Remember What's His Name?

Mike Dryland mourns the death of Frank Tomlin

Frank gone! How sad. Brings back so many memories. Frank was effectively my first boss in Systems Office 50 years ago.

I joined in ’68 but swanned around Tractor Plant, then HR Staff for a while. At least HR did introduce me to this ‘systems’ lark.

I remember my first trip to Cologne, with Jim 'What's His Name' from Personnel Systems to look at the IPIS system. Its manual, translated into English said, ‘In IPIS it is necessary to have a slash after each instruction’. It was one of Ford’s first real-time (as opposed to batch) systems.

Nik Garbers had built it and our hosts in Cologne were one Reinhard Bertuleit and one Gerd Schumacher. We went to Frueh for supper, got offered Halve Hahn (tee hee) and got very pissed.

I had a lousy hangover to take to the office next day. Much mirth all round. When HR asked me what I wanted to do next, the systems thing seemed like a good idea.

I was put in Don Tombs department. I was always late in the morning. John Smith patrolled outside the lift on the 5th floor at Warley and took the names of late-comers. Later someone told me to leave a suit jacket on my chairback overnight and sneak in up the back stairs.

Don always called a spade an effing shovel. He told me he could effing fire me for being effing late. I fear Don shaped my vocabulary for the rest of my Ford career.

Around that time I recall Jeff Perry, Charlie Croly, Steve Cuthbert, Gordon Wilford, Gordon Palmer, and Alec Lynam. At first I was a sort of junior programmer-dogsbody while Alec tried to teach me to debug core dumps. He never succeeded.

I think Frank, Alec and I ended up with Jack Lobley. We were developing VOCS. We started ‘Flop of the Year’ around then. John Harvey made cracks about a vocs to keep Alec’s valis in. Alec was still trying to turn me into a programmer.

I remember he and I worked an entire weekend trying to launch something. We started work at 8:30am on the Friday, worked non-stop, and I remember dozing off in the Dartford Tunnel on my way driving home at 2am on the Sunday. The tunnel was 2-way but there wasn’t any traffic.

I owe Frank a lot. He was really good at training and development. He did manage to turn me into a systems analyst of sorts. I went on lots of BIS-Brandon courses in Eastbourne. Peter Davies was around then too. And Dick Richardson and Allan Simpkins.

I remember we did lots of work at Langley truck plant. They were always short of parts but kept on building ‘cripples’ which had to be parked-up at the plant and accumulated more damage waiting to be finished.

We put in a Mickey Mouse system to track the cripples. Allan programmed a report with the title “Cripes report for the Plant Manger”. Spelling was never Allan’s strong suit.

Mike Lawrence, Paul Chapman and Stan Smith were there too. I think they came to work at Ford as a hobby; their real occupations were at the horses. Mike was the fastest programmer I ever met. When I got to be team leader and planned a week’s work, Mike would come back on Monday afternoon to say he’d completed it and was bored. Alec was still trying to teach me to program.

I did write several VOCS modules in Cobol DL/I. The modules survived in Ford as long as I did. John Cornwall retired the last one just after I left.

Frank hammered home the systems analysis lesson—never accept the first answer. Always ask the question 3 times. He never explained how you dealt with the three different answers. Mind you, I seem to recall that even then, Frank was showing dangerous political tendencies.

I then discovered that ‘management’ was much easier than programming or systems analysis. Peter Greene, John Greenway, and I were all rotated into each other’s job. It was Norman Lewis’s idea of a laugh. I ended up working for Peter Erbert and I turned green with stress. It had been Peter Greene’s old job. How we all laughed…

I miss Frank. Happy daze.

Dave Low reconciles the Brits and Germans

Mike's piece really did raise feelings of nostalgia. I started working with the Don Tombs team when I was in Ford Britain as supervisor of Systems & Data Control in Vehicle Supply & Distribution.

I remember working with Alec Lynam to specify the error reports and Mike Dryland and Peter Davies were the analysts. We used to play chess at lunch time in the Warley canteen.

Later I moved into Ford Europe, working for Ralph Scheib. There were some pretty chaotic meetings in Cologne, which were great fun. In those early days of Ford Europe it was somewhat exciting trying to reconcile British and German requirements.

I also got involved with all the other names Mike mentions. Gordon Wilford recounted the story about Dick Richardson on his first trip, telling the Germans that he'd been to Cologne before—at night during the war.

The standout names at the time were Alec and Jeff Perry, and Frank was loosely in the mix. Those were good times with lots of characters about including, on our Ford Europe Programming & Distribution side, people like Juergen Schmidt, Ralph Scheib, Peter Hellermann, Raffa Mareschi and Geoff Goodey.

Gone are the days when we used to work directly with a programmer or analyst to specify what you wanted without a thousand contractors getting involved.

Ah well. Memories!

Don Tombs—in at the beginning

Don Tombs is warmly remembered by his old Ford Systems colleagues, despite having left the company nearly 50 years ago.

He was a formative influence on development of the Systems Office, and it all began for him when he joined Briggs Motor Bodies in 1954 as a trainee cost accountant.

As part of his job, he took a training course for the Hollerith punched card process. Don says he decided there and then that, "This was the job for me".

Ford later took over Briggs and at Dagenham Don advanced to training and programing for IBM 1401 amd System/360. He moved to Gants Hill, Ilford to join Jerry Minch, who was forming the Ford Systems group.

He entered the Warley Central Office building when it opened, by now as the Manufacturing Systems programming supervisor. His main project was to build the 'level-by'level' system that explodes vehicle assemblies to parts and ultimately to shipping releases.

Don was promoted to manager, despite a fractious relationship with Systems director, Alec Daly. Then at the formation of Ford Europe, he was made manager of Vehicle Information Systems.

But his clashes with Daly eventually came to a head and in 1971 after, "17 great years" he moved to Phillips UK as head of systems development. He sold up in Brentwood and bought a 1-1/2 acre estate in Surrey. "Probably the best move I could have made", he noted.

Whilst still at Phillips, Don set up his own consultancy. He finally left Phillips in 1980 to concentrate on consultancy—one of his major projects was a huge study for the EEC (European Community). But the stress of constant travel was too much and he retired in 1985.

In retirement he moved to the Costa del Sol, and formed another company. Its business was to move expatriate possessions, including cars, in and out of Spain in containers. A very profitable business.

But after 20 years in Spain, constant hot weather and boredom took their toll, so he returned to the UK, to West Sussex.

Back home he and wife, Dodie concentrated on ocean cruising. He reckons they have taken around 60, including several round-the-world trips. As Don says, "Somebody has to do it!".

John Greenway recalls early days at Dunton

I joined Ford in 1964 at its Birmingham Research Centre, next door to Winson Green Prison. It was located in the Midlands to tap into the engineering skills of what was then the centre of Britain's motor industry. I lacked those prized skills so was lucky to be hired.

John Potter was a colleague. We spent all our spare time arguing politics, and as we prepared for the planned move to Essex, he and I bet on who would be the first to be elected to the local council.

John won and eventually became leader of Basildon Council. And he nearly made it to Westminster. I lost the bet and never entered politics, but I avoided paying him his winnings.

I moved into Dunton as soon as it opened, and one of my first tasks, under the leadership of Geoff Dye and John Beckett, was to help launch Ford's first example here of personal computing.

This consisted of half a dozen electro-mechanical teletype terminals scattered around the building and linked to a bureau in London. Teletypes were enclosed in plywood booths in a vain attempt to suppress their awful keyboard noise.

At the same time Product Development installed a new, modest IBM 1130 computer. PD Systems in Ford US saw it as a excellent remote terminal for its own mainframe and asked for someone to go to Dearborn to code the communications software.

But my manager, Peter Nevitt had no intention of accepting satellite status. So I was sent on a mission for which I was quite unsuited. Peter was happy for me instead to swan around the US, looking at candidate mainframe computers for Dunton.

In due course, Product Development brought in the mighty GE-625 wiith its attached communications controller to support dozens of terminals. The IBM 1130 was abandoned.