Interview with Christine Arrowsmith

Christine Arrowsmith was born in 1948 in Ryhope, three miles south of Sunderland. Her father was a joiner, his father was a butcher and her maternal grandfather was a coal miner. Christine’s mom stayed at home to look after Christine and restarted her working life when Christine was 13 when she went to work as a shop assistant before becoming a scrutiny clerk in a mail order company.

Christine, like her mother and most of her mother’s family, suffered with asthma. She says: “When I got to school age I was classed as too ill to start school, so I had a tutor for an hour a week. Basically, Mum and Dad taught me to read, write and do arithmetic.”

At the age of ten, having read a book about the Lyons Tea Company, Christine decided that she wanted to work with computers. She was advised by her maths teacher that if she wanted to pursue this dream, she should study maths and physics.

However, she couldn’t do O Level physics, but she chose maths and was the only girl in the class. She also chose economics. At school, she says that “university wasn’t even considered” and instead she was advised to attend a new technical college. She says: “These new technical colleges had appeared with the white heat of technology of Harold Wilson’s government. I applied to one in Stafford but my A Levels weren’t good enough. I was offered the HND course, but I wanted a degree. I had been offered a place at Middlesbrough Constantine College of Technology so, I opted for Middlesbrough, said goodbye to Ryhope, and moved into bedsitter land in Middlesbrough.”

It was at college, that Christine encountered her first computer. She says: “We studied PLAN, FORTRAN and computing in general. I survived two years.” Unfortunately, due to an allergic reaction to the damp mould that was in her bedsit, Christine collapsed and spent a month in hospital and a further six months recovering. She was not able to finish her course. She says: “I had some knowledge and there were jobs in lots of jobs the north-east of England. I feel as if I went for a job interview a week, and it always started with doing an aptitude test. If a system was ICL, you did the ICL test; if it was IBM, there was a different test. When I had attended an IBM interview, my test results were kept, and I didn’t need to re-sit the aptitude test for each future interview. With ICL, I did the test each time, knew it off by heart at the end.” At the face-to-face interviews, Christine was frequently asked if she was engaged. She adds: “I was not sure what that’s got to do with programming computers to be honest.”

After six months of interviews, the Job Centre, suggested that Christine should try banks as they were introducing computers. Christine ended up in a branch office for the TSB which had no computers.

In 1970, after six months, Christine decided to move on. She says: “I started job-hunting using the magazines (Computing and Computer Weekly) that I got. I had a day off and went down to London to Rank Hovis McDougall for an interview, and I was offered a job as a trainee programmer.”

To learn the Rank Hovis McDougall business, Christine spent time with each department on rotation. She says: “I spent three months in six different departments within the business, so that I knew it inside-out.  The one I mainly remember was where all the orders came in. We had to batch them up into blocks of 20, with a batch header with the date on, and they went through to be punched on to paper tape.”

In 1971, at the end of the eighteen months induction, Christine was sent on a three-week COBOL course in order to be able to work on the company’s computer which was a System 4 which used COBOL.

After her course finished, Christine joined the computing department, she says: “It was quite a friendly office, but it had to be, because any program we were writing, we had to draw a flow diagram. We had to think of data, and we had to walk the data through. The three of us would take part, each one doing a different role, to check that the logic was right. Once the logic was OK, it was then coded, and that was punched on to cards, and you get a pack of punched cards back. Every card was automatically numbered by the punch card machine. If you dropped them, they could be sorted, which was quite important.”

Christine took a role training programmers at Vickers and also signed up to the Open University: She says: “I wanted a degree; I was going to get it one way or another.”

Having completed four years of her Open University course, Christine got a job as lead programmer at Woolworths based in Rochdale but wanted to move into analysis, so she decided to create a limited company using her mother’s maiden name and formed: Kinsey Computer Services Limited.

Her best friend with whom she had shared a house in Rochdale, let Christine know that the company she was working for needed a contractor. Christine was successful in gaining the contract and started working for LBMS, initially on a six-month contract which was then extended to a year.  Finding business development tough, rather like Dame Stephanie Shirley, she decided to shorten her name on her CV to Chris. She says: “All of a sudden, I started getting invites for interviews. It was quite interesting when I turned up, because the look on some of the faces, it was mainly men that did the interviewing, they were all a bit dumfounded.”

The tactic worked and Christine worked for a number of companies across the UK, using the analysis skills she had trained for after leaving Woolworths. The roles included the Ordnance Survey in Norwich, Sheffield Council and Nissan in Sunderland.

Spells followed with F International NCC in Manchester, the Department of Works and Pensions and ICL.

Christine says of the analysis work: “It was a case of identifying what the business needed, and plotting them out into chunks of doable work, and putting it together as a presentation.  Sometimes I was part of a team, sometimes it was just me.”

Christine quickly realised that often in companies, different departments used different styles of communication to talk about the same thing.  She adds: “Being a business analyst, I tried to make a link between it all, and get them all to sing from one hymn book which I was hopefully successful at.”

Christine ended her freelance career in December 1997 and, since retiring, Christine has been an active member of the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT Manchester branch committee.  She also joined the Computer Conservation Society. She adds: “I do voluntary work and more recently I joined the museum in Manchester where I talk about computers to the public. I think I became a computer geek, and I can’t get away from it.”

Christine says of the future: “The impact it’s had on the last dozens of years has been dramatic.  The next ten years is unimaginable.  I certainly never thought I would find myself with a computer in my pocket, my mobile phone.  It’s more powerful than many things I’ve worked with. Where they can go from there, I don’t know.”

To anyone thinking of considering IT as a career, Christine says: “It’s exciting, it’s interesting, and it’s a challenge.  The object of it is to know what you need it to do, and to get the system/computer to do it the way you want it to do it. The problem is that all the AI, which is very clever, is unfortunately all being done by men, and AI is a learning system, it learns the ideas of the people that develop it, it needs a much wider based background.  We need more women.”

Interviewed by Christine Arrowsmith

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley & Tom Abram