“I was very shy” Mary said, “so I didn’t stand out, I think, at all” – but it is so often the quiet ones you need to watch out for. Mary was a trailblazer and led a life which was, in every way, outstanding.
Mary Blood, as she was known when she joined Putney High School in 1938, would go on to become Mary Coombs; the first female commercial computer programmer on the world’s first business computer. She may have been shy, but she certainly did stand out.
Maths was Mary’s forte, “it was something definite – it was either right or wrong” and she excelled in it during her time at Putney. Years later she would go on to realise, while teaching at a primary school, that she had dyslexia. “Nobody knew anything about that in those days” she said.
World War II put a stop to Mary’s time at Putney as she and her fellow students were evacuated to Chippenham. “Of course, you got to know the teachers really well as we were quite a small group, so I have fond memories of Miss Achurch who taught Maths, and the games teacher, who also did guides.”