My friend and colleague Douglas Comish, who has died aged 97, was invited in the mid-1950s to join the small band of people that had established J Lyons & Co, the food empire best known for its Corner Houses, as the first company in the world not just to use but to construct an electronic digital computer to carry out the work of its clerical staff.
The Lyons management had the foresight as early as 1947 to recognise the need to improve their backroom clerical functions and had the wit to see the possibility of using computers.
With the support of academics at Cambridge University, Lyons put together a team to develop what was to become Leo, the Lyons Electronic Office. Leo I was installed at Cadby Hall, the Lyons HQ in Hammersmith, west London, in 1951.
Such was the interest shown by other companies in what Lyons was doing that the board decided to set up a subsidiary, Leo Computers, to build, market and sell computers.
I first met Doug early on in the Leo story when we both worked in the Lyons Statistics Office. Doug had joined the J Lyons company in 1949 as a management trainee. The Statistics Office was responsible for the costings of different parts of the Lyons enterprise and answered management’s “what if” questions of the kind: “What might be the impact of changing the recipe for our Swiss rolls?”
Doug had risen to be the head of a team overseeing a group of Lyons departments and I was a humble clerk who looked after, among others, the Lyons laboratories, where Margaret Thatcher had once worked as a chemist. At that time I simply respected Doug as someone I perceived to be in command, with a bluff and direct manner, but well liked by his colleagues.
He was selected to join Leo Computers in 1956. He undertook many critical roles in the evolving British computer industry, as under competitive pressure it went through successive mergers and takeovers, with the creation in 1968 of ICL, made up of originally seven companies. Doug built a highly capable unit of people to whom he was intensely loyal and he had the tenacity to achieve the goals the company had set him, including product development and managing the successful purchase of the international operations of Singer Business Machines. He retired from ICL in 1986.
Born in Liverpool, to John Comish, a salesman, and Mona (nee Moore), a housewife, Doug studied maths at King’s College, Cambridge, followed by national service in the army, where he achieved the rank of captain.
He was an active sportsman, playing football for Cambridge University and later for Lyons, and a keen cricketer. He was also a golf enthusiast, playing for as long as he could lift a club.
Doug’s wife, Mary (nee Morgan), whom he married in 1971, died in 2004. He is survived by his partner, Sylvia Morris, three stepchildren, Martin, Carol, and Michael, from his marriage, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
• This article was amended on 25 September 2023. ICL bought the international operations of Singer Business Machines rather than the Singer sewing machine company.
