What would you do when you have to get up to work very early the next morning but without an alarm clock as it has yet to be popularized?
Why, hire a knocker upper of course!
Knocker upper(s) is the term used to describe individuals whose primary occupation is to wake up other people in industrial Britain.
Yup, such an occupation did indeed exist.
It’s hard to imagine it now with the existence of alarm clock and smartphones but up until the 1970s, seeing individuals holding and using long poles, soft hammers and even pea shooters knocking on other people’s windows was a common sight in the United Kingdom.
These individuals would go near the windows of their clients very early in the morning and use the aforementioned implements to knock on the windows and wake up the still slumbering person or people inside the room.
Some of you might question the necessity of hiring a professional “alarm clock” but we mustn’t forget that it’s the industrial revolution where everything is busy, crowded, and fast. It’s also an era where worker unions is at its infancy and that being tardy could get one fired in a heartbeat.
So as to protect their source of income, workers in industrial British could only loosen their wallets a bit to hire knocker uppers to wake them up every morning.
All knocker uppers, without exceptions are night owls. That is to say that they sleep during the day and were active during the night.
They needed to have such a lifestyle as their occupation required them to get up before the sun had even risen in order to do their jobs properly. One could think of them as the call center representatives of the industrial revolution. But instead handling ongoing and/or outgoing customer calls, a knocker upper’s sole job is to knock at their clients’ windows at the agreed upon time.
But as knocker uppers have plenty of clients that need waking up every morning, they would only knock at their clients’ windows 3 to 4 times before moving on to their next client. Whether that numbered knocks had successfully waken up their clients was no longer their concern.
Moreover, to avoid disturbing their clients’ neighbors, knocker uppers had to be very careful with their knocks. After all, these neighbors weren’t paying customers so there’s really no reason why they should benefit off of their clients’ money. Professionals indeed.
As mentioned earlier, knocker uppers were very popular till the 1970s in the United Kingdom. But as technology improved, followed by the increase popularity of the alarm clock, the need for a knocker upper decreased considerably.
And before long, what used to be a common sight of individuals knocking on other people’s windows in cities like London vanished completely. The death of an occupation that persisted for centuries was finally completed.
Thank you for reading
Article Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up
Image Source:
By Nationaal Archief (flickr.com) - [1], Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11292602
