Interview with Sir David Brown

Sir David Brown was born in Wolverhampton, in May 1950. David’s father was a civil engineer working in local government and his mother was a primary school teacher. The family were especially keen on education as David explains: “My mother was the first of all of her family and all of her line to get what I call a decent education.  Her mother was insistent that her youngest daughter would get educated, whatever it took.  So of course that feeling was passed on to my mother, and passed on, and I have it, and my sons have it.  Life’s about learning as much as anything else, it’s endless, it never stops.”

Having passed his Eleven Plus, David went to a state grammar school near Warrington where the family had moved to after his father was recruited to the position of Borough Engineer, Surveyor and Architect of Warrington. David enjoyed his school days and in his early teens set his sights on an engineering career after attending an Institution of Electrical Engineers lecture.

David explains: “ One day when I was just coming up fourteen, my father said, ‘the Institution of Electrical Engineers is giving this year’s Faraday Lecture at the big hall right in the centre of Warrington, there will be a lot of people there, about 2,000, and I am going to go.’ He didn’t say, ‘Do you want to come with me David?’  He said, ‘Oh and you’re coming with me.’ … Now imagine how I greeted the prospect of a lecture but I really didn’t have a lot of choice so off we went.  I prepared for the worst.  About ten minutes into the one hour lecture, this chap from the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority at Daresbury had me hooked.  There he was doing real demonstrations and experiments on stage and he was enthusing.  By the end of that I thought, I don’t know that I want his job, but boy, do I want a life in engineering.”

David’s passion for electrical engineering grew quickly and he spent his pocket money on subscriptions to Wireless World, the journal for amateur electronics people, and in the Government Surplus Supplies shops which sold stripped-down parts of oscilloscopes, radios, telephone exchanges, etc. David adds: “I was having a field day.”

After gaining his A levels in physics, pure and applied maths, as well as further maths, David went to Birmingham University to study electrical engineering. He had been sponsored by the Plessey Company from the age of sixteen and, equipped with the knowledge he had gained from spending a couple of long summers working with them and drawing on his further maths, he coasted through the first year. In his second year he “found that, thankfully at that stage in my life and no later, that isn’t the way to carry on. If you’re going to do something right, do it right. Do it right. Don’t depend upon just being lucky all the time. Do it right.” So he radically reset his work habit to “get it right, and how”, completed his electrical engineering degree at Portsmouth Polytechnic, and has maintained the ‘do it right’ habit ever since.

David graduated in 1972 and having been sponsored by Plessey he expected he would go to work for them. However, because of the recession, Plessey did not take on any graduate recruits that year and David was forced to look elsewhere.  He says: “I started writing masses and masses of letters of application to everybody in the electronics world.  Everybody was in the same state, really. Finally I had an offer in avionics in Hatfield.  I thought I’ve got to take this, it really does look interesting.  Then, the day before I was going to sign this deal, I got a call from Plessey offering me a job as an assistant engineer in their ace telecoms research establishment at Taplow Court.” He adds: “I saw telecoms then as I see it now, an opportunity to work on the biggest machine on earth. And how can an engineer walk away from that?  Particularly since what they were doing at Taplow Court was figuring out the convergence of communications and computing.  They were researching and developing processors for the very first stored program control exchanges.”

 While at Plessey Telecommunications Research, David was working on project Ptarmigan; a landmark tactical mobile cryptographic telecommunications system for the British Army.  He says it is now obsolete but: “It was the absolute state-of the-art, indeed reaching beyond it then, because the heart of it was the Plessey PP250 computer, the first industrial computer architected to be a pure Church-Turing machine, to create a digitally secure platform for trusted software.”

When the Ptarmigan switch transferred to Plessey at Poole to begin its development phase, David went with it. He met his wife there. She was a computer scientist, who was working on parts of the operating system for PP250.

In 1976, David and his wife were both recruited by Standard Telecommunications Laboratories, STL, Europe’s leading telecoms research establishment, based at Harlow.  STL was owned by the ITT Corporation. David progressed to become a principal research engineer. His role saw him split his time between Harlow and Antwerp, and he also spent time working with Frederick Electronics, a subsidiary of Plantronics, in Frederick, Maryland. He says: “I was learning at a rate of knots, and having a lot of adventures along the way.”

In 1979 David moved over to STC, also owned at that time by the ITT Corporation. He explains: “Bernie Mills, the technical director of STC and a great telecommunications engineer, invited me to come and be STC Telecommunications’ first ever director of software engineering.” David says that he pointed out to Bernie that he did not have a background in software. Bernie responded that he wanted a Chartered Engineer for the engineering rigour that goes with that in order to bring software and engineering together and take “STC quickly and massively into the software engineering age.”

David adds: “At that time STC employed about 100 people that we would quickly begin to call software engineers. It had major contracts to engineer bits of the software for the stored program controlled exchanges, SPC exchanges, System X.  We needed to recruit 1300 software engineers, up from 100. That was just never going to happen just by following our noses; there had to be a plan.  I  approached it from an engineering point of view, with old-fashioned tools and rigour.  Nobody was more astonished than I was by how well-received this was. And soon, something magic happened – I always love when it happens – the tables turned and I started following the team. And me saying to them, ‘So what do we do next?”

Later, with STC pursuing a strategy of accelerating the convergence of communications and computing, STC acquired ICL. But the expected financial and cultural synergies were never realised. In 1991, when STC was acquired by Northern Telecom of Canada, David decided to move on. He felt that the company had lost sight of the convergence of communication and computing which had been one of his driving visions throughout his career.

In 1991 David joined Motorola Ltd as Director of UK Operations. He would go on to become Senior Director, Radio Access and ultimately Chairman of Motorola Ltd. He says: “Motorola was a smallish company in the UK in 1991.  Big in what’s called land mobile communications, supplying the army and so on, and with a lot of technology, good early successes and a huge passion to be very big in cellular communications, in fact to be the number one in mobile phones. They wanted to expand it rapidly and invest in engineering and research. They had massive ambition and I thought it was absolutely spot on.”

He adds: “I took probably the biggest financial risk of my life walking away from all the financial security of being a well-remunerated executive of STC, to this uncertain role.  Well, the rest is history.  It was intensive.  All my days with Motorola were full-on; every day was an adventure.”

The main challenge was the speed at which the company wanted to achieve its goal of untethering every phone on earth. David says: “When I was Director of UK Operations of Motorola Limited, I had the privilege of that being the team that built the first GSM network in the UK. The provider was then was called Cellnet; it was partly owned by BT and G4S. And we went on to build a number of other networks in Europe.  But, by then we had built the biggest telecoms lab in Europe of any company, and the Queen opened that in Swindon in 1997.”

In 2008 David decided to step down from Motorola with the intention of taking some time to pursue his hobbies but says: “in a heartbeat I found myself very happily as the chairman of an IT company, DRS, Data Research and Services; the senior non-executive director of a hydrogen fuel cell company, Ceres; a non-executive director of a FTSE 250 high tech company manufacturing all the way round the world, Domino Printing Sciences, and lots of other things, including pro bono work I was doing. I’ve just carried on that way. These days, when given a choice, I choose to do what I think is going to be really edgy and fun, with people who are filled with a sense of purpose and I’m going to enjoy working with them.”

In 2019, David was asked to chair the board of trustees at Bletchley Park. He says: “It’s an independent heritage site, museum and visitor attraction with about 300,000 paying visitors a year, about 30,000 schoolchildren visitors and we reach about another 20,000 schoolchildren through outreach.  It’s wrong to regard it simply as the home of code-breaking in World War II; it’s how that was done that made it the birthplace of computing science, artificial intelligence and digital communications. Even the first transmission of digital voice happened there, ahead of Alec Reeves and PCM.”

He thinks that people who have yet to visit Bletchley Park can too easily associate all the many Bletchley Park breakthroughs in code-breaking, computing science and so on with Alan Turing alone, genius and great man that he was. But that is not the whole story. He says: “It’s about inclusivity. There were 11,000 people working there and I think that Turing would be really quite upset to think that people today think that the other 10,999 weren’t as big contributors as he was. They all came from very different backgrounds.  There were mathematicians like him, but all walks of life.  Bletchley Park even tried to recruit Tolkien.”

David also highlights that the majority of those 11,000 were women, adding: “What Bletchley Park teaches all the kids who visit every year is that mathematics, if you approach it right, isn’t as difficult and dull as you might imagine it to be.  I’m convinced, and so are a lot of the maths teachers who come to us, that Bletchley Park is actually having a measurable effect in lifting the grades that are achieved at GCSE maths and engaging people for life.  Bletchley Park also teaches the value of getting education early on.  Turing and his young contemporaries invested a lot of their time and effort in their education before they got to Bletchley Park.  They took advantage of everything the school and the university systems offered them in return for very hard work.  It teaches you the value of teamwork and that nobody can do anything alone.  It teaches you the importance of self-discipline, that you can be and must be as creative and innovative as you can be; you owe it to yourself, if not to others.  But you can only do that safely if you are operating within a framework of discipline. Bletchley Park was the first time and the first place ever where the processes of code-breaking turned into computing with the Bombe machine and then Colossus; the first place to industrialise that process.”

David reflects on the impact that changes with which he has been involved during his career in technology have had on society. He says: “It is unbelievably better connected at every level. That’s brought with it huge transparency; society is a lot more transparent.  Now we worry about, and rightly, all the dark corners as well, but at least now we’re worrying about them and tackling them because this same technology gives us ways of doing that. You have to believe that if we carry on this way society is going to become progressively, and never fast enough, more level, more equal, levelling up and never down, more inclusive.  It certainly was not inclusive all those years ago, it was not even on the scale and although great strides have been made, we’ve really only just started.”

He continues: “I am as optimistic now as I was as that young lad.  My sense of purpose is just as strong, in engineering, in telecoms, in IT.  I think, the future is a multiple of the present, and what characterises it and must characterise that field are three things: interdisciplinarity, inclusivity, globality.”

“Industry, every industry and IT no less than any other, is the economic engine of the country.  Cash comes from nowhere else.  That’s where taxes come from. Directly or indirectly, it’s how we fund all our great institutions.  It’s never too late to stick another gear in that economic gearbox and shift the country up another gear and I think IT has a major role to play in that.”

David has relished the many leadership roles he’s had throughout his career but has never been inclined to start his own company. He says: “I love working with other people. It is impossible to innovate alone.  It always has been. Very little worthwhile ever is achieved working on your own. I think if people get that from the start, and get that nobody has a right to be correct, and everybody’s wisdom is important in cracking any great innovation, then you immediately drop into the mode of ‘I want to work with other people’.”

Looking back, David wishes that he had understood sooner in his career how best to use the relationship between purpose and motion. He explains: “Purpose is essential but it’s useless unless you’re in motion.  Static purpose is of no help at all. I say to this day to teams I’m privileged to work with when they ask ‘How do we work out whether to go this way or that way?’ – when there might be 180 degree different directions to choose from – let’s discuss whether we’re utterly clear about the purpose and then it really doesn’t matter in which direction you take the first step.  Take it. When you’re clear about the purpose you will know whether you have landed in a direction which is contributing to the purpose or it’s detracting from it, whether you are going in the right direction.  If it turns out wrong, just do a 180 degree U-turn and take two steps, and then you’re in the money again.  People shouldn’t freeze.  They shouldn’t think, if I don’t know, if I can’t see the right way to go now, that must be my fault; what am I not doing?  It just is.  Move on.”

David goes on to compare navigating through technology futures to driving in the dark, he adds: “Driving down this dark road, and you don’t know where the turns are or whether you’re going to go into a hairpin or a cliff edge or whatever. You can only see as far as the headlight range will let you. The trap is to try to see further, or to imagine you can see further.  Just because the road is gently bending to the right, doesn’t mean it’s going to keep gently bending. Don’t be fooled. That’s key when you’re thinking about planning.  There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly granular short-term plan, a rather less granular mid-term plan and an ultra-clear long-range purpose. Just have faith that when you come across these brutal facts, the cliff edge, or the hairpin, that hanging onto the purpose will help you to draw up the next bit of the plan in sufficient granularity to overcome that.”

In 2001, David was Knighted by the Queen, an experience that made him think “I’d better do something to earn this. It changes you in that sense, that you think why me?” He adds that since then he has tried even harder, adding; “I try not ever to say no, and to just be there, as long as they’re clear about the purpose.  When people ask you for help, they think that because you carry the title you must have a better understanding, you must know more than them.  Of course you never do. But what they want is for you to listen. And so I resolved, 20 years ago, to be there for the country like it’s always been there for me, especially when things have never been as easy as I should have allowed them to be.”

Asked for his advice to those considering a career in engineering and technology, David says: “Success without passion is luck.  Don’t let any of your life, and certainly not your career, depend on luck.  Take a deep, hard look at the whole width of the IT field and you will find reasons aplenty to believe that you can be passionate about it.  When you are convinced that you are going to be passionate if you’re not already, jump in with both feet.  Let your passion show and don’t be the tiniest bit surprised when everybody welcomes you and says, ‘Go for it, and I’ll help you.’  Don’t ever imagine that just because something looks impenetrably difficult from the outside that that’s how it looks from the inside.  One step at a time.  If it looks hard, it’s only because you’re on the outside.  Get in.  You can do it.”

When talking to people who visit Bletchley Park, and especially youngsters, David offers them the following insight: “I’ve spent my career so far adventuring.  To be an engineer is to be an adventurer. That’s as true for software engineering as it is for any other field of engineering, and it all started with a dream. Every day we dream about what could be. In my field, it was about untethering every phone on earth, overcoming the issues of distance, processing power and storage. Now it’s about 6G, and so on.  It’s OK to dream and it’s OK to be an adventurer.  It really is.  It’s how we got to where we got to and we mustn’t ever stop.”

Interviewed by Jane Bird

Transcribed by Susan Hutton

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley