Wake-up call City divided over ‘infernal’ hooter
Eugene Byrne looks at a curious tale of noise complaints and poetry in the local press from exactly 150 years ago
EXACTLY 150 years ago, many Bristolians were getting to grips with a new word that they had just learned. Hooter.
Those of a more fastidious disposition doubtless considered it vulgar, and more than one would note that, like all bad new things, it came from America. Far larger were the numbers who just hated the noise.
Larger still, apparently, were the numbers of those who loved it.
Writing decades later, John Latimer, in his Annals of Bristol in the Nineteenth Century explained the now long-forgotten controversy:
“Many citizens had been annoyed by the adoption, at a factory in St. Philip’s, of an American invention called a ‘hooter’, devised for the purpose of arousing operatives from their morning slumbers.
“The instrument created so violent a vibration of the atmosphere that the sound was sometimes heard at a distance of twelve miles, and its effect within the limits of the borough proved extremely distressing to invalids and nervous persons.”
Latimer’s brief mention of the episode had us eager to find out more, and if you look through the pages of the local press from October of 1870, we can find out all about it.
That year, a major factory installed a steam-hooter to wake its workers in time for the morning shift. Few reports mention the actual factory, but it was the Avonside Engineering Works in The Dings, just across the river from Temple Meads station. The site it occupied is nowadays mostly covered in modern maisonettes and apartments.
From the viewpoint of both management and workers it was extremely useful, as while some working men owned pocket watches at this time, few had the convenience of clocks of any kind in their homes.
Factory hooters, new in Britain in 1870, would become commonplace in British industrial towns into the 1950s. The alternative was for a community to pool its pennies to pay a “knocker-up” to tap on their windows to wake them in time to get ready for work.
The Bristol factory’s new hooter, though, caused widespread complaint among those who didn’t work here.
One man, writing to the Western Daily Press from his home on Redcliff Hill, wrote of this “infernal machine belonging to some factory … It commences its intolerable ‘hoo-oo-oo-o’ at a quarter to six a.m. and continues until really one cannot tell whether it is stopped or not, only by its commencing again at six o’clock: then again at eight, half-past, nine and so on. Now it is very kind of those employers to wake their employés in time, but they should also recollect that they do not employ all Bristol.”
Other correspondents asked for consideration for the sick and the nervous. ‘ A Sufferer’ wrote to the Bristol Times & Mirror: “I reside in the upper part of Kingsdown and … the noise is unbearable. An invalid, who resides near me, states his nervous system can scarcely stand it; and I am sure that the Infirmary and Hospital patients must be great sufferers.
“Can nothing be done to remedy this great nuisance?”
The same paper on the same day carried another letter on the subject: “Though it alarms me every morning at a quarter to six out of my innocent slumbers, it is unable to rouse up my servant, for whom the hooter, however, enables me at its first awful note to ring my bell, and she is quickly wide awake. So you see the frightful hooter is of some service.”
As the days went by, the letters pages attracted supporters of the frightful hooter. One to the Western Daily pointed out that in “other manufacturing towns, viz., Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Derby &c., numerous steam whistles of a much larger size … are employed and yet complaints are not made by the inhabitants.”
‘An Admirer of the Hooter’ wrote to the Bristol Times & Mirror pointing out that the working population of St Philip’s liked the ‘The Hooting Machine’, without which many would have been docked wages for turning up at work late.
“I am an inhabitant of the parish in which the ‘hooter’ is situate, and I am bound to say that it is spoken of by my beighbours as a great boon rather than an intolerable nuisance.”
By October 7, the Western Daily did not have space to publish all of the letters it had received in favour of the hooter. One it did have the space for came from a group of working men living on Stapleton Road, pointing out that while it summoned the employees of the engineering works, it was useful to many others, too. They went on to suggest that the Great Western Cotton Factory on Barton Hill and the Waggon Works on Lawrence Hill ought to have hooters of their own.
‘A Voice from St. Phillip’s’ (sic.) wrote to the Bristol Times & Mirror saying that the hooter’s opponents should put up with it: “Them, I spose, be wot I calls slugerds, and so I puts their writing down as worth nothing … I hope the company wont superanivate the hooter, as it be a grate blessing.”
(For what it’s worth, BT is fairly confident that The Bristol Times & Mirror was not above fabricating letters from non-existent readers, and it certainly poked fun at the working classes.)
The Western Daily said it received a lot of verse on the subject (fortunately, one suspects) it did not have the space to publish. However, it did find room for this little bit of satire:
What is it breaks my blissful dreams
With its infernal yells and screams,
Long ere the rosy morning beams? The “Hooter.”
What oft affrights my gentle wife? What makes hysteria so rife, And thus embitters half my life? The “Hooter.”
What bids my tender infant squall?
My seven children, large and small,
In unison together bawl – The “Hooter.”
What drives my servants, day by day,
With terror-stricken face to say, “Please, sir, I can’t no longer stay”?
The “Hooter.”
Still, “Hooter,” I can’t wish thee dumb,
For out of evil good doth come: My wife’s mamma has fled my home!
Dear “Hooter.”
With hooters and whistles being installed at factories across the
It commences its intolerable ‘hoooo-oo-o’ at a quarter to six a.m. and continues until really one cannot tell whether it is stopped Redcliffe Hill resident, 1870
country, the government stepped in and in 1872 legislation was passed which stipulated that they could only be used with the permission of local councils.
In Bristol, the St Philip’s hooter was banned, immediately prompting a campaign by families in the area. The St Philip’s Committee for the Revival of the Hooter found a powerful advocate in the form of local shipping magnate and philanthropist Mark Whitwill.
The issue was brought before the council in January 1873 and by 21 of the labour movement’s muscles in Bristol was nothing to do with shorter hours or better pay, but the right to be woken up in time for work.
By order of the Corporation, the noise made by the hooter was greatly reduced and everyone was happy. The St Philip’s instrument would be joined in due course by several others across Bristol, until the days sometime in the postWWII era when the majority of homes had acquired mass-produced alarm clocks.