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Joseph Lyons and Co. was a United Kingdom company which controlled the largest food empire in the 1930s. It had a large central Checking Department in London with hundreds of clerks and mechanical Burroughs adding machines to run this empire.

To the public, Joseph Lyons and Co. were best known as the Lyons Corner Houses chain of tea rooms which flourished in the 1950s. They were popular with the working classes, who would typically stop by carrying shopping and with the children in tow. Service was to the table by uniformed waitresses. Many of the tea rooms were noted for their art deco style. In the post-war gloom, the Corner Houses provided a degree of escapist relaxation. The company was losing money in the 1960s but remained under the control of the Salmon family, descended from a founding partner, until 1978 when it was acquired by Allied Breweries and became part of the resulting Allied Lyons. It fell on hard economic times in the late 1980s; and was sold off, eventually being broken up with its ice cream and ice lolly products which were branded as Lyons Maid being sold to Nestlé. Other parts that were sold off included Lyons Cakes being sold to RHM and ending up as part of their Manor Bakeries subsidairy which also makes Mr Kipling's Cakes and Ready Brek cereal ending up being owned by Weetabix Limited.

The rearmament period just before World War II saw a big expansion in the number of Royal Ordnance Factories, (ROFs), which were UK government-owned. However, due to shortages of management resources some ROFs were run as Agency Factories; and J. Lyons and Co. ran at least one ROF: ROF Elstow (Bates, 1946). The management and stock control systems needed in the ROF's, in respect of control of raw materials and "perishable" finished products, were somewhat similar to those used in the catering business; and Joseph Lyons was ideally suited to this task. They did not appear to have any involvement in managing these after 1945, when the ROFs started to run down.

Joseph Lyons's top management, with its back ground in the use of mechanical adding machines, saw the potential of new electrical computers for organising the distribution of cakes and other highly perishable goods. They, therefore, built their own programmable digital computers and became the first user of these in businesses, with the LEO I digital computer: the Lyons Electronic Office I, designed and built by Dr. John Pinkerton under the able leadership of John Simmons. It handled the company's accounts and logistics.

In the 1960s Joseph Lyons was losing money and it started to close some of its London tea rooms and hotels; in 1963 it also merged its LEO Computers business with English Electric's computer interests to form, the jointly-owned, English Electric LEO. In 1964 Lyons sold their half-stake; and Electric Electric merged the company with Marconi's computer interests to form English Electric LEO Marconi Computers. A continuing problem in the UK computer industry was both lack of investment capital and competition with much larger USA computer companies, such as IBM. English Electric LEO Marconi Computers became International Computers Ltd, (ICL), but ICL has now also disappeared as a UK computer company.

J. Lyons' papers are now stored in the London Metropolitan Archives.

See also

• Greasy spoon, the antithesis of a Lyons Corner House.
• LEO computer
• Wimpy Bar

External links

• Designing Britain 1945 - 1975: Lyons Corner House
• J. Lyons & Co.: An illustrated history by Peter Bird 1887–1998
• The papers of John Simmons relating to Lyons' computerization
• LEO Computers Society
• Bates, H.E. (1946). The Tinkers of Elstow: The Story of the Royal Ordnance Factory run by J.E. Lyons and Company Limited for the Ministry of Supply for the World War of 1939–1945. Privately Published.