A GENERATION ago, no decent department store was complete without an automated cash system.

Front counter staff placed the cash and bill into a pod which went into a vacuumed tube which sucked it around the store to the back office accounts department where the money was calculated and the change was despatched back to the counter.

In Memories 306, we established that Darlington Co-operative had such a system.

“When I left school in the early 1960s my first job was in the office at Bainbridge Barkers in Skinnergate,” says Ann Lake. “We had a pneumatic system which worked very well until something got in and stopped it working. At the time, plastic bags were coming in and occasionally one was sucked into the system and got stuck.

“I remember when a member of staff was getting married and when she sent something to the cash office, we put confetti on top of the bill and cash so it would have to come out first on the counter.”

On a similar theme, Delia Kirk-Osborne’s great aunt and uncle Oxendale owned a drapers store in Northallerton in the 1880s. In 1882, they took on a 14-year-old apprentice called William Barker who took over when they retired and today Barkers is a great Northallerton institution (that’s why its café is called Bistro 1882).

Delia says: “In the 1960s Barkers had a system where cash payments were put into a pod and then into a pipework which noisily shot up into the office above and then after a short while your change was returned.”

A third pneumatic system has been reported even closer to home – in the very office in which Memories is compiled. In the pre-computer era, newspapers were all about typewritten copy and hot metal presses. Steve Warren was a sub-editor in the Echo’s Priestgate palace in the early 1970s and prepared the copy for typesetting so it could be printed.

“We put handwritten instructions regarding type size, font, headline sizes etc on the paper copy, which was then rolled up, placed in a glass pod and sent whizzing through the overhead pneumatic tube to the overseer’s office,” he says. “This saved us and the copy girls from constantly running back and forth.

“There were a dozen or so machines with tentacle arms and a cauldron of melted lead, where the story was converted into lines of metal type.”

Steve left journalism in 1975 and turned to the dark side of public relations, working for the Co-op.

“One of my tasks the following year was to help organise the re-launch of the Darlington food hall on Tubwell Row,” he says. “We got TV personality Shaw Taylor to cut the ribbon.”

Shaw Taylor was best known for presenting Police 5. His catchphrase was “keep ‘em peeled”.

Are there any other pneumatic cash dispensing systems that we should be aware of – can anyone describe a Doggart’s system to us?