Wake up
Waking up ( English knocker-up or knocker-upper ) was a profession in Great Britain and Ireland that began during the Industrial Revolution . The job of a wake up was to wake sleeping people so they could get to work on time.
history
Since alarm clocks were still expensive and not widely used at the time, the alarm clock ran from house to house in the morning and woke everyone who had to come to work early in the morning, who then left the alarm clock with a small wage .
The profession was particularly popular during the Industrial Revolution and up until the early 1920s. It was later replaced by mechanical alarm clocks .
There were a large number of people doing this job, especially in larger industrial cities like Manchester . Generally, the job was done by older men and women, but sometimes the police officers added their salaries by doing the job during early morning patrols.
Methods
The alarm clock mostly used a short, heavy stick to knock on customers' doors, or a long and light stick, often made of bamboo , to reach windows on higher floors. Some of them used a blowpipe with peas to shoot at the windows.
The knocker-up only left the place in front of a customer's window when he was sure that the customer had been woken up.
Web links
- Wake-up at work (short film)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The life of the knocker-upper: How "human alarms" made sure everyone was up for work. In: The Vintage News. November 28, 2017, accessed July 24, 2019 .
- ^ David Taylor: The New Police in Nineteenth-Century England: Crime, Conflict and Control . 1997, ISBN 978-0-7190-4729-9 .
- ^ A b Sitala Peek: Knocker uppers: Waking up the workers in industrial Britain. BBC, March 27, 2016, accessed July 22, 2019 .