Britain's Human Alarm Clocks Worked Until the 1970s

Mary Smith of Limehouse, in the 1930s, carried a rubber tube and a pocket of dried peas. For sixpence a week she stopped under a client's bedroom window before dawn, took aim, and shot peas at the glass until a hand waved back. If you missed your shift at the docks or the mill, you lost the day's pay; a few pennies was cheap insurance.

The trade existed because the factory clock and the working-class household hadn't yet met in the middle. Alarm clocks had been around since 1787, but reliable ones were expensive, and shift workers needed rousing at oddly precise hours — 3am for the bakery, 5am for the colliery, 4:30 for the spinning shed. So an auxiliary trade grew up around the bedroom window.

The tools were practical and slightly absurd. A short baton for doors. A bamboo pole, sometimes ten feet, for upper panes. The pea-shooter, photographed by John Topham in 1931, was Mary Smith's specialty. In Ferryhill, County Durham, miners chalked their shift times on "knocky-up boards" outside the house so the colliery's knocker-up could read them in the dark.

It was, unusually for the period, a trade open to women. An 1853 report noted that one Mary Filleroft made enough knocking up to set herself up as a moneylender to the workers she woke. Pay drifted: half-a-crown from a generous London client between the wars, three old pennies a week in rural Ireland.

The Guardian declared the trade dying in 1914, blaming "the cheap American clock." It took another sixty years to finish it off. Molly Moore, Mary Smith's daughter, claimed the title of last working knocker-up; she was still tapping windows in the early 1970s, by which point the wristwatch had been on people's wrists for nearly a century.