Hello, ye wondrous humans 👋
⭐ Did you bag yourself a gold star on LinkedIn this morning?
As much as I want the correct answer to be “the women’s finalist in the Olympic pea-shooting competition of 1899,” it isn’t. She is, of course, a knocker-up, AKA the industrial answer to an alarm clock!
Traditionally, we associate the entrepreneurial spirit with the big (male) inventors of the industrial age but knockers-up provide an opportunity to reframe that. Typically, knockers-up were older people who were no longer physically able to work full-time. It required no specialist equipment (except for a pea-shooter, perhaps) and no premises. It was a very innovative way to earn a living! While men did work as knockers-up, I found significantly more women working in the trade in my research.
Knocking-up was not a widespread occupation. It was largely confined to industrial towns and cities. Aside from the obvious advantage of getting up on time, what really made this service attractive was the price: on average, a knocker-up charged anywhere from two pence to nine pence per house per week, making it affordable for working families.
Despite such low prices, knocking-up could become a lucrative business. When a knocker-up called Margaret Hargreaves died in Burnley in 1899, an investigation of her home found a “large quantity” of silver coins, stashed inside a biscuit tin. In fact, this “hoarde,” as the newspapers called it, amounted to over £100 and was the talk of the town for some weeks.
Even more impressive was the case of Mrs Waters, a knocker-up from an unnamed town in the North of England who told a journalist that she had between 35 and 95 houses on her round at any one time, which gave her an annual income of over £50. To put this into perspective, that’s over three times the annual wage of a (well-paid) maid-of-all-work for considerably fewer hours.
Inspired by the example of older knockers-up, some young women set themselves up in business. In Manchester in 1879, one former mill girl told a journalist that she much preferred knocking-up to working in the factory. Her mother had been a knocker-up and she chose to continue the profession:
“I knock up policemen, gasmen, bakers, and all sorts of people …And I am not even able to get Saturday night in bed for the gasmen and policemen must be knocked up. But I go to bed early Sunday morning and get a good rest. I like the work.”
But knocking-up had a dark side, too. Rivalries could easily develop between knockers-up who worked in the same community. Early one Saturday morning in November 1900, two knockers-up in Leeds - James Rawson and Joshua Speight - got into a fight over territory. When James refused to leave, Joshua “struck him with a violent blow.” James died a few days later.
Throughout the 19th century, there were several threats to the industry’s survival. One of these was the short-time movement, designed to bring working hours down to just 8 a day or 40 per week. Although the short-time movement failed to garner adequate support in parliament, in practice, many factories experimented with shorter working hours. In Salford, for example, Mather and Platt’s Ironworks had cut weekly working hours from 58 to 43 by 1901. Instead of starting at 6 a.m., workers got an extra 2 hours in bed, which negated the need to be knocked up.
Remarkably, though, the industry did survive. It survived shorter hours and the introduction of electric alarm clocks. I found references to knockers-up in Wigan from as late as the 1970s.
But never did I find an answer to the ultimate question: who knocked up the knocker-up?
Until next time,
Kaye x
P.S. For an extra history fix:
🖤 I wrote a (very short) history of women’s history …
🖤 And then the FUTURE of women’s history.
🖤 Here’s an awesome podcast about women’s involvement in the spiritualist movement in the U.S. in the 19th century.