Technology has eliminated many jobs over the years. Buggy whip makers have been out of business since William McKinley was in the White House. The iceman hasn’t made home deliveries in nearly as long. And there’s not as many calls these days for switchboard operators as there once was.
Oh, and knocker-uppers have vanished from British streets as well.
Wait, what?
This story is a reminder of the fundamental truth in George Bernard Shaw’s quip: “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”
In Brit Speak, to “knock someone up” is slang for waking them up. The name derives from knocking on a bedroom door to rouse a sleeper.
On this side of the pond … well, let’s say “knocking someone up” involves something completely different and leave it at that.
Getting back to our British cousins, there’s more involved than just a simple phrase. From the Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century to World War II, people in the United Kingdom were paid to be “knocker uppers.”
As large factories and business offices began appearing, people suddenly had to show up for work by a specific time, often early in the morning. That could have been difficult for sound sleepers long before alarm clocks in that era. (And when they were invented, many early models were unreliable.) Being late too many times carried the genuine possibility of losing a much-needed job. What to do?
Enter the knocker-uppers.
For a few pennies a week, they would come around to homes and make sure working-class people were awake. They did so by using a variety of methods.
Most common was using a long, thin pole, similar to a fishing rod. They would lift it up and rap on a bedroom window until the party inside got out of bed. Sometimes, rattles were used. Some enterprising people even used peashooters to hit the glass windows and awaken their clients.
They were especially popular in industrial cities like Manchester but were also commonly found in most metro areas.
So, just who were the knocker-uppers?
Poor retirees, mostly. Older men and women looking for extra money to help them scrape by. Moms-to-be, frequently not allowed to work during pregnancy, did it to help replace their lost wages. Sometimes, police officers walking the beat would supplement their meager income by performing the service. Children were occasionally employed, though not often due to their fondness for oversleeping.
In England’s coal country, miners sometimes hung slate boards on the outer walls of their houses and wrote the times they were to be awakened. They eventually gained the nicknames “knocky-up boards” or “wakeup slates.”
And the practice wasn’t limited to England. Although the custom didn’t catch on in this country, knocker-uppers were also used in Ireland and the Netherlands. Nowhere was the practice as widespread as it was in Britain’s working-class neighborhoods.
All good things must eventually end, and so it was for the knocker-uppers. Alarm clocks became both more affordable and dependable after World War II. Most knocker-uppers stopped making their rounds in the 1950s, with a few isolated pockets carrying on into the 1970s.
A woman named Molly Moore claimed to be the last practitioner of the trade, as was her mother before her. Both women favored the peashooter approach to ensuring their clients greeted the new day.
It’s a quaintly picturesque image today: An old man or woman wandering down a street in the morning’s first light, reaching up and gently tapping on a window, then moving on down the block and repeating the process until finally, with the sun inching higher overhead, a whistle blows, and the workday begins anew once more.
Editor’s note: J. Mark Powell is a novelist, former TV journalist and diehard history buff. Have a historical mystery that needs solving? A forgotten moment worth remembering? Send it to him at HolyCow@insidesources.com. Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at AzOpinions@iniusa.org.
