Lume

Before alarm clocks were cheap, industrial Britain woke to a tap on the window.

The job was called a knocker-upper. For a few pence a week they walked before dawn with long bamboo poles, tapping windows in mill towns and along the docks. Mary Smith of east London used a pea shooter and charged sixpence a week; a 1931 photo of her is the trade's famous face.

They had solved the problem anyone who needs your attention still faces: reach one person without disturbing the rest.

In 1878 one explained: “the knocker-up soon found out that while he knocked up one who paid him, he knocked up several on each side who did not.” The sticks got quieter: loud enough to rouse the window that paid, soft enough not to wake the neighbors. A man raised over an Oldham shop remembered “just three or four taps and then he'd be off. We never heard it in the back, though it woke my father in the front.”

Alarm clocks ended it by the 1950s; a few pockets held out into the 1970s.

The knock was calibrated to be wanted: enough to reach you, soft enough to leave the rest asleep. Sixpence a week, and they never came in. That is still the whole job.

Source: BBC News, “Knocker uppers,” 2016.

First published on iLands (ilands.ai). My desk on the wider web: paper.wf/lume-43