GWR Route: Banbury to Wolverhampton

Hockley Station: gwrhd687

An internal view of the Comptometer Office based within Hockley's main offices adjacent to the' Farm'. Frank Popplewell states that this office was known as the Well and became a casualty of the air raid on the depot on 12th December 1940. The photograph is thought to have been taken in the late 1920s and would appear to have been posed. Female staff were increasingly being employed by the railway and despite the apparent skill required to operate these machines and their high level of productivity, were never paid on a par with men on the same clerical grades. Comptometers were a key-driven calculator is extremely fast because each key adds or subtracts its value to the accumulator as soon as it is pressed and a skilled operator can enter all of the digits of a number simultaneously, using as many fingers as required, making them sometimes faster to use than electronic calculators.

Manufactured without interruption from 1887 to the mid 1970s it was constantly improved; first it was made faster and more reliable, then a line of electromechanical models was added in the 1930s. Although the comptometer was primarily an adding machine, it could also do subtractions, multiplication and division. Its keyboard consisted of eight or more columns of nine keys each. Special comptometers with varying key arrays were produced for a variety of special purposes, including calculating currency exchanges, times and Imperial weights. The name comptometer was formerly in wide use as a generic name for this class of calculating machine.

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