A personal anniversary - ENM

This article is a personal note to end the month of May 2020, which marks the 50th anniversary of the sale of English Numbering Machines (ENM) to the Rank Organisation. It’s a historical and heartfelt post, because ENM was built and led by my grandfather, supported by my father and my uncle, for nearly 30 years. This article is a tribute to them.

The firm grew from small beginnings to become one of the world’s leading manufacturers of machines for displaying and printing numbers (examples below), and its achievements included pioneering the use of injection-moulded nylon for display wheels, replacing Mazac alloy. Its heritage now belongs to Hengstler, a giant of the industry.

But its sale to Rank was instead almost entirely due to and valued on its pioneering work on desktop computing. During a ten-year period, ENM developed a range of cutting-edge electronic desktop systems for the Post Office, creating the branch tools for the proposed National Data Processing Service (NDPS), a public data utility service much favoured by Britain’s Labour Government. The project was my father’s creation and consuming passion, and I grew up with the Post Office Machines (pictured below, styled by two of Britain’s greatest industrial designers). The project was one of the very first to use integrated circuits in the UK, evolved, adapted and grew as the technology advanced. Two talented Austrian engineers, Manfred Huber and Norbert Klimek, were responsible for the design and I was privileged to receive my introduction to engineering from them. I recall also that my father was particularly impressed with Olivetti, and by his meeting with Elserino Piol.

(Image credit: Design, edition 252 December 1969 p.68; now published at vads.ac.uk)

Perhaps Rank believed it would become another Xerox. Shortly after the sale, the General Election brought in a Conservative Government which cancelled the NDPS. Rank struggled to understand, commercialise and invest in the extraordinary portfolio of advanced technologies, which subsequently included the UK’s first dot-matrix printers, though some of its derivatives equipped the French state lottery system in the late 1970’s. ENM’s 1,200 loyal employees at Queensway in Enfield, North London did not have a great future. My grandfather was 78 years old when he sold ENM and died a few years later, leaving almost all of his fortune to the British exchequer. Some loyal staff received bequests in his will, an action deemed so remarkable at the time that it was widely reported in the press.

The end of ENM's long story as an independent, family-run business, and the beginning of its decline as a division in a conglomerate, took place at a turning point in UK industrial history. Mechanics were giving way to electronics (a force that shook Olivetti too), the global post-war boom was ending, and conglomerates and national champions were becoming the fashion. Accountants, not industrialists, ran much of British industry. In a time of rapid change, innovative businesses need vision, conviction and judgement to survive. My grandfather and his sons had those qualities. Their absence cost Britain an industry.