OFF THE RECORD
Alan Crosby shares his views on family and local history An accident with an alarm clock gets Alan Crosby thinking about how our ancestors measured time
How our ancestors measured time
The alarm didn’t go off, because I’d forgotten to switch it on, so we overslept and woke up about an hour later than we should have done. Panic! Disaster! For most of us, daily life is governed by time and timetables, dictating what we do when, where we are at a certain point, and how long we have to do something. It’s a trend that has been developing for the past two centuries, although of course the concept of time and its subdivisions goes back thousands of years. Ways to measure and indicate the passing of time were familiar in the medieval period, including water-clocks, sundials, marked candles and hourglasses.
But for the vast majority of the population, time was a more flexible idea, and it varied with the seasons and the weather. When the hours of daylight were the determinant of when you worked and when you socialised, when you ate and when you slept, life was not governed by strict timetables. Indeed, it simply could not be regulated in that way, because hardly anybody had a clock, let alone a watch, by which to check the time.
Things began to change at the end of the 18th century. Once the factory system developed from the 1770s onwards, regulated hours became essential. This was a purely practical requirement – if workers turned up at random times, how would machinery operate? How would complex processes function? But it quickly became a powerful weapon in the disciplining of the workforce – lateness became a punishable offence, breaks and mealtimes could be strictly controlled, and the hours that were worked according to the factory timetable became the framework of the employees’ existence.
So in came the bells, the whistles and the factory hooters, the calls that summoned the workforce and punctuated their day. Those who worked outside the system felt themselves lucky, in that respect at least. They were more free, able to work at their own time and pace as their forebears had always done. In the 1833 report of the Factories Inquiry Commission a stocking-knitter from Leicester – a domestic worker – defiantly asserted: “We work when we please; each man has full liberty to earn what he likes, and how he likes, and when he likes. We have no factory bell – it is our only blessing.”
And along came another problem: how to wake up in time when you just wanted to sleep, exhausted by long, hard labour – the working day commonly lasted 12 or 13 hours. Even if you had a clock, it was unlikely to be an alarm clock, and the temptation to turn over and snore once more must have been overwhelming, especially on those dark, early mornings in winter.
The answer in many working-class districts was a human alarm clock. The ‘knocker-up’ was a man who had a timepiece that woke him in the early hours. Six days a week, he rose and walked the streets carrying a long pole, with which he knocked on the upstairs bedroom window of every house, whose occupants paid him a couple of pence a week for the service.
A folk-tale from Yorkshire, Never Come Monday, tells how the knocker-up’s clock stopped one Monday, so there was no knocking on the windows of the terraced houses and everybody slept happily on, believing it was Sunday. The knocker-up was a familiar, indeed essential part of life in northern industrial towns into the middle of the 20th century. I have a photograph of Hiram Taylor of Oswaldtwistle, Lancashire, walking the street with his long pole in 1960. He was about to retire, aged 82. He, his job and his way of life, and even the street in which he was photographed, have all vanished for ever. The people of Oswaldtwistle now have ways of waking themselves up that would have totally bemused Hiram... just as long as they remember to switch them on!
Once the factory system developed, regulated hours became essential