Technology has eliminated many jobs over the years. Buggy whip makers have been out of business since McKinley was in the White House. The iceman hasn’t made home deliveries in nearly as long. And there’s just not as much call these days for switchboard operators as there once was.

Oh, and knocker-uppers have vanished from British streets as well.

The what?

This story is a reminder of the fundamental truth in George Bernard Shaw’s quip that “England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”

In Brit Speak, to “knock someone up” is slang for waking them up. As you can imagine, the name derives from knocking on a bedroom door to rouse a sleeper.

Here on this side of the pond … well, let’s just say the term involves something completely different and leave it at that.

Getting back to our British cousins, there’s more involved than just a simple phrase. From the Industrial Revolution of the late 19^th century up to World War II, people in the U.K. were actually paid to be “knocker uppers.”

As large factories and business offices began appearing, people suddenly had to show up for work by a specific time, often early in the morning. That could be difficult for sound sleepers in that era long before alarm clocks. And when they were invented, many early models were unreliable. Being late too many times carried the very real possibility of losing a much-needed job. What to do?

Enter the knocker uppers.

For a few pennies a week, they would come around to homes and make sure working-class people were awake. They did so by utilizing a variety of methods.

Most common was the use of a long, thin pole, similar to a fishing rod. They would lift it up and tap on a bedroom window until the party inside got out of bed. Sometimes, rattles were used. Some enterprising people even used peashooters to hit the glass windows and awaken their clients.

They were especially popular in industrial cities like Manchester but were also commonly found in most metro areas.

So, just who were the knocker uppers?

Poor retirees, mostly. Older men and women looking for extra money to help them scrape by. Moms-to-be, frequently not allowed to work during pregnancy, did it to help replace their lost wages. Sometimes, police officers walking the beat would supplement their meager income by performing the service. Children were occasionally employed, though not often due to their fondness for oversleeping.

In England’s coal country, miners sometimes hung slate boards on the outer walls of their houses and wrote the times they were to be awakened. They eventually gained the nicknames “knocky-up boards” or “wakeup slates.”

And the practice wasn’t limited to England. Although the custom seems to have not caught on in this country, knocker-uppers were also used in Ireland and the Netherlands. But nowhere was the practice as widespread as it was in Britain’s working-class neighborhoods.

All good things must eventually come to an end, and so it was for the knocker-uppers. Alarm clocks became both more affordable and dependable after World War II. Most knocker-uppers stopped making their rounds in the 1950s, with a few isolated pockets carrying on into the 1970s.

A woman named Molly Moore claimed to be the last practitioner of the trade, as was her mother before her. Both women favored the peashooter approach to making sure their clients greeted the new day.

It’s a quaintly picturesque image today: an old man or woman trodding down a street in the morning’s first light, reaching up and gently tapping on a window, then moving on down the block and repeating the process until finally, with the sun inching higher overhead, a whistle blows, and the workday begins anew once more.

Have comments, questions or suggestions you’d like to share with Mark? Message him at jmp.press@gmail.com.