IT pioneer celebrates 60 years of doing business

PHILANTHROPIST Dame Stephanie Shirley hosted a party exactly 60 years after launching her pioneering IT company.

More than 80 former staff of Freelance Programmers gathered at Greenlands, the home of the Henley Business School in Marlow Road, on Wednesday last week.

Dame Stephanie staged the celebratory afternoon tea because she wanted to honour those women — and a few men — who helped grow the business.

The guests, some of whom had not been together for 20 or 30 years, enjoyed a reception on the terrace before listening to speeches in the school restaurant.

Tony Bryant, professor of informatics at Leeds Beckett University, was invited to chart the history of the company, in a speech entitled “Whatever happened to Freelance Programmers?”.

There was also a reading of a poem called “With women’s hands” by Toni Giselle Stuart, which was specially commissioned by Dame Stephanie for the occasion.

The tea was accompanied by a performance by the Singing Waiters, who surprised the guests by breaking into song.

Their set featured La Donna è Mobile, Toreador Song, Tonight, That’s Amore, Nessun Dorma and O Sole Mio.

Dame Stephanie, who lives in Phyllis Court Drive, Henley, said it was a great opportunity to relive old times.

She said: “I had a lovely time and it was a really super day.

“Time stood still when I met the wonderful women with whom I had worked so long ago.

“Although people had different colour hair now, the faces, voices and eyes were just the same — although we did have name tags on.

“One of the people I saw again was my first secretary I had in the Sixties, who still looks just like her mother.

“Quite a lot of the topics discussed would start with ‘Do you remember when…’, while we all asked each other how we fared during covid.

“Thankfully, I don’t think we lost anyone in our group due to the pandemic, although the list of people has shortened over the years.  

“Seeing everybody just took us back to a time in our lives when we were all involved in the business world, although the concept of women leading a vigorous professional career and raising their families is accepted now.    

“My head did swell with all the nice things everyone said to me but one of the reasons I had a poem written was to honour them and their contribution because they do make a fuss of me.

“I gave a short speech where I told them what I had been doing since I saw them last and my hopes for the future and asked them to support my three charities, which are a big part of my life now.”

Dame Stephanie set up Freelance Programmers in 1962, when she was 29, and worked from her dining table.

Nearly all the employees were women and mostly worked from home.

She wanted to provide flexible opportunities for women so they could juggle childcare and forge their own careers to overcome the gender issues of the time.

Sick and tired of “bumping up against the glass ceiling”, she adopted the alias “Steve Shirley” and found she received more replies from business contacts when writing as a man.

Dame Stephanie came to the UK in 1939 as a Kindertransport child refugee at the age of five and it was this and relying on the help of strangers that instilled the sense of resilience in her.

One of her most famous speeches was given at an event in Vancouver in 2015 to an audience of thousands, including Bill Gates.

Enitled “Why do ambitious women have flat heads?” she explained that ambitious women suffered from being “patted patronisingly — and we have larger feet to stand away from the kitchen sink”.

Since then the speech has been viewed by more than 2.5 million people online.

Dame Stephanie puts her success down to surrounding herself with “first class” people who she liked.

Once, when she referred to her late husband Derek as an “angel”, a woman complained: “You’re lucky, mine’s still alive!”

In 2017 she was made a Member of the Order of Companions of Honour for services to the computing industry and philanthropy in the Queen’s birthday honours.

She was made an MBE in 1980 and a dame in 2000.  

Dame Stephanie now devotes her time to her other passion of philanthropy and supports strategic projects in autism research, which her late son Giles suffered from. He passed away in 1998, aged 35.

She has also launched three charities, Autism at Kingwood, which provides round-the-clock care to adults across southern England, Prior’s Court Special School, near Newbury, for pupils aged five to 25 with complex needs, and Autistica, which lobbies for and supports research.

The three charities employ more than 1,000 people.

More pictures in this week’s Henley Standard.