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My maternal grandfather, his daughter (my mother) and my father all worked for the post-war Directorate of Colonial Surveys (DCS) which begat the Directorate of Overseas Surveys DOS. Ernest Osman McIntosh (my maternal grandfather) was awarded the MBE on Thursday June 7th 1951 in the King's Birthday Honours List. At the time he worked as Drawing Superintendent at the Survey Production Centre, War Office. During WW1 he was a Sergeant Major in the Royal Engineers, working in surveying, and won the Meritorious Service Medal. After the Great War he worked for the Sudan Government Survey until 1923 when he returned to England and married his childhood sweetheart. On his return he worked at the General Staff Geographical Survey (GSGS) which was also known as MI4, and in 1928 invented, developed and patented (under the grasping aegis of the War Office) the Photonymograph; the forerunner of the modern phototypesetter. For this he was awarded £100 by a grateful government who proceeded to make a fortune from the licensing until the advent of personal computing led to the demise of typesetting. However, this £100, a paltry sounding sum by today’s standards, enabled him to buy a brand new house in Coulsdon, Surrey - now part of Greater London. During this prewar period he worked closely with Martin Hotine but In the early part of WW2 he and the family, now comprising three daughters, lived in Coulsdon while he worked at the War Office in London. In 1940 his department moved to Cheltenham to escape the Blitz. Later, when the German threat diminished GSGS moved back to London in early 1944 where he worked on the detailed mapping required for D-Day, based in Bushey Park. Post-war he applied for the post of Director of the newly formed Directorate of Colonial Surveys (DCS), sadly being turned down in favour of a serving officer (and his long time colleague) Brig Martin Hotine. Curiously his daughter Audrey McIntosh, became employee number one at DCS. Later DCS became the Directorate of Overseas Surveys (DOS) at Tolworth as the British empire dwindled, with my father joining in late 1946 after being demobilised from the Army of Occupation in Germany. My mother Audrey, employee number one, who died in Feb 2024 aged 95, recalls working with all the young Poles who were unable to return to their homeland, remembering it as being one of the most exciting periods of her life. However she met my father, William Russell Furse ‘Bill’ Jenkinson, and they married in 1951, whereupon she left the service. I was born in 1953 and grew up in a house filled with maps and air photos, learning to read a map before I could read a book! I recall a number of trips to DOS as a youngster where I was allowed to ‘work’ on the Multiplex plotters. My father worked at DOS until his retirement in 1980 and died in 2010. Only one of their former colleagues, Miriam Bradley, is now alive so far as I’m aware. Sadly there seems to be very little information to be found on the DCS and the DOS, with this excellent lecture being the only one of substance that I can find. Perhaps there are still some former colleagues of my parents out there who will read this?
I notice that local access to jobs/work is not one of your essential services. Is the assumption that access to public transportation facilitates access to jobs? Local access to work is one of the essential services. By omitting this from the analyses, we totally overlook the evolution of distributed working and the potential to alter the built environment by creating a new level of distributed infrastructure. What would it take to discuss how further work might be promoted in this untapped area of research?
