I resolved, eventually, to leave it behind.
In the same way, psychoanalysis taught me to look differently at another issue that had been eating away at me: survivor guilt. I don’t know if I had ever explicitly formulated the thought that I was undeserving of life, when so many millions of others had had life stolen from them, but now that I looked in on myself I realised that this idea underlay much of my long-term unease. Now I turned a more forgiving light on the issue. Yes, I had been lucky: astonishingly so. But my luck was no more undeserved than it was deserved. It was not my fault. Rather than agonising for ever over the unanswerable question “Why me?”, I could choose to make more positive use of my luck. In other words, I should make the most of the life that had been vouchsafed to me - and make each day count, so that my life would have been worth saving.
I mention all this partly because it was a significant stage in my personal evolution but also because it explains why these early years of my career were, in general, uneventful. By the time I had fitted in my evening classes - my initial studies in advanced mathematics and physics were followed by a four-year degree course at Sir John Cass College and, after that, a further one-year stint working studying computer logic at Birkbeck College - and my therapy - initially three times a week but later just once a week - there was little time left to do much else except work and sleep.
It also gives a hint, I think, of how the shadow of war still lingered over 1950s Britain. Compared with tens of millions of fellow Europeans, I had been all but unscathed; yet even I was still traumatised by the conflict’s destructive effects. If people in general were a little numb and withdrawn in the way they worked and lived, it was hardly surprising.
But things could have been worse, and, in my increasingly frequent moments of maturity, I began to develop a sense of contentment. Yet it was all too easy to slip back into a sense of aggrievement and frustration, especially in the early days of my therapy. This was partly because I was beginning to suspect that my progress at work was being hampered by prejudice. My evening classes had raised me from the bottom of Dollis Hill’s intellectual food chain - I was now sufficiently qualified to start studying for a bachelor’s degree - and I began to look out for a less menial position. A vacancy for an assistant experimental officer (the next grade up) was advertised internally, and I asked Ettrick Thomson to put me up for it. He looked awkward and, without explanation, refused. I felt, initially, crushed. It took me some time before it occurred to me that the most likely explanation for his refusal was my gender.
Undeterred, I found a public version of the advertisement - published in The New Statesman, I think - and applied anyway. I was interviewed and, in due course, appointed. Ettrick Thomson never forgave me.
I suppose this must have meant that I was growing more confident - or, at least, behaving in a way that suggested greater confidence. I was scarcely out of my teens, but perhaps my fractured upbringing had given me a sense that, if I wanted to make anything of my life, I needed to take control of it myself. It doesn’t surprise me at all, in retrospect, that some people saw me as pushy. A kinder analysis would be to say that, like all refugees, I had been forced to develop a strong sense of independence.
I was certainly independent in my lifestyle, by the standards of the day, setting my own agenda rather than being at someone else’s beck and call. I kept in touch with my mother, sporadically, by phone - but hardly at all with my father, whose new wife, Maria, wanted as little to do with his previous family as possible. I exchanged regular and warm letters with Renate, who by now was settled in Sydney (where she in due course became an admired social worker, specialising in the care of traumatised children); but the physical distance between us prevented us from playing major day-to-day roles in one another’s lives. I also kept in touch with Auntie and Uncle, and I still paid them occasional visits when time permitted. But I had by now begun to look rather disdainfully - with my young woman’s arrogance - upon what I saw as their parochial outlook; and, as the years passed, time permitted less often.
Instead, the main focus of my life outside work became Walm Lane, where I gradually settled into more mature habits and began, for example, to give embryonic dinner parties in my little bedsit. I even organised, towards the end of my third year in London, a small 21st birthday party for myself. This was attended by a number of family friends as well as younger colleagues from work and college. There was also an older man present, called Trevor Attewell, who was at that stage my boyfriend.
This was the most important of my various pre-marital relationships, and the longest-lasting. Trevor was much older than me, and married, and in almost every respect unsuitable. Later, when I had untangled some of my subconscious knots, the attraction was obvious. My father had rejected me; my mother had always been criticising me for being immature (an excusable failing, one might think, in a child). What could be a better way of answering them than to be the loved one of a successful older man?
The affair lasted for several years, on and off, and was sufficiently serious for me to be cited as co-respondent in Trevor’s divorce. I’m not sure that I was the cause of it: he had been separated from his wife before he met me, and there were faults on the other side as well. But convention dictated that the man should be the guilty party, and so, according to the sordid custom of the day, we spent a weekend at a hotel in Brighton where, by prior arrangement, the hotelier served us breakfast in bed, so that he could later testify in court to Trevor’s infidelity.
I relate this not because I am proud of any of it but because it must say something about the kind of person I am, and how I became who I am. I also have a vivid memory of how, many months later, the relationship ended. Trevor was divorced by then, and was hoping that we could start a new life together. I remember feeling a mounting sense of panic as this prospect grew more real and realising with increasing certainty that this wasn’t what I wanted at all. I liked Trevor, and enjoyed being with him, but the longer we spent together the more I realised that I was still developing while he was not. He was happy with his place in the world, whereas I wanted more. And while he was certainly not stupid, I knew that I was outstripping him intellectually.
I had, I realised, been hiding this fact from both of us, just as I had with my previous lovers. That was what women did in those days. (For years, I had been in the habit of replying, if a man asked me what I did for a living, that I worked for the Post Office - hoping that he would think I sold stamps or something - rather than admitting to working with my brain at the internationally admired Dollis Hill Research Station.) But now, when it came to a decision that would define who I was for the rest of my life, I realised that I could no longer go along with this kind of self-effacement.
I had to stop playing a part, to stop playing down those very qualities that made me who I was - my intellect and my curiosity and my restless drive to have an impact on the world. It was one thing to pretend to be someone else, in order to fall in with a man’s understanding of what a girlfriend’s role should be and thus to oil the wheels of a relationship in the short term. It was a very different thing to build my whole life on that pretence.
I realised, with shocking clarity, that if I wanted more from life I would have to go out and insist on it - irrespective of any challenges this posed to received notions of “femininity”. That meant moving on from the whole idea of living my life as a supporting role in someone else’s drama, whether it was Trevor’s or anyone else’s.
Perhaps I had finally grown up. From now on, I decided, I would be my own person. I would stop apologising for myself, stop hiding myself and, while I was at it, stop feeling sorry for myself. I wanted whatever talents I had to be fully used, and the only person who was going to make that happen was me.
I also resolved that I would stop congratulating myself on the little I had achieved in my life so far. Resting on one’s laurels is the surest route to stagnation. Instead, I wou
ld keep aiming higher and higher, giving free rein to my instinct to ask, restlessly, “Is that all there is?” If I failed, so be it; but I would never allow myself to get into a position where I would curse myself for not having tried.
I have not always succeeded in sticking to these resolutions. But, more than half a century later, I am tempted to say that they have defined my life.
6: The Glass Ceiling
BY THE mid-1950s, I was developing a core of inner confidence that did not meet with universal approval. I had added a bachelor’s degree in mathematics to my qualifications. If I hadn’t taken my exams in the middle of a pregnancy scare, I might have got a first rather than a 2:1. Even so, I was eligible for further advancement So I signed up for a year’s study for a master’s degree, at Birkbeck College, and applied for another promotion.
My immediate boss, Ettrick Thomson, supported this, yet my applications for a Scientific Officer’s post came to nothing. Word eventually reached me that men were resigning from the interview board that administered such matters rather than recommend me for promotion - they disapproved on principle of women holding managerial posts. I was devastated by this: it felt like a very personal rejection. Even when I tried to rationalise it, it was impossible to know if it was me or my gender that was the problem.
Comparable problems arose when I began to express my growing interest in computers. One of the perks of working for the Post Office was that you got six weeks’ holiday a year. The drawback was that I, at least, could not afford to go anywhere. So I had arranged, though a fellow student at college, to spend some of this time working unpaid at the General Electric Company (GEC) Hirst research centre in Wembley. Bill Cameron, the friend in question, had spoken enthusiastically about a new computer he was working on: the HEC4. “You’d love this,” he told me. So I went along for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1954 and made myself useful and, in the process, picked up the basics of this pioneering project. The HEC4 was a huge, multi-part machine that to the modern eye would look more like a fitted kitchen than a personal computer (or PC). While primitive, however, it was none the less unquestionably a computer, in a way that the calculator I had been using was not. It received its initial data and instructions on punched cards (80 columns, and six instructions, per card) and processed them using a 64-track magnetic drum. Ultimately, it could theoretically be used for a wide-range of complicated and repetitive data-processing tasks, from payroll processing to production output analysis. But at this stage the challenge was simply to make it work.
I spent many weeks watching Bill and his colleagues working on this. (I had to do something with my annual leave entitlement.) My understanding grew. And I became increasingly excited by the thought that this was just the tip of the iceberg. As computers became more reliable electronically, so the possibilities for programming them would be hugely and thrillingly expanded.
Eventually, I went to Ettrick Thomson and said, look, couldn’t we use some of these ideas?
The suggestion wasn’t well taken.
No doubt such rejections were largely my fault. I wasn’t a great communicator and, on the whole, was better at just getting on with my work than at expressing myself. But it was impossible to avoid the suspicion that, had such suggestions come from a man, they might have caused less offence.
Once again, I felt crushed. I was used to sexism (although I didn’t yet know that there was a word for it). There were scarcely a dozen female employees in the entire establishment, and walking into the main canteen reminded me of walking into the boys’ school in Oswestry: hundreds of heads would turn and gawp at me with expressions that might have indicated a variety of things but almost certainly didn’t indicate respect. I had grown used to the need to dress as unprovocatively as possible, in a plain grey suit and white pintucked blouse, like a female version of a man, with a black band round my neck instead of a tie. I had learnt to live with the angry minority of senior scientists who seemed affronted to encounter a girl in the workplace at all and expressed their affront by being as scathing and horrible as possible to their female subordinates. I had even grown used to the fact that women’s pay scales were substantially lower than those for men, although I made no secret of my resentment of this injustice. (Sometimes, a man would offer to help me carry my typewriter-like calculating machine - which was exceedingly heavy - only to receive the tetchy reply: “I believe in equal pay, so I’ll carry my own machine.”)
What shocked me now was the discovery that, the more I became recognised as a serious young woman who was aiming high - whose long-term aspirations went beyond a mere subservient role - the more violently I was resented and the more implacably I was kept in my place.
But although I felt upset by these rebuffs, life went on. The pain passed; before too long, I bounced back. (This has, I think, been another recurring theme in my life.) I applied a few more times for promotion and, eventually, was promoted. I was, however, moved to a different part of the research station in order to sidestep my colleagues’ resentment - which meant that I now had the honour of working in Tommy Flowers’s division.
Tommy was not just an engineering genius but also, in spite of his diffidence, an inspirational manager, with a gift for getting the best out of everyone who worked for him. One of our main tasks at the time was to develop ERNIE: the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment that had been earmarked to select winners for the impending national Premium Bonds scheme (introduced in 1957). The challenge was to ensure that the device - which worked by sampling “white noise” generated by a neon gas discharge tube - was genuinely random. The key (without going into too much detail) was to use two such devices for each number that needed to be generated, subtracting the output from the second from the output from the first, in case one of them went wrong. This meant - we thought - that 32 devices were needed to generate the requisite 16-figure number. Then our youngest lab boy suggested that we could achieve the same result with just 16 devices, pairing the first with the second, the second with the third, the third with the fourth, and so on, instead of having 16 discrete pairs. At a stroke, the cost was halved. The genius of Tommy Flowers - or part of it - was to run his team in a way that allowed such suggestions to be both made and heard. This may have been the most important thing I learnt from him.
Checking the randomness of the ERNIE premium bond computer was an important part of my postgraduate work at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill.
There was great public interest in this project, and occasionally groups of visitors would come to watch us at work. The piece of machinery that usually fascinated them most was a futuristic spherical device, on wheels, that we kept in the corner. We could hardly bear to tell them that this was just the vacuum cleaner.
In another version of my life, I might have spent my entire career at Dollis Hill. Whatever its frustrations and limitations, it was a research station - with “Research is the door to tomorrow” carved over its big stone portals - and most of what we were doing was by definition new and challenging. The work that I was able to contribute to was only a few years behind what real mathematical pioneers were exploring, and as we grew interested in computing for its own sake - rather than as a slightly tiresome means to a mathematical end - I began to feel that I had found my metier.
I spent a year studying for my master’s degree and began to do some pure research of my own, into the feasibility of speech recognition by computers. I also became a founder member of the British Computer Society, in 1957. (I’ve always been a great joiner of societies and public bodies, perhaps because of the refugee’s desire to belong. Around this time I also joined the Interplanetary Society and, for some reason, the Homosexual Law Reform Society - I suppose because of my innate sympathy with outsiders.) I don’t think I made a significant contribution to the development of speech recognition software, or indeed to any other aspect of pure computer science, but it was exciting simply to
be involved in the field. I felt that I was finally beginning to fly - and made a point of not taking my lunches with the same old crowd in the canteen any more (even if this meant bringing in my own sandwich), so that no one could be in any doubt that I was no longer at the bottom of the organisational ladder.
It felt good to be making a difference to the world at last, and there were plenty of important projects to be worked on, from helping to design the first electronic telephone exchange (at Highgate Woods) to investigating likely traffic patterns on the first transatlantic telephone cable. And I was above all learning, finally, how to work effectively. I learnt - mainly by trial and error - how to use information, how to prioritise, how to manage money, how to impose structure, how to manage time; and, not least, how to get on with my colleagues.
A lingering sense of prejudice remained: of a glass ceiling that would always prevent me from developing my talents to the full. But in the short term I had plenty on my plate to challenge me, and in the end it was not sexism that persuaded me to leave. It was something more personal than that.
This “something” had its origins back in my scientific assistant days, when I had at some point found myself needing to know more about waveguides - the physical structures (such as cables) through which electromagnetic waves are conducted. I asked around, and one of my female colleagues - Valerie Copper - took me to see a man called Derek Shirley.
He worked in a small office in another part of the research station and initially made next to no impression on me. He was extremely shy, and on our first meeting scarcely made eye contact with me. But he was friendly and helpful and, although I still haven’t entirely mastered the intricacies of waveguide theory, his explanations were sufficiently useful for me to return on several occasions for further guidance. In due course we noticed one another.
Let IT Go_The Memoirs of Dame Stephanie Shirley Page 6
