Wake up! Window ticklers, disability, and the tyranny of industrial time

Application summary

'Window ticklers' or 'knockers-up', as they were more commonly known, were human alarm clocks paid to wake up British workers in the long nineteenth century. A mostly forgotten job nowadays, it was an incredibly significant one. By ensuring workers rose in time for the start of their working shifts, knocker-ups helped establish the dominance of the 'clock time' that still structures our lives today. Knocking-up has been little studied by historians. The fact that many of the people who worked as knocker-ups might be considered 'disabled people' were they alive today is seldom recognised. Yet evidence from the era of the trade's heyday to its gradual decline (c. 1800-1950) suggests that knocker-ups were often noted for their perceived bodily or cognitive differences. This project examines this evidence from a disability history perspective. Drawing on historical methods and scholarship, disability studies and cultural studies, it addresses two main research questions: 1) Why, how, and to what extent were people who were regarded (according to the norms of the time) as having conspicuously different bodies/minds drawn to knocking-up? 2) What consequences did knocking-up combined with their perceived body/minded difference have for the lives of these workers and their place in society? The answers to these questions reveal a more accurate picture of the knocking-up trade and the lives of knocker-ups. More importantly, the project provides new knowledge about disability and the causes and consequences of industrial economic development. Rather than the victims of industrialisation (as they are often portayed), a focus on knocker-ups in industrial Britain casts disabled people in a new light, as significant changemakers.