Before alarm clocks

[Newsenmum]

A lighter thread!

I’ve read that before alarm clocks people used to pay ‘knocker uppers’ to come and knock on their doors or shoot peas at their windows to wake them up! But who woke up the knocker uppers? Does anyone know? Did they sit up all night and watch the clock? When were clocks first used?

Does anyone have this fun knowledge and what else do you want to know that just seems impossible now?

“Many industrial towns had factory whistles rather than use knocker uppers, the factory owners also built clock towers for the workers.
As did some rural land owners. There is a huge clock tower near to us that was built for the land workers. Placed on a gap between two hills so it could be seen in both valleys either side.”

Yes, you also often see clock towers in stately homes built into the stable block…the family would have their indoors clocks and naturally order their carriage or horse to be brought round at a certain time. The clock tower in the stable block was essential to not having to wait around for your horse or carriage.

I thought this was quite interesting

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4nn7gew9zxo

My mum, as a little girl in the 1930s, went to stay with her grandparents in Ashton under Lyne. They were millworkers, and the knocker upper would tap on the windows early to wake them for work; then my mum said she could hear the clatter of dozens of pairs of clogs in the street as everyone went to the mill. And her grandparents had a clock on the mantlepiece. If a man had a pocket watch (many men did, even working class ones), he might have a repeater watch, which would chime the hours - that technology had been around since the 18th century.

I was just thinking of the time lady.

Before railways, towns used to have their own time, going by the sun - so places to the west would set their clocks later than London. But railways needed to run to fixed tmetables, so needed the time to be the same everywhere.

Ships' chronometers needed to be accurate for navigation puposes. At various places around the coast, and at Greenwich, there was a time ball tower, where the ball was raised to the top of the tower, then dropped at 1pm each day, on a signal from Greenwich. The time balls at Greenwich and Deal still operate, but as a tourist attraction, not for sailors.

Except wax candles would have been unaffordable for most people.

Tallow would work as well as wax, just not smell so nice.

@Angrymum22 I recognise that description! Main town B, island W! I used to work in an office just by that bridge and remember the whistle going then thousands of men on bikes and on foot streaming past at lunchtime.

Au contraire. It's what gives the best fish and chip shops, ie the ones that use beef dripping aka tallow, that amazing smell.

I think shift workers in mills and mines in the 1700/1800s were the first time that people had to get up for work on time en masse and often people lived in company housing in earshot of the siren emitted by the site, which probably had a night watchman, or also overnight shifts, to set it off.

What I want to know about these workers was how easy was it to walk on all the cobbled or muddy footpaths in their clogs or leather shoes.

I live in 'mill and mining country' and a lot of the footpaths that people used to get around are still in existence and they're steep and slippery and quite hard to walk on even in specialist hiking footwear so I can't imagine trying to walk on them without slipping and tripping in the types of shoes they wore at the time.

Which has reminded me of something else related to the OPs question. Sometimes, especially in winter when it was dark all the time and the weather was bad, instead of trekking to and from work if people lived more than a mile or two away, people sometimes used to sleep at work rather than make the journey home and back again (there's an information board about this somewhere in the Peak District where there's a path that goes over a hill from one valley to the next).

I pinch my right thigh the number of times that I want to get up on the o'clock. 4am, 4 pinches.

I'm usually waking up a quarter of an hour early. Whether this is the reason I wake up, I don't know, but I always do it.

Love this thread!

My Nana was a knocker-upper in Bolton in the 1940’s and 1950’s. She woke people that had early shifts at the local mills. I do remember her but while she was alive I never thought to ask her how she woke in time. It’s bothered me ever since though … so thanks for this 😊

There are all sorts of things we have collectively forgotten about daily life in the past. This article, about people habitually sleeping in two shifts, is fascinating:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep

I guess also if you slept in one room with your entire family on a hard floor, maybe you woke up quite often/easily anyway!

Interesting thread

Wasn't there a passage about someone being late for work in mayor of casterbridge

The boss made the guy come into work in his nightwear or something like that as he was late

They do this in the Victorian children's book "Five Children and It", and I tried it so often as a child with no success. Perhaps it's a lost art!

I think the first peoples of America used to drink a lot before bedtime to ensure they would wake up early. Not a fixed alarm clock, but likely you’d be up too early

@SpiritAdder if you have found the name of the book, I'd be very interested to know! I find the lives of working women in the past absolutely fascinating. TIA if it turns up!

My late DDad was in the army in the 1950's and for a short while he had the job of playing reveille on the bugle to wake everybody up.

He didn't have the job long, because he had a tendency to oversleep...

I do the hit head on pillow thing occasionally. It does work, sort of, but I find the most useful part of it is that when I need to be up earlier than usual it stops me waking up at 2, 3 and 4 o'clock