David Caminer

Jun 26 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

THEY were the soul of the chattering, hat-pinned England of refained voices and pursed lips, sitting at their tables in the cafes.

Scurrying between those close-set tables with silver trays and serviettes (napkins), taking orders for the tea and buns were the “nippies” – women in smart black and white uniforms with caps and smiles.

They were national treasures, having replaced the Gladys, the nickname for the company’s waitresses in the 19th century.

But the nippies had a problem, as they worked in Joseph Lyons’s tea shops and cafes. Every order required a hand-written bill.

By then Lyons, with its legendary corner houses, was the largest catering organisation in the country, employing 30,000 people, serving 150m meals a year. With suppliers, transport, orders and 36 miles of its Swiss roll consumed daily, the administration had become colossal.

Enter David Caminer, the son of a Jewish tailor, who had been killed in the Great War,

Young Caminer became an idealistic young man whose radicalism had been formed by the poverty he saw around his East End home.

Nevertheless, he joined the Green Howards fighting against Axis forces in Tunisia in World War II, where he lost a leg. Before signing-up, he had been a management trainee with Lyons, rejoining the company after being invalided out of the Army.

Keen organisational talents led to Caminer becoming manager of Lyons Systems Research Office, where, with others, he started to work on a computer, which could cope with the mountainous work-load. They called it LEO (Lyons Electronics Office). It was 16ft long with 6,000 valves and a storage of more then 2,000 words.

It was a major innovation in business practice, and he was appointed head of marketing and a director of LEO computers. The toughness of mind and intellectual depth of Caminer was in many ways distant from the experiences of the nippies, but they were united in the revered British institution of Lyons.

Caminer, married with three children, was appointed OBE in 1980, and in 2006 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Middlesex University.

As his career advanced in the 1970s, he lived in Luxembourg as project director for the installation of a computer and communications’ system for the European Community.

He was profoundly respected as a pioneer of business computing.

David Caminer, computing innovator; born June 26, 1915, died June 19, 2008