c. 1830 – 1950 · north of england · supplanted by the alarm clock
before clocks were cheap, somebody had to wake the workers. she walked the dark streets at four, with a long bamboo pole tipped in wire, and tapped the bedroom windows of those who had paid her a few coppers a week. the tap was light — enough to wake one sleeper, not the rest of the house. some carried a pea-shooter for the upper storeys.
the round took an hour and a half through cobbled rows that still smelled of last night's kitchen. she had no clock of her own; she ran on the four-am sky and the distance between mills. mary smith of limehouse charged sixpence a week; she would not leave a window until she saw the sleeper's hand at the curtain. it was a question of honour. if the man overslept, the foreman docked him and he blamed her.
then the alarm clock became affordable. by the 1940s, every other house in lancashire had one ticking on the dresser, and the knocker-up walked routes that shrank a window at a time. the last working knocker-up retired in bolton in 1973. a few were photographed before that. they look, in the photos, like very tired women holding fishing rods.
field note · the pole was kept by the door, never under the bed. the bed was for sleep, and the pole was not.