’t defined but they put everybody through a programming training so I was put on with a bunch of other graduates initially on intercoders, I think we called it then, and we tried a little bit of Cleo and intercoder was it and I was put on a team and I didn’t do well as a programmer working at a post office. My task was to produce software that produces prize certificates for any premium bonds so if I mentioned to anybody what I was doing they all wanted to give me their premium bond numbers just in case.  

JD	Yeah, there were about seven of us working on…the GPO had bought- and maybe a bigger customer of LEO had bought several of them.  It was a very successful.

DP	LEO IIIs?

JD	LEO IIIs they would be, yes.  And that was successful but what I found interesting at that time, there was a presumption that LEO would do the core programming of the main application for the computer and I think, you know, LEO must have promised, “We’ll give you a working system that will handle all your premium bonds and such.”  I had nothing to do with any of those discussions but I think that must’ve been how it worked because I was always impressed by people who had got into programming and then we’re with LEO, and I…one of the few names I remember, but they would work out what they call the prime loop of that application and they would code.

DP	These are the systems analysts?

JD	Yeah, the systems analysts who’d come through programming who could define that main loop, work out every instruction that was needed for that loop, and they calculated how many milliseconds maybe or microseconds, they knew that.  They calculated that, and said, “That main loop will work.”  I think it was by the sales piece.  Now, you don’t have to worry about that.  I mean computers have infinite power, infinite memory, but then, they didn’t.

DP	So the premium bond service had what’s called early electronic (Overlapping Conversation)

JD	Yeah, we had nothing to do with that.  That was a machine.

DP	Okay, that was already done?

JD	We took…I think we took a paper tape out of it or something like that.  You know, it spewed out numbers.  Ernie was the number generator anyway, yeah.

DP	So what was the LEO computer doing?

JD	The LEO computer was…it was clearly checking the list of people entitled to bring in bonds because it had all of those records.  I wasn’t dealing with that and yeah, then Ernie would do its work and then it got to pull out of there and then all the records were there and [inaudible 00:13:55] everything was there so that we could produce prize certificates with the proper names and addresses on.

DP	So LEO produced the prize certificates?

JD	Yes. Anyway, I wasn’t successful with that and I can’t remember exactly how it happened, but then I found myself helping David Caminer.
DP	I don’t know but possibly nobody else wanted to work for David Caminer and I didn’t know that.

JD	So tell me about your interview with Mr. Caminer if you can recall that.

DP	My very first interview with Caminer I think was yeah, I wasn’t very clever, I said I was interested in current affairs amongst other things so I’m sort of a reasonably political animal and he was quite abusive of value, affairs and that sort of thing, but he still has got his Communist party leanings and all the rest.  

DP	You’re summoned.


JD	No, the…the step after not really competent programming work was to join their sales team, so then I got involved in a number of sales of LEO computers and of System4.  Now, how are we going to cover this one, because really, by the time I got involved, we were selling…LEO computers in Eastern Europe, but elsewhere, we were selling System4 because English Electric had signed up with RCA in America to take their design and use that as System4, so most of my activities were System4-related, but I sold a number of those around the UK, so therefore, I was seen as somebody who could handle the marketing and the sales task and then it was at that time that Caminer maybe spotted me and thought I could be suitable as a sort of assistant gofer for him and your listeners know about David Caminer, they know quite a bit about David Caminer.  He was a unique person.  Oh, I admired him immensely but god, he was difficult, and the tasks he gave me, I sort of now in retrospect, I can’t believe I was given those tasks and why he gave them to me.  One of those was finding him an office block.

DP	Where were you based at this point?

JD	Hartree House. I got rescued by somebody and indicated to me that Encyclopaedia Britannica were moving out of their London offices which were in Portland House in Victoria and I remember it was a very nice building, so we took it, and I escaped from the clutches of the Lyons organisation because we didn’t have to pay any commission on that one, so I got that.

DP	He was Minister of Transport?

JD	Yes.  He had a reputation.  Minister of Transport, yes.  He had a reputation for building the M1 and things like that and he had this guy, Ridgway, so Marples Ridgway was this company that did all of this, but he denied the existence of Ridgway while he became a minister and he…conservative central office, not [inaudible 00:05:11] with David Caminer, wrote to Caminer and said, “The minister wants to do, he wants to commit two days a week for the next three months to learn something about computers.  Would you take charge?”  So he created a working group with ICT who had a director of government communications and [inaudible 00:05:41] information existed then who had a joint managing director and there was me.

DP	Can you remember their names?

JD	Johnson was the Elliot man.  I’m going to say Murphy, but I wouldn’t trust that.

Anyway, and me, and I was by far the youngest and looked the youngest and looked the greenest of them, but it was my job to pull this whole thing together and deal with conservative central office and I realised that David Caminer just set me up to be a calculated insult to Marples.  You put the most junior person with the least experience and put him in charge and I was it, so I had to arrange all these events with directors of banks and everything else for Marples to go around meeting.

DP	But were there sales opportunities for LEO or English Electric LEO?

JD	There was no sales opportunity there, but, you know, some unbelievable stories.  I mean Marples had the ability to be absolutely appallingly rude, but he behaved, so if he was having lunch with the board of Midland Bank for example and, you know, Marples tasted their wine and said, “Oh, I would send that back, it’s corked,” so insists on not having any of the wine, get some of his own, and he would say, “This smoked salmon is very square, straight out of a tin.”   He’s just insults pouring out all the time and he was just totally unpopular.

DP	How about you?  Were you on the receiving end of any of this?

JD	I was only on the receiving after one of our days he would say come back to his place in Eccleston Street in Belgravia and then he said, “John, I don’t think you know much about wine.  Let me make an…” so he got a cellar because he’s got his own vineyard and such and in the middle of our wine tasting, the prime minister came onto him and said, "Where’s that document that you promised?”  And then, you know, he sort of semi-polite, then he’s so abusive to the prime minister, to me.  (Laughs)

DP	Remarkable.

JD	It was.  Anyway, he and I got along all right.

DP	What was the outcome of this meeting with Marples?

JD	Nothing.

DP	Oh.

JD	Nothing, and I don’t think he learnt anything and I don’t think he seriously meant to, either, and I don’t think I was the person to teach him either.

DP	You were hired as a LEO man but by the time you actually turn up for work, it was English Electric LEO.  Were you aware of two camps as it were, two organisations coming together?

JD	No, I was not.  The whole thing, in a sense, baffled me, and I couldn’t work out, but it did not seem to affect any other people in Hartree House or all the rest.  Bigger decisions were being made and I’m absolutely confident that those bigger decisions included not going with the Minerva Road development of a LEO IV and I went there, I liked the people, and I was hugely impressed with what they were doing and then to do the deal with RCA and…

DP	What was that?  RCA?

JD	Oh.  I think somewhere, they decided that Lyons and everybody else didn’t think we were capable of bringing out a complete new range of computers, so can we buy that in, and at that time, IBM had announced its own computer and brought in the concept of the bytes and various other things that are now completely normal and it looked as if the IBM 360 Architecture they may have called it, was going to dominate the world and so I think RCA in America set out to essentially copy that architecture to create a family of computers and then license them across…they were licensed to English Electric, so the top brass must’ve been involved in all of this stuff.  

DP	To compete with IBM?

JD	To compete with IBM.  But to offer essentially the same architecture whereas LEO had gone its own way.

DP	But were you David Caminer’s PA at this time?

JD	Yeah, but he never called me that, therefore I wouldn’t know anything about any of those things.  I heard a lot going on that I didn’t know about.  I think…I don’t want to be called a dogsbody but it’s more of that than…I wasn’t his right-hand man, and I don’t know how much influence people like Caminer had had now that the company had been taken over and Lyons growing up a bit.  I don’t know how much influence he had on those big decisions.

DP	So were you gradually moving away from Caminer into the sales team of English Electric Computers?

JD	Yes, I was in the sales team and then whisked in to help Caminer on some assignments.  When I was doing that, I was also part of the sales team and we had this interesting thing when they were looking for German speakers.

DP	Why were they looking?

JD	The reason was…and we can go into the geopolitics of this if you wish, you know, the LEO people had worked out that they could sell into the Eastern European market because the Americans had embargoed it, so the Americans said, “Ah, this is the communist bloc.  We won’t sell any of our computers there.”  LEO said, “Well, we’re find with that.  We don’t have a problem,” and so that’s…I was pulled into that activity.  So they saw there was an open market there and…

DP	So what happened?  You were recruited because you were able to speak German?


JD	No, I failed that.  I failed that test.  Yeah, I mean I thought it was hilarious.  Only a British company could interview people to work out whether they speak German, when the interviewer doesn’t know German.  I just found it…I find it hilarious.  I mean I was asked what a carburettor is, what a magnetic unit…I was just asked questions like this and I said, “I don’t know, but I do speak German,” but you’ve just failed. Later, I was seeing a group of people working around a German document.  I can’t remember which one they were trying to do the translation but they were having trouble, so I offered a bit of help.  I said, “John, you speak bloody good German,” or something like that.  (Laughs) I said, “I know.  That’s why I told him but he told me I don’t because he doesn’t speak German”.

Yeah, but I was already in there.  I didn’t need to be specially recruited, and then in ways, management structures were very, very fluid I felt and what they had done is the land brothers, Frank- I worked for Frank for a period and then Ralph was running the weekly service bureau and that they said, “Ah, because you’re German, you speak German,” which proved not to be the case.  I mean we find it quite funny because my German is a lot better than Ralph’s and he’s German.  That he came…Ralph and Frank, [inaudible 00:22:49] friends, they came out in ’37 I believe out of Germany and the rest of that is history.  Why am I getting onto the…so that’s right, in this rather fluid way, they said, “Ralph, [inaudible 00:23:09] associate, why don’t you start a sales operation in Eastern Europe?” (Laughs) So he started that and then I got sucked in on some of these things and they needed some help in Poland, a bit in Hungary, I was there, and it was helpful to have German for the very obvious reasons that that older generation spoke German but the last thing we wanted to do was to talk German or hear German, but when I learnt to make mistakes in my first or second sentence, “How do they say that in German?”  You know, you only have to say something like that and then they look at you, “So you’re not German?”  Because my German is quite fluent and I don’t have a German accent, which is all unusual.

DP	Why is that?

JD	Well, I think it was helped that when I was 16, I did a bike ride all around Europe with a German boy and we [inaudible 00:24:23] France, Switzerland, [inaudible 00:24:27] and we cycled around German point and we just spoke German.  I can’t remember ever discussing with him why we did that but we did that and so I had…it hasn’t gone away.

DP	So LEO is moving into Eastern Europe.

JD	And in parallel, it’s developing a totally new range of computers based on the RCA Spectra 70 I think it was called, the range that we licensed.

DP	Which became System…

JD	We called System4.

DP	System4.  Right.  So which countries did you get involved in?  You mentioned Poland?

JD	Yeah.  I…

DP	Yugoslavia?

JD	Yeah.  I will get to that.  My involvement...there was quite a bit in Poland.  I went in and out of Poland and we were trying to get the steel and coal industries in Southern Poland, Dubai.  I think that was achieved after I pulled out, but I didn’t have any part in that.  We had quite a success in Czechoslovakia when it was one country in that area which is the coal and steel area of Czech Republic and Poland, they’re all very close together.  Very successful there.

DP	Tell me about the people that you met in these countries running these state enterprises.  What did they know about computers and what were they like to deal with?

JD	They knew nothing about computers.  I think the sort of sales message was we were communicating, “If you want to be a really major company, you’ve got to have a computer.  I mean throughout the world, the biggest companies are all buying a computer,” and did they understand?  I found myself being called an expert on central planned economies, because that’s what these communist countries all were and I would go and give lectures on how can you use computers for controlling a…the steelworks complete economy.  What did I know about this?  Nothing, but they were quite happy to hear me talk about this stuff, so we were…there was a sort of weird disconnect.  These guys felt they were being advanced by buying one of these.  I’m sure they knew what they were going to do with it.

DP	But they could afford to buy them, could they?  Apparently.

JD	That’s the word, apparently.  I mean they paid us.

DP	Did you get involved in the actual delivery and implementation of the computers?

JD	Well, look, I didn’t get involved with any of those.  There’s a clear distinction between Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia.  The Comecon blocked the Warsaw Pact.  It stopped there because Tito stood up to Stalin and wouldn’t be part of the Warsaw Pact, but that was the piece that Ralph Land picked up on, that Yugoslavia is different, but we still don’t have that freedom of entry without the American competition.  So Ralph took me aside one day and said, “John, I’d like you to go to Yugoslavia.  I’d like you to move there and create a company there because we can do it.”

DP	When was that?  How old were you then?

JD	I was old.  I was 27, so I get there and the whole thing was very, very strange but I…and our biggest customer was the Yugoslav army.

DP	Ah, but they weren’t a customer when you moved there?

JD	Look, what had happened, and I only worked this out 10 or more years ago because I asked Ralph what happened there before I got there.  The Yugoslav army had signed a contract to buy one of our things and I was responsible getting into the country and getting [inaudible 00:29:45] and all that things, and there was a guy called Dan Broydo.  Has he figured in any of your reports?  I think he was Russian.  I quite liked him but I didn’t get very close to him.

DP	Broydo?

JD	Yeah, Dan Broyd.  He was an older guy to me at that time and he’d played a significant part in commissioning the Yugoslav army that they wanted one of these things.  You then ask the question; do we get involved in what they wanted to use them for?  Well, the army, anything venturing on that gets into dodgy territory and you just didn’t go there.  That was their problem.  What was very evident in Yugoslavia was Tito’s army got the very best of everything.  So if you were in Yugoslavia, I’m still going to use that word because it was one country then, if you said you worked for the army, then everybody knew you’re the best.  You only take the best, so they get some remarkable people there.  Anyway, I did my bit and then we…

DP	Well, just tell me about your bit.  I’d just like your own experiences.  You get off the plane and then were did you live?

JD	Yeah, I found a flat in Belgrade.  I found myself somewhere to live and then I found…we had to have a Yugoslav partner organisation, so I found one of those.

DP	How did that come about?

JD	Well, I just asked around, looked around and came up with one.  I can’t remember.  Anyway, I did it, and I had to have an opposite number who’s a genuine communist, a Tito supporter and that sort of thing and one who speaks good German, so I finished up with a guy who trained in Germany and had fluent German so he and I, we get along absolutely fine.

DP	Can you recall his name?

JD	Yeah, his…this is unfair, but yeah.

DP	Well, we’ll come back to it.  (Overlapping Conversation)

JD	I think that may pop back in because it was a rather special friendship, one Serb and one Brit talking in German, modifying our German between ourselves.  It didn’t matter if we used that.

DP	I haven’t quite followed you, is he working with or for you or is he with the army?

JD	No, neither.  In setting up there, I couldn’t setup a company in the normal way that we would expect to do it.  You had to have a genuine Yugoslav socialist organisation working with you, so that’s what I setup and he worked for such an organisation, so he was neither army nor us.

DP	So you then spearheaded the sales drive?

JD	Yeah.  Well, sales, but we needed to…I’m just trying to get some coherence in this.  Yeah, I started to bring a few more UK people in and also recruited local people in…a bit in sales but trying to get them into technical support and the rest and I built up a team and the initial team, I built up in Belgrade, which is the capital of Serbia.  That’s where the army had its computer and then another team in Zagreb, which is the capital of Croatia, and probably the biggest success was to sell to the biggest oil company in Yugoslavia called INA.  We sold them the largest computer we had, a System4 computer, not a LEO computer.

DP	How did you get into that organisation?

JD	There was no problem with that.

DP	Did they know of your activities in Yugoslavia?  There was a computer company…

JD	Sorry, they…who are…?

DP	Well, the oil company, I was thinking, the state oil company.

JD	The state oil company, we were talking to their finance director.

DP	Right, so you would’ve approached them through the finance director?

JD	And it was clear they had talked to the army and the army thought it might be a good idea if there’s one of these computers in, so if INA would buy one in Zagreb because the army bureau was in Belgrade and build a small team in Slovenia, in Ljubljana, and a little presence in Sarajevo, yeah.

DP	When the LEO computers arrived, presumably in packing cases, flown in, you had a team to assemble them, did that team came out to assemble them?

JD	No, I did have engineers there and others came out, but I can remember flying the first computer.  It was quite a sort of moving moment and…

DP	Was the press there?

JD	Oh, the military trucks were everywhere and the army was everywhere protecting everything.  Oh god, they weren’t going to let anything happen to this, so it was pretty precious.

DP	Of course, of course.  And their own people would be trained up by LEO?

JD	We would’ve trained them, yes.  We had a training person.  I wasn’t doing any of the training, but we had somebody who looked after training.

DP	And were they good customers?  Did they pay up?

JD	Oh absolutely.

DP	No problems there?

JD	No problems there.  I’m trying to work out where this was taking us.  I could take you on a story about INA.  

DP	This is the oil company?

JD	The oil company-

DP	The state oil company?


JD	That’s it.  Sort of state, but it was a little bit…you know, it was veering towards independence with these companies and one of the things that Tito had done is that he had a benevolent form of socialism and it was actually quite popular.  People liked it, they liked him.  Every Yugoslav had a passport, they could leave, they didn’t leave.  Anyway, Tito decided that as part of his process of, you know, his version of the economy, he gave control of the bank accounts for each firm to the worker’s council of that firm, so they realised they controlled their bank accounts, so they could give themselves pay rises, then another one, and then when they were brought up with a bit of a jolt when they realised they’ve got to pay their bills.  They can’t just pay themselves.  So you’ve got over half a million court cases a year of one firm that they call on the enterprises saying another one, they said, “You owe me money,” and they said, “Of course I owe you money, but nobody’s paying me.”  So our company man said, “I think we can solve this,” us and him, that supposing he writes a letter to the finance director of every company in Yugoslavia and say, “If we could put some money into your bank account, who would you like to pay?”  So a direct debit authority that only activated if some money came into his account and he says, “If I give that as data to you, you can write a programme that…” we use the word ‘compensating’ debts and we compensated the indebtedness of all of this, and so oh, I thought we’d try and do it.  I had a programmer, a name for you, Charles Groundwater, I can remember that one.

DP	Charles Groundwater?

DP	So why did you leave?  What brought you back to England?

JD	Tiredness.  I was going up to 30 and I just…it really was quite…it was pretty gruelling and with one of the…Jim Ellis, one of the guys I worked with, we decided we’d go for a three-month tour and we go to India and Dubai at the end and we did that and then I came back to head office in London, which at that time was in Putney Bridge because this was actually ICL. 

DP	Well, whilst you were away in Yugoslavia then, English Electric LEO became absorbed as it were into ICL.

JD	Correct.

DP	Did that have any direct impact on you personally?  I mean you were out of the country.

JD	In a way, it didn’t, other than there was an ICT guy who called himself manager for Yugoslavia and I called myself manager for Yugoslavia and these companies weren’t clever enough to sort out these issues so we had to sort it out ourselves, so I had to make sure he failed, which is not a…yeah, but it really was funny sometimes when we would secretly try to be secretly when I was…we were in a meeting with a Yugoslav customer and behind this curtain or drapes, he was hovering, trying to listen in so it was complicated but I don’t like feeling that I’m going to let this guy win.


DP	But you were the Yugoslav manager or director for English Electric LEO at this stage, and he was the Yugoslav manager for ICT?

JD	Good questions.  He had clearly come through the ICT route and I had come through the LEO English Electric route.  Those two were then merged as one and all sorts of strange things happened because the whole people with a LEO background, pretty proud of themselves and not hugely impressed with ICT, and ICT, my recollection is they knew they needed a new family of computers and they did a deal with Ferranti, with Ferranti-Packard and I think they had that and English Electric had the RCA connection.  Now, I wasn’t involved with any of the staff, but it was clearly going on.

DP	Well, what happened when you came back because you came back to such a different company?  How did you find that?

JD	I couldn’t take it.  I came back, I didn’t like the feel of the head office.  I liked the fun, the excitement of being out there in the field and I just didn’t like it and so my career took a total change at that point.

DP	Through your choice or were you moved into a different…?

JD	No, no, no.  My choice, because what I…I saw the importance of software and there were a few software companies opening up and I joined one called Software Sciences.

DP	So you left?

JD	I left the whole of the ICT.

DP	Did they try to keep you?

JD	I think I became a problem because I was saying…you know, the English Electric is the better solution, we don’t need to go with all this stuff and it was a very political time, so I was pleased to be out and they gave me a task of vaguely European Marketing Manager, so I did that for the software industry.

DP	Is this the company you joined?

JD	Correct.  It was called Software Sciences.


DP	Software Sciences, okay.  It’s a UK company?  

JD	Yes.  I’m not sure what happened to…but then it was there that another major turning point, the top technical guy in that company and we became good friends and over a few years, one night, I said, you know, we could do this, we could form a company within Yugoslav, so we did.  For 35 years, we’ve been business partners.

DP	May I ask you now a bit about your private life, your family life

JD	Yeah, well in my period we’re talking about, the LEO Electric, I was single, then when I came back and I married when I was 34 I think, then I came back from some of these fun and games.

DP	How did you meet your wife?

JD	At a party.

DP	She was English?

JD	Right, she’s English, yeah, and then we had two lovely kids.

JD	The huge thing that changed everything was something over 20 years ago, my wife died very suddenly.  The doctor’s saw her on the Saturday, not feeling well, Monday morning, she was dead.  Yeah, and my son was 15, daughter 17, and it was an awful period for us.

DP	Of course.

JD	And there was no hint of anything.

DP	So they were still school children?  Were they away at school or…?

JD	No, no.  My son expected to walk home aged 15 and for his mum to be there.  I took it so badly because it was also a stage that my business was struggling. I came through all of that, but it was a hellish period.


DP	And you were about, what?  60 then?

JD	I was less than that.

DP	John, I’m afraid this is an afterthought, have you joined the      British Computer Society or the LEO Computer Society

JD	I never did.  No, but I could.  I didn’t, no.

DP	John, it’s been fascinating, and I’m grateful.  Let me conclude, if you don’t mind.  I just have a few formal words to put on the tail of our recording.  This interview with John Durham has been recorded by LEO Computer Society and the society would like to thank you very much indeed for your time and your reminiscences.  Any opinions expressed are those of you, John, the interviewee, not the society, and the copyrights to this interview in its recorded form remains a property of LEO Computer Society.  Thank you very much.  

Provenance :
Transferred from Frank Land's Dropbox to Lisa McGerty

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