Courtaulds

Foleshill was the powerhouse of Coventry a century or so ago, ahead of the game, it had the textile, the tool making, the foundries, rubber, the canal transport, the gas works, the rows of houses huts and sheds under its perpetual dust and dirt and smells. The pressure of war brought innovations and improvements, orders rolled in and the canals were the transport and the workers plentiful. Courtaulds prospered and expanded around 1925. By now a giant of industry, it built a spinning factory between the Foleshill Road and Old Church Road and the canal formed an arc that joined the two sides together. Hot, humid and toxic smells to counter, it built a glass greenhouse inside with upright hollow poles, the poles perforated with little spouts like watercans, water pumped through in a continued spray, the factory air pumped through the spray cooled the air and took out the toxic fumes somehow, safe for the workers. On the other side of Old Church Road not 200 yards away at the side of the canal was a weaving factory. Here coloured bobbins spun on about 15/20 looms, making a tartan like cloth, noisy, the constant click-clack of shuttles were deafning, dirty and dangerous. If you were not wide awake there were straps, drum shafts, pulleys, rollers and cog wheels that could tear your arm off. At the same time good wages. A century before the Enclosure of Land Bill came in, this enclosed a lot of the common land, like the heaths etc., gave it to farmers and industrialists. We lost grazing rights, the heaths, the common land, instead they gave small patches of allotments. One was opposite the spinning factory the other side of Foleshill Road.

Strange - I felt sure I had written on this topic previously. I worked in the computer section at Courtaulds about 1975-1979, and it was a great place to work. The computer section were mainly young people, and we had teams for everything. Football, Cricket, Tennis, Bridge, Hockey, Snooker. I remember Christmas in the club, the tea trolley coming round, excellent lunches in the canteen.

I worked in the Courtaulds computer department from 1966 to 1977 and then in Group Systems until 1981. When I joined, the department was located on the ground floor of the Matlock Road building with a Honeywell 1200 magnetic tape media only system. I believe this had memory of 16 Kbytes with 4 Kbytes reserved for printing from one of the six magnetic tape drives. The system was upgraded to a Honeywell 3200 in 1972 and the department was moved to the main building on Foleshill Road underneath the clock tower. The upgraded system included three exchangeable magnetic disk drives allowing random access to data rather than purely sequential data processing. The computers and associated air conditioning and electrical supply needed to be housed on the ground floor as size and weight effectively prohibited their installation on higher floors. The computer system was upgraded again in 1976 to Honeywell 8000 series, which was a completely different operating system to the Honeywell 200 machines - Honeywell had taken over computer production from General Electric and the two systems were pretty much incompatible with different base word lengths. The 8000 series provided a significant increase in disk storage and the ability to support interaction with computer display terminals. The programming department ran along the side of Foleshill Road. The data preparation department and computer operations were set further back in the building with management offices overlooking the green behind the gated entrance from the Foleshill Road, which seemed to be reserved for arriving directors and distinguished visitors. Most of the department members would have been aged under 30 at the time, though there were a few more experienced heads most of whom had had some experience with even earlier computing technologies than the Honeywells.

Hi Andrew, welcome to the forum. I was lucky enough to get into IT work in the late 1980s and my first full time job in 1991. It was still primitive but hard disks and MS Windows weren't very far away. My very first computer, an Acorn Atom, had 10k memory which Dad upgraded to 24k. I would sing along to the tape deck as stuff loaded. How fast things have gone since then. I love computers, but I'm glad I'm not an IT professional anymore. Far more fun things to do with technology than fix problems day in, day out.

Hi Helen, thanks for the welcome! Returning to Courtaulds, their computing policy in the 1970s was devolved across a number of UK units - probably resulting from historic company acquisitions. The three main computer centres were at Coventry with Honeywell equipment, British Celenes at Spondon with IBM equipment, and British Cellophane at Bridgewater with ICL equipment. The review in 1974 attempted to source from a single manufacturer, but the costs of migrating between different platforms was considered prohibitive and each of the three sites renewed with the same manufacturer. A smaller IBM system used by some of the clothing divisions in Nottingham was consolidated into Spondon as a cost saving measure. The Coventry computer site provided services beyond the production units based in the locality. In particular, International Paints was a major user and the Courtaulds share dividend payments (the register was managed in Braintree, Essex) was processed at Coventry. Mostly the Coventry computers were used to manage basic financial processing for sales, purchasing and payroll with data being prepared to Hollerith punched cards or later directly to magnetic tape using CMC machines. I believe that Courtaulds Engineering used the facility to manage budgetary control for their major building projects, and I remember the same program being used by Shell to manage an oil terminal build in Rotterdam. Once the system was upgraded in 1975, some more interesting projects were undertaken including one to build a database for the Marine paints division that captured data from vessel inspections around the world to monitor the performance of marine coatings in different oceanographic conditions. After 1975 Courtaulds started to install smaller computers in a number of their divisions to better support the diversity of needs across the different business sectors. Some of these were produced by ICL and used in their wholesale division centred in Birmingham, several others were manufactured by CMC and used an operating system designed and named after Richard Pick. A number of the CMC systems were installed by clothing manufacturers for order management, production management and stock control. I believe that the central systems at Coventry, Spondon and Bridgewater continued to process weekly payroll even after the mini computers were installed. I can still remember one of the developers of the CMC systems writing design notes on the back of a cigarette packet, of which he always seemed to have several spare in his pocket. I moved on from Courtaulds in 1981 and have continued in computing ever since, being involved in the development and test of Unix standards and then in developing cryptography standards for online transaction systems and for television service providers. I certainly wouldn't have had those opportunities at Courtaulds!

Hi Andrew T, I was always grateful for the assistance received from the data input manager, along with his assistant who I believe he married. I was a trainee accountant with C.E.L at the time of the mainframe computers. My memories of hastening to meet deadline times, for data transfers to punched cards. I can see both of them now in my mind, but not their names.

When I started they were just upgrading to a Honeywell 6025 running under GCOS. You are right about CEL using the department for accounting, as did many other sections. The punch girls would input the data, then it came to data control for balancing, then to the computer for a check run. Back to data control for corrections and then into the overnight run. Different colour cards were used for each division. There was also payroll runs on the machine, the worst of which was received via paper tape - how I hated having to receive that, I hated it even more when I had to process it. A Heath Robinson like device using elastic bands to maintain tension and which you fiddled with according to the size/weight of the input tape. Then we moved to tape input, same process, but handled online, much quicker for processing. I think I could still sight read a punch card, I spent a lot of time working on them. I remember one afternoon after the Christmas Party, everyone had been instructed to not over indulge. Mid afternooon the ops manager came in, an older cockney guy called Bert (forget the surname). One girl was sat crying at her desk, another was throwing up in a bin, another was asleep. I was scanning a deck of cards, basically flicking through them to ensure the digits went up one at a time so they were in the right order, and that there were no off-punched columns. Bert looked around the office, and left without speaking a word. As the door shut behind him the cards slipped in my drunken fingers and exploded across the desk. In the new year I was called into Bert's office where he said "I saw you were the only one in a fit state to work at Christmas. There will be something extra in your pay packet."

I used the Honeywell computer at Courtaulds several times. I worked at Unbrako in Burnaby Road 1969-73 on their Honeywell 200 machine. On a Thursday it was payroll processing day and if there was a maintenance problem with the machine that day, we would rush the magnetic tapes over to Courtaulds to run the payroll there. I think there was a reciprocal backup agreement but I don't recall the reverse operation. I think the Honeywell maintenance engineers had an office/parts store at Courtaulds or somewhere nearby to minimize any unscheduled downtime. It's hard to believe now that even a large company would have a single computer; but it would fill a room and needed scores of staff to keep it busy.

I believe that Honeywell used an area next to the Courtaulds computer room in Matlock Road to store some spare parts. The area was in general use to receive and store various machine parts for use on the Foleshill Road site and an area was partitioned off for use by the Honeywell engineers. Without holding spares locally, I think that Honeywell would have needed to ship parts from Acton. I vaguely remember that there was a reciprocal agreement for running payroll at another local site to cover for machine failures. These were days when weekly operatives were paid in cash and the payroll had to be returned in time for pay packets to prepared. I think there were very real concerns as to the consequences of not being able to make the weekly payments and the excuse of a "computer failure" was unacceptable at the time.

Hello Philip, I think that the couple you refer to were Roger and Teri. I believe that they were married in about 1975. The computer department seemed to have good customer service standards helped by having Roger, Teri and others working in customer facing roles.

Yes, the name Bowler comes to mind. Brill. You get the three brills award & a chocolate biscuit for that, Andrew. Thank you.

Yes, it was Roger Bowler. I couldn't remember his surname until seeing your message.

Quite. It's become part of the dictionary today. I hear it all the time from big organsiations. No-one will own up to having goofed. It's always the computer's fault. Like as if. In fact, something like 99.99999...% of the time the computer has not made an error. It's human error inputting data or programming. If the computer did actually go wrong, i.e. hardware failure, everyone would know about it because there would be far more serious consequences! I recently had a complaint from a team member that a letter informing them of being furloughed for 3 months stated a start date of 13th July and a finish date of 16th July. When I pointed this out to HR, the youngster there said they thought it was a "computer mail merge error". What is interesting is that people who understand how computers work never blame the computer. As an IT colleague said, it's "finger trouble". GIGO.

Bert was operations manager when I was the programming manager. I seem to remember Bert drove a large Ford Zephyr Mark III. We always had a Monday morning meeting with David Tyler, the computer services manager, where Bert and I would negotiate the amount of computer time available to the developers. Bert always erred on the cautious side, but regularly made more time available as the week progressed when it became clear that he could relax his cautious attitude. On the plus side, this encouraged the programming team to desk check their code to locate errors that would have stopped their test from completing. These basic disciplines have proved invaluable over the years. I remember the horrors of the paper tape reader and the elastic bands. Updates to the share register were provided on paper tape from Burroughs machines in the Braintree office. I tried to replace these in 1976 when I looked at the share registrar's systems but, as often the case, there was no budget available to update their ageing equipment. My first task when I joined in 1966 was part of a project to drive a graph plotting machine with a paper tape reader that would automate the sizing of garments for clothing manufacturers. Compute time was at a premium so we ended up splicing bits of paper tape together and using a tape punch to correct minor coding errors. I can also remember dropping a few trays of cards over the years and having to reassemble them in the correct order. Most of the programmers became fairly adept at using the hand card punch, three fingers at a time, and red sticky tabs to cover up holes punched in error.

It was Roger Bowler, but his wife wasn't Terri. Terri (McKeirnan ?) worked in Data Control, Roger's wife was Pat, she was in charge of the punch room.