RECENT Memories have established that there were two types of cash-carrying systems that whizzed money and invoices around old-fashioned department stores. One was a mechanical system, in which gravity helped propel the cash-containing pods along wires; the other was a pneumatic system in which a blast of compressed air or a suck from a vacuum had the pods in motion.

Two of our museums have curious relics from these by-gone days.

The idea of a cash-carrying system, which stores like Doggarts and the co-op used, was to get cash fast from the front counter to the back cashier’s office and then to return the change.

Let’s start with the mechanical system, or the “cash railway” to use its proper name, which was first patented in 1881 by William Stickney Lamson of Massachusetts in the US.

He halved a hollow wooden ball, placed the cash inside it, screwed the halves together and then placed the ball on some wires strung tight on a slight incline across the shop. The ball then rolled along the wires to the cash office – and so the cash railway was born.

Ingenuity then developed the railway. Wooden tracks were installed, and balls of different weight and diameters were employed to drop down different chutes into the various departments. Some railway systems were so large they needed a catapult to give the ball a good push to get it going.

By 1885, Mr Lamson’s system was in hundreds of stores in the US and he had gained a London agent. A system from these early days is in the co-op in Beamish museum – co-ops were especially keen on the systems because they meant that as well as keeping the money safe from robbers at the front of the store, the accountants were able to carry out complex calculations about the dividends quickly and accurately.

Beamish’s co-op building is from Annfield Plain, which had a cash-carrying system, and the museum’s records show that over the decades it also acquired bits and pieces of mechanical cash systems from stores in Blyth, Hexham and the co-op at Butterknowle.

"The cash-carrying containers at Butterknowle were screwed onto a carriage which was then catapulted along the wires,” says Graham Redfearn of Bishop Auckland, whose father worked at the store from 1931 until it closed in 1968. “There were remnants of it left when the store closed, so perhaps the odd bit ended up at Beamish as one of the counters did.”

Indeed, the Butterknowle counter is now in the hardware department of the Beamish co-op.

The other form of cash-carrying system was pneumatic, and this was invented in Cornwall by steam locomotive engineer William Murdoch in the 1780s. He was experimenting with the power of air being blasted through a tube – he installed a pneumatic doorbell on his house at about the same time – but it wasn’t until 1836 when a capsule was added to his air tubes that stores began to take his idea seriously.

The Victorians saw such potential in pneumatic movement that they started building narrow gauge pneumatic railways under London to move mailbags. The first, in 1863, was a 2ft wide tube that was a third-of-a-mile long between Euston station and a post office. A train of 35 mailbags could be blasted along the tube in one minute.

In 1865, a wider and longer tube was installed between Euston and Holborn, and it was opened by the chairman of the London Pneumatic Despatch Company, Richard Temple-Grenville, the Duke of Buckingham, posting himself in a capsule along it. He arrived at Holborn in five minutes.

However, the tunnels regularly got blocked by derailed buggies or fallen mailbags or tumbled ceilings, and there were problems with airtight seals. In 1874, the General Post Office abandoned the pneumatic experiment.

Two pneumatic railway vehicles survive – one is in a museum in London and the other is in the National Railway Museum in York.

After this disappointment, the pneumatic tubes were scaled down and installed in stores, usually replacing mechanical cash-carrying systems.

In 1894, the Bishop Auckland Co-operative Flour and Provision Society finished building its splendid run of buildings in Newgate Street, and it opened them on July 14 with “one of the greatest events this town has ever witnessed”.

After a formal door opening ceremony, everyone had a quick look round the new store and then between 4,000 and 5,000 processed behind various brass bands to the grounds of Auckland Castle where they were treated to a free tea in “three monstre pavilions” and plenty of speeches.

The premises were indeed impressive – a “princely pile of buildings”, according to the co-op itself. Undertaken by Messrs Kilburn & Sykes, they had taken 20 years to complete, and had cost £9,031 and one life – a labourer had been killed during construction.

The newest wing contained the drapery and earthenware departments on the ground floor, the carpet and mantle departments on the fir first floor, and the furnishing department on the top floor. In the older wing there were departments devoted to grocery, flour and provisions, drapery, millinery, boots (manufactured and ready-made), tailoring and ready-made clothing, ironmongery, jewellery, dressmaking, kerseymaking and stocking making.

But what do you think was the greatest attraction on opening day?

The Northern Echo said: “The great feature in connection with Messrs Kilburn & Sykes’s contract is the fixing of pneumatic cash tubes, which convey the cash in leather carriers from every department in the premises (both old and new buildings) to the central cash office.”

THERE were cash-carrying systems everywhere. Memories 310 contained some beautiful descriptions from readers of the systems in the Darlington co-op in Priestgate.

John Biggs in Etherley Grange adds to our knowledge of Bishop Auckland’s devices. “Doggarts in the Market Place,” he says, “had a wonderful pneumatic system, but Wilkinsons – a smaller family-owned department store at the ‘top end’ of Newgate Street) – was a sprung wire mechanical system. The wires, under tension, carried small glass containers which went from the counter to a glazed cashier’s office in the middle of the store.”

And, as we’ve already established, it wasn’t just retail that used these devices. Industry did as well. “I worked at Wheatly Motors, Yarm Lane, Stockton, in the early 1970s where there was a vacuum system running between the workshop and the stores and reception,” writes DJ Nicholson from Fishburn. “As a jolly jape, the mechanics used to put mice in the tube to scare the girls in the reception.”