The things one learns, when one has children. Many facts about fire trucks, planets, geography, tiny people who live in one's house, faeries, and…knocker-ups or knocker-uppers.
We brought home from the library this delightful book, Mary Smith by A. (Andrea) U'Ren, riffing off Mary Smith, a knocker-up who woke people in the early 20th century in East London. She ran about with a short rubber hose shooting dried peas at the windows of subscribers who needed to be awoken at a certain time in the morning. The indefatigable Daniel Pinkwater discussed the book with Scott Simon on NPR, and read it aloud back in August 2007.
Knocker-ups (knockers-up?) are part of the panoply of professions that popped up between the Industrial Revolution and the Golden Age of Technology, when people crowded into urban centers, and labor was remarkably cheap. The army of specialized professions dealing with excrement before central waste treatment, documented in Stephen Johnson's The Ghost Map, is a study in evolutionary niches in employment. Large-scale industry ultimately required shifts of labor, and needed people at particular locations at relatively precise times. Alarm clocks weren't yet both reliable and affordable; even an accurate watch was expensive in its own right. (Tea was also a key component, providing antibiotic properties, alertness, and avoiding the consumption of small beer. See Tom Standage's tour de force, A History of the World in Six Glasses, for more on impact of beverages on human society.)
Such odd professions persist in places where cheap labor is in abundance, and slums sit toe-to-toe with skyscrapers. India has the best known of these–the wallahs of all stripes and varieties, who carry out tasks that in the so-called developed world are too expensive to conceive of (the dabbawallahs who deliver meals from a home to an office mid-day in the tens of thousands in Mumbai alone), engaged in largely by high-priced professionals (street barbers, doctors, and ear cleaners), or automated or motorized (dish- and clotheswashing).
Mental Floss compiled a list earlier this year of seven pre-alarm clock waker-uppers, including the knocker-upper. But I have children: I haven't needed an alarm clock since my first was born.
