Knocker-up

Before cheap alarm clocks, somebody had to wake the workers. In the mill and factory towns of industrial Britain and Ireland, that somebody was the knocker-up — a person paid a few pence a week to come round in the dark before dawn and rouse sleeping families in time for their shift. They were a fixture of working-class streets for the better part of a century.

The job was exactly as simple as it sounds. The knocker-up walked a regular round in the early hours, carrying a long pole — often bamboo — which they used to tap on the upstairs bedroom windows of their clients. Some used a soft hammer or a rattle; one famous London knocker-up used a pea-shooter to fire dried peas at the glass. They kept tapping until they saw movement or a face at the window, then moved on to the next house. A good knocker-up did not leave until they were sure the client was actually up.

It was a trade built entirely on a gap in technology: workers had to be on the factory floor at a fixed hour, fines or dismissal awaited the late, and almost no one could afford or rely on a mechanical alarm clock. As soon as that gap closed — as cheap, reliable alarm clocks spread in the early twentieth century, followed by electric ones — the knocker-up had nothing left to sell.

The job faded out across the first half of the 1900s, surviving longest in the industrial north of England, where some knocker-ups were still working into the 1940s and even the 1950s. It left behind little except photographs, a few names, and the phrase ‘to knock someone up’ — to wake them — which once meant exactly that.