Two days ago, Wendy Martin wrote beautifully about her father Peter Green with fascinating details. Peter Green’s furniture business of 58 years’ history has been transformed over the years and the store in Chandler’s Ford is contemporary and the decor modern.
Wendy’s family story inspired me to introduce Jacksons department store in Reading to you.
Jacksons was Reading’s oldest family owned department store trading since 1875, but the family business of 138 years ended last Christmas. I travelled to Reading at weekends regularly with my teaching job. I always visited Jacksons as its traditional approach to business appealed to me. The shop assistants were polite and gentle. They knew the details of their products well. This place felt like home. Architecturally, Jacksons’ interior design remained in a time warp.
© Thomas Macey
One unique feature of Jacksons was the use of cash system (or cash railway). The system is known as Lamson pneumatic tube system. The Lamson cash machine at Jacksons was the last commercially operating Lamson cash system in the UK. The pneumatic pipes transported cash around the building.
Have you seen the pneumatic pipes before?
one tube for each direction. © Thomas Macey
When I visited Jacksons last winter, I decided to find out more about Lamson pneumatic tube system. After you have paid for your goods, the sales assistant would place the money in a cylindrical metal carrier, which could be closed by twisting the ends. Later the carrier is inserted into a metal box known as a cash station.
One sales lady Margaret let me ‘have a go’. I put my typically non-manicured hand into the metal box and suddenly I felt strong suction. Margaret told me that they also nicknamed the metal box ‘a vacuum’.
I spoke to Jacksons’ archivist Thomas Macey – a young man who started working at Jacksons when he was only 16 years old. Thomas loves Victorian life, steam trains and invention, so working for Jacksons was the perfect job for him. Thomas has a passion for Jacksons’ history and he spent years collecting and reproduced the company archives. He published a book about Jacksons (and I bought a signed copy). He also gives talks about Jacksons.
I’m going to show you a few more images of Jacksons, one of my favourite stores in my life in England that I’ll fondly remember. I remember its smell, its calm space, its personal service, and the rattling of the tubes as the cash carriers were moving through them. However, most of all, I remember the gentleness and courtesy of the family of Jacksons to their customers.
As a youngster I used to be scared of those things. What if the assistant got his or her arm sucked into it. Would the rest of the body follow? They seemed to use it rather like the till in Open All Hours; it was dangerous. I wonder if you could have a large one, large enough for people. It would give a new meaning to travelling by tube.
I liked the overhead cable-car system that preceded the pneumatic tube but I do not think it could go up or down a floor.
Mike,
At Jacksons, the power for the system is produced by a blower in the basement. As the blades of the blower turn, they draw in air from the outside and create a partial vacuum in the tubes. This vacuum is used to move the carriers through the tubes.
I thought I was about to lose my arm when my non-manicured hand felt the strong power of the vacuum. Your concerns and fears as a youngster weren’t at all unfounded.
Until very recently (possibly the last refurbishment) they had some system similar to this in Tesco in Eastleigh. It was used for transferring excess cash from the checkouts to (presumably) the cash office. The cash would be put into a cash carrier similar to those in your photo, and then placed into a pipe by the checkout desk. I think, however, that this was a one-way system.
Hello, Ysenda Maxtone Graham here. I’m writing a book about women’s jobs and careers in the second half of the twentieth century, to be published by Little, Brown, and have greatly enjoyed reading about these Lamson pneumatic tube systems. I would love to talk to someone who worked at Jackson’s or any other department store that used this system. Please get in touch, ysenda@talk21.com, if you can.
Hi,
Thomas Macey has published a book about Jackson’s and he might be able to help you. He has a FB page – https://www.facebook.com/thomas.macey.180/.
Hi. As I’m now nearly 70. I often think about my youth and searching for the vacuum cash system came across your post. We lived outside Liverpool and can’t remember which stores at the time used it ? Have you any list of them ? Regards
Phil
Don’t know if you’ve seen it by now but the Cash Railway Website, http://www.cashrailway.co.uk has a listing of all the former systems worldwide that I’ve been able to trace.