Obituary for Paddy Sandford-Johnson | Data processing

Paddy Sandford-Johnson, who has died aged 92, was a systems expert on early computers and a Wimbledon tennis umpire. He was both multi-talented and quick-thinking.

His first job was as a salesman at Unilever, but he joined IBM in 1957, when only a dozen British companies were using computers. Realizing the impact of this new technology, systems became his watchword. Over the next 25 years, he developed computer strategies for large companies and governing bodies, from Royal Parks to Premium Bonds and Royal Naval Stores. During a year in Liverpool he installed computers for a regional hospital board and its 35 hospitals, and later spent a year in Belfast at Gallaher, then the world’s largest tobacco company, changing sales and inventory management methods.

In the Rank Organization, he started accounting and within five years was involved in most of the Rank Xerox group, cinemas, records and TV and radio production. In 1971, he founded his own consulting company, but after the recession of the mid-70s, he merged with the American AT Kearney group, managing large projects in Europe and Great Britain.

Illness put an end to this project in the early 80s, but Paddy later became a headhunter for large international companies, turning the market around in accountancy services. For a decade he was part of prominent forward-looking organizations: the British Computer Society, the Institute of Computer Science (dissolved in 1974) and the London Board of Governors of the Institute of Management. He was called a statutory engineer and in 1988 was one of the first 100 freemen in the newly formed Worshipful Company of Information Technologists. He was made a freeman of the City of London.

Born in London during the Depression, Paddy was the only child of Margie (née Stone) and Benjamin Sandford-Johnson. He attended St Cyprian’s School in Eastbourne and Eastbourne University, both of which were evacuated during the Second World War. He started running as a teenager to escape bullying and was an avid squash and tennis player.

When he left school, paid work was a priority, but he kept his sports equipment in his car to use when free time allowed him to progress in his career. He lived at one stage in Birmingham and became a linesman at Edgbaston, after which he qualified as a magistrate. He never missed the Olympics and took annual leave to coincide with them, and was devoted to following rugby, wrestling and motor racing.

Refereeing at Wimbledon (before the computer-generated Hawk-Eye) offered other challenges: from 1955 to 1984, he judged line calls and hated rivals such as John McEnroe. She took early retirement In 1991, later renovated a house in France where she spent half a year and where fierce table tennis battles were popular, as my husband, Paddys younger cousin, discovered. He rarely hit her.

Paddy is survived by his second wife, Wendy Kettle, whom he married in 2006; two daughters, Jemma and Sam, from his first marriage to Annie Tayler, which ended in divorce, and five grandchildren.