The average lifespan of a human alarm clock, or knocker-upper, in Victorian London has been calculated at fifteen minutes.
While some noteworthy human alarms did last many years, most were killed as a result blunt trauma from a missile striking them on the head during their first early morning shift.
Missiles most commonly thrown at ‘alarms’ were full chamber pots, but bibles were also commonly a cause of death.
Old News spoke to Mary Smith of East London, a survivor of the trade, about life on the predawn cobbles of old London and just how easy it was to die on the job.
Mary is an authority, having been given the handle of ‘Ace’ by other alarms during her very first shift, after successfully waking five customers without being killed.
Mary’s lodgings, high over the street close to The Old Bailey, were striking for the sheer number of scuffed bibles stacked about the room and dozens of crates of broken chamber pots that look vintage.
“It was murder on them streets,” Mary told us, puffing on a pipe, her wrinkled hands crissed and crossed with the scars of battles fought long ago, “Jack the Ripper was at his foul work when I first started working as an alarm. I was only nine at the time. It wasn’t my first job. Prior to working as a knocker-upper I’d managed a team of fifty children in a match factory. I had to leave that when my jaw rotted away from the sulphur. This jaw is wood.”
Mary knocks her pipe against her jaw with a regular beat that evokes the window panes she must have knocked on all those years ago.
“But it were your customers who were the most dangerous. And other knocker-uppers’ customers too. Oh, and the packs of feral, abandoned infants you had to be on your guard against.”
Mary pauses, lost in thought a moment, until a shiver running up her spine brings her back to Old News.
“I saw one knocker-upper, bright eyed chap, called himself Life, he were just back from killing people legal like for Empress Victoria on the subcontinent and fancied his arm at waking people early.
Well he thought he was going to be an ace and his red army coat would be his schtick. His first customer was his last. Bill Tricks the manager of the knackers yard end of Shit ‘n Blood lane. This fool Life walks right into the yard and shouts ‘wakey wakey hands off Bill’s snakey!’.
Life were killed by an old bull set for boiling down to glue that morning. Gored Life through the kidneys, right through the stones and all. Rumour had it he got thrown in the pot with the bull and ended up as glue too.”
Mary went on to explain that the way to survive on the job was to use a very long stick or a blow pipe, through which you could dart frozen peas at windows and run before the pot was flung.
“For a while I had a stick so long I could tap on windows just by leaning out of my own reasonably priced, top floor studio apartment on Sensible Road, just down end of Youmustbekiddingme Market. Before I moved here that was.
Lean right out my window and tap on all the windows on my street. No bugger could kill me with a flying King James Bible that way. No one could come charging down stairs with a knife and use my guts for garters. I could duck as soon as I saw the glint on a rifle barrel.
Old Harry Fists was a terrible one for shooting human alarm clocks. He killed six of them before I took him on. I was an ace many times over by that stage.”
Inquiries as to the reason she carried such a wish onto the cobbles were met with an icy glare.
“Did you spend your childhood on the streets of Victorian London? No. Well, you wouldn’t understand, so keep your beak out of it.”
We apologise and she continues.
“Not one of us could read letters or numbers and so you were forever waking up the wrong house. Although that were pretty funny if you got up some high and mighty type like a lawyer or a merchant of louse powders or what not.”
So how is Mary spending her days post the invention of the electric alarm clock?
“Having a lie in! How else? And hurling bibles at all these bloody delivery people that buzz my buzzer a dozen times a day because they’ve worked out I’m always in. Vermin. Here’s one now. Pass me a crate of broken pots and grab yourself King James! Let’s have at them. You’ll be an ace at knocking out Amazon Prime men by lunch time!”
