How did people get to work on time before alarm clocks were invented?

Before the days of alarm clocks, people still needed to get to work on time.

A knocker-up, sometimes known as a knocker-upper, was a profession in Britain and Ireland that started during and lasted well into the Industrial Revolution before alarm clocks were invented and even after, as alarm clocks were neither cheap nor reliable. A knocker-up's job was to rouse sleeping people so they could get to work on time. By the 1940s and 1950s, this profession had died out.

The knocker-up used a baton or short, heavy stick to knock on the clients' doors or a long and light stick, often made of bamboo, to reach windows on the second floor. In return, the knocker-up would be paid a few pence a week. The knocker-up would not leave a client's window until they were sure that the client had been awoken.

A knocker-upper would also use a 'snuffer outer' as a tool to rouse the sleeping. This implement was used to put out gas lamps that were lit at dusk and then needed to be extinguished at dawn.

There were large numbers of people carrying out the job, especially in larger industrial towns such as Manchester. Generally, the job was done by elderly men and women but sometimes police constables supplemented their pay by performing the task during early morning patrols.

Mrs. Molly Moore (daughter of Mrs. Mary Smith, also a knocker-up and the protagonist of a children's picture book by Andrea U'Ren called Mary Smith) claims to have been the last knocker-up to have been employed as such. Both Mary Smith and Molly Moore used a long rubber tube as a peashooter, to shoot dried peas at their client's windows.

In Ferryhill, County Durham, miner's houses had slate boards set into their outside wall onto which the miners would write their shift details in chalk so that the employed knocker-up could wake them at the correct time. These boards were known as "knocky-up boards" or "wake-up slates."

Compiled by Neil Gale, Ph.D.