Knocker Uppers

Britain may have been the home to the Industrial Revolution, ushering in the brave new world of mass produced goods, anomic urban living, and toiling in the factory. Unfortunately, those who toiled in the factories, especially if they wanted to be consumers and not just survivors, mass produced goods were not as cheap and widely available as they are now. And unfortunately alarm clocks and watches weren't readily available to, or affordable by, those toilers. 

In plenty industries, in plenty parts of the world, factory work remains dreadful: dangerous, smelly, noisy, ill paid. (Would you want to work in a meat processing plant? Me neither. I did work one summer in a shoe factory, and that was quite enough for me. It was only quasi-dangerous: fumes to inhale, ancient elevators, protruding nails that could shred your fingertips as you felt around the bottom of a boot to find the protruding nails you needed to pull out. But it was plenty smelly, noisy, and ill paid. By the end of the work week, there were some workers in my section who went without lunch because they'd run out of money.) 

But factory life was especially terrible in early industrial Britain. You worked hard under harsh circumstances. Brutalization of workers was the norm, and you'd better not be a minute late for work or you could get your pay docked. (I think that in "my" factory, if you punched in a minute late, or out a minute early, they docked you for a quarter of an hour.) In some factories, the gates closed after the workers entered for their shift. If you got there a second too late, too bad. You'd lose a day's pay, and maybe even your job.

None of this flexible, make your own hours that many of today's professional "knowledge workers" enjoy - especially if you're working from home in your comfy pants. Back in the day, you really didn't want to be late. Which meant you really didn't want to oversleep. 

What was a worker to do? Unless you had whatever they used to call a built-in alarm clock back in the day before they had alarm clocks, you needed whatever they would have called a wake up call. If they'd had such a thing as a wake up call. Back in the day.

What they did have in Britain, especially in the industrial north, in the docklands, in the mining towns, was someone called a "knocker-upper." Knocker-upped came around and tapped on your window with a long pole. Or, used a pea shooter to wake you up. 

I don't suppose it paid all that much, but I do suppose the job of knocker-upper had its charms. You got to work outside, rather than in a fetid factory or in a mine where you always had to fear a cave-in. You were an entrepreneur, your own man - or your own pea-shooting woman. After you covered your shift, the rest of the day was your own. Sure, this probably meant scrounging around for other work or seeing if you could find a lump of coal that had fallen off the coal cart (male division), or figuring out how you were going to feed a family of 8 on one turnip, or scrubbing diapers by hand (female division). 

On the other hand, the pressure must have been immense. You miss a window, a bloke gets fired, it's on you.

I was this years old before I'd ever heard of a knocker-upper, which I learned about when this picture of a knocker-upper floated across my Twitter timeline. But they were apparently still a thing up until the 1970's, which is pretty shocking, given that there were plenty of cheap alarm clocks and watches around by then. Timex, anyone?

Now it's another one of those lost professions. No great loss, of course. But a little bit of color and a historic artifact, gone. Today, most of us - even, I'm guessing, most of those still toiling away in rancid factories, at least here in the States and throughout Europe - have a smartphone to wake them up.

But I do have one chicken-and-egg question about the knocker uppers. Who knocked up the knocker upper?