ONCE-UPON-A-TIME, before contactless payment whizzed money from a shopper’s purse directly into the shop's bank account in just a blink of an eye, department stores were equipped with wondrous pneumatic cash dispensing systems that sucked banknotes around the store while the customer waited minutes to receive their change.

The Co-op in Priestgate was fitted with such a system, as regular readers will know.

When a customer made a purchase at the front counter, the assistant placed the money and the bill in a pod. The pod was then put into a tube which ran around the store at head height. Through the wonders of vacuum engineering, the pod was sucked along the tube to the accounts department at the rear of the store. The accountant would empty the pod, work out the change, place the money in the pod, put the pod back in the tube and whizz it back to the front counter.

“I am 67 and can remember going to Bishop Auckland with my mother, when I was nine or 10, and seeing such a system in a drapery shop called Wilkinson’s,” emails Robin Linton, adding to the list of stores we’ve been building up in recent weeks. “I also remember Doggarts had a system in Bishop, and probably Darlington as well, and my mother, 90, tells me that the Co-op in Butterknowle also had one.”

Butterknowle Co-op is famous because in 1898 it suffered so badly from subsidence that its owner, the Bishop Auckland Co-op, sued the local colliery for damages. It was a ground-breaking case, and went all the way to the House of Lords, with the judges awarding the Co-op £844 in damages. Immediately, the colliery went into liquidation, depriving the Co-op of its money and throwing the Co-op’s customers out of work.

In 1908, the Co-op received £122 from the liquidators.

All this is revealed in the history of the Bishop Auckland Co-op, written in 1910, which also tells us that in the one of “the most extensive and finest piles of business premises” in Newgate Street, Bishop Auckland, it had installed “a system of pneumatic cash carriers”. It must have been a very early one.

But it wasn’t just shops that had these systems. Eric Gendle, of Nunthorpe, writes to inform us of one at the ICI terylene plant at Wilton, where a test laboratory had become separated from a development laboratory by a road. So a vacuum cash system was installed to reconnect them,

“It was never very satisfactory, probably because the samples weighed up to eight ounces whereas the system was only designed to carry a few coins of negligible weight,” says Eric. “The pipework ran in the open, exposed to the weather, so stoppages were far too frequent for comfort.”

But, like everything, these pneumatic systems were just one step forward on man’s great highway of advancement. Let’s go back a step, and see what came before.

“I remember in the 1930s and 1940s Jimmy Lowes’ shop on Darlington High Row which sold haberdashery,” says Pauline Savage in Romanby, Northallerton. “I was taken there to buy hair ribbons, and their cash system was a series of wires and pulleys suspended from the ceiling.”

This sounds like a pre-pneumatic mechanical cash dispensing system. Peter Tarn in Forcett remembers seeing one in the Priestgate Co-op before it was converted to pneumatic ways in 1957.

“The cashier was located in an elevated wooden “pulpit”, which had a series of steel wires radiating from it,” he says, evocatively. “The far end of each wire was attached to a “launcher”, which was located just above each sales counter. A chain and handle, which looked just like a lavatory chain, hung from each launcher. The chain was pulled by the sales assistant to send the cash and bill in a small wheeled bogie up to the cashier in the pulpit.

“The little bogie had to travel uphill to the pulpit, and the energy required to achieve this, in defiance of Newtonian laws, was provided by the assistant’s energetic pull on the “lavatory chain”.

“There must have been a small fly-wheel in the bogie which was spun up to speed by the chain-pulling action, and the stored inertia enabled the cash to make its journey up to the cashier at a steady speed.

“Failures were quite frequent, and sometimes the bogie came to a halt just short of the pulpit. It returned slowly by gravity to the sales counter where the assistant performed a much harder pull on the lavatory chain to get the bogie to its destination.

“As a seven-year old, I found these mechanical antics far more interesting than anything else in the store.”

Who could blame him? If stores did away with their boring contactless cashpoints and re-installed Heath Robinsonesque lavatory-lookalike cash bogies, the decline in the high street would immediately be reversed.