In an obituary in the NYtimes recently it said this English bloke who just died revolutionized business computing - as far back as 1951 helping create LEO - a now crude computer system that tracked sales, inventories, etc. and which was later copied by Ford Motor and other giants.

LEO got its name from Lyons something

Q - It said that there were Lyons Tea Shops on practically every corner.

I've been coming to U.K. since 1969 and never remember seeing any of these apparently iconic tea shops - which i assume were cafes for tea time, etc.

It seems now there are no real tea shops except some high-end things you go to for the experience but not your daily chai.

What were Lyons Tea Shops - and as usual i may not have everything right.

thanks

Googled it - http://www.kzwp.com/lyons/teashops.htm

I think your memory's off a bit. I started working in London in 1971 and there was a Lyons Corner House in St Martin's Lane, where my office was.

When I came back to the UK in 76, they all seemed to have gone.

They were always called Corner Houses and never tea rooms: they served proper breakfasts, lunches and whatever we called the meal you eat after 6pm, to all sorts of people. In the afternoon, women did use them for the pseudomeal called afternoon tea. They were also handy, like Starbucks or a pub these days, as a place to just pop into - and a cup of tea was the standard thing you ordered.

Lyons got hit during the 70s by lots of things. The Corner Houses were worth more to other people, the market for main-meal plain cafes got overtaken by proper restaurants serving interesting food, their mainstream business was selling pretty undifferentiated packaged food to supermarkets, and they couldn't compete with more efficient, or better branded, manufacturers. And the really, really crappy chain called ABC in London (and lots of other things everywhere else) undercut their prices as a place where you could sit down for a cup of tea.

Nigella Lawson's family used to own the Lyons corner houses I seem to recall from her "Who do you think you are?" episode.

There's a really dismal story about that.

The founding father - Lyons was run by lots of people called Salmon, but this was the chief Salmon, who I think was her maternal grandfather - was in the catering corps during WW2. It now appears that he was in a regiment that liberated Belsen, and had some responsibility for feeding the captives.

Sadly, the death rate apparently soared once feeding started. The British army had never had to deal with that kind of starvation, and gave people what you'd give to healthy soldiers who'd been on short rations for a couple of days. Popular histories of the liberation claim it was the food that killed them.

How true that was I've no idea. But it must have been an awful thing to live with afterwards.

Sounds very plausible Flanner.
No wonder they didn't mention that in her programme.
And indeed a terrible thing to have to live with, even just being there at the liberation must have been traumatic, but to think that your well meaning help may have killed even more would be unbearable I should imagine.

Pal - a couple of links to LEO for you:
www.leo-computers.org.uk, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LEO_computer
Fascinating stuff - I used to work as an operator on an ICL computer.