Knocker-Upper
Before alarm clocks.
Today, as we adjust our clocks, we consider something we might often overlook: How we measure time. It’s easy for us to take the clock for granted, but time-keeping wasn’t always so easy. In the days before alarm clocks, how would you know when to wake up?
The knocker-upper.
The knocker-upper was a person paid to go around town and knock on people’s windows to wake them up in the morning. In other words, they were human alarm clocks. In the early days of the profession, knocker-uppers often used bells or loud noise-making devices, but neighbors complained about the disturbance. So, over time, they gave up the bells and instead started using batons, poles, and (in some rare cases) pea shooters to knock on a client’s window to wake them up for work.
Knocker-uppers filled a very particular niche in nineteenth century England: Their clients worked in factories and were therefore wedded to an industrial timetable, but they didn’t have enough money to afford their own watches. Thus, knocker-uppers were common in poor British communities, like northern mill towns or near the docks of London, where people worked in shifts that could start as early as three o’clock in the morning.
The profession enabled many individuals (especially elderly men and women) to create small businesses. In 1878, a reporter from Canada’s Huron Expositor met Mrs. Waters, a knocker-upper in a small town in the North of England. Waters tells the reporter: “I made my independency … by knocking-up.” Waters established a client base of ninety-five houses, earning around thirty shillings a week (which is equivalent to $1,250/week today). She worked as a knocker-upper for thirty-five years –– on top of running a shop –– and only retired when she “saw that [she] had enough to live upon.”
While the trade often ran in families, with clients being passed from one generation to another, Waters was a childless widow, so she had no living relatives to take over her business. Instead, she gave her business to –– in her words –– “a poor man, a neighbor, who fell out of work; and as he had a large family, and was running from bad to worse at his shop every week, I just handed over the knocking-up to him; and a good thing it has been for him, you may be sure.”
The knocking-up profession came about because of a confluence of conditions: The Industrial Revolution established a new way of working based on factory schedules, but at-home electronic technologies like alarm clocks were not yet affordable and reliable enough for the everyday consumer. Thus, the knocker-upper existed in this middle space, only disappearing around World War II when household electronics became common. The profession, in turn, marks a transition from waking up with nature’s rhythms to being “on the clock.” The knocker-upper captures a shift in who controls time –– from the sun to industry. A shift that remains to this day, as our iPhones and Alexas buzz to get us up in the morning for work.
BONUS: A nineteenth-century tongue twister.
We had a knocker-up, and our knocker-up had a knocker-up
And our knocker-up's knocker-up didn't knock our knocker up
So our knocker-up didn't knock us up
'Cos he's not up.
(The answer to who wakes up the knocker-upper? Per Mrs. Waters: “I always went to bed at nine o’clock every night … and I was up again at half-past two to the minute; for my first customer lived a good 20 minutes walk from my house, and you know he had to be awakened at three 'o’clock.”)
Notes:
I first heard about the knocker-uppers while listening to this episode of 99% Invisible.
The full 1878 Expositor article can be found here.
The BBC has a comprehensive article on knocker-uppers here. “Lessons from History” also has a good article here.
Great Big Story has a nice short video on the profession.