DV Journal

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.

Wait, what?

This story is a reminder of the fundament 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. 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 “knocking someone up” 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 19th 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 rap 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 didn’t catch 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 wandering 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.

Martin Walker, the gifted former Washington correspondent of The Guardian, used to start his speeches saying that the Fourth of July wasn’t a time for sorrow for him, as it was a time when good British yeomen farmers in the colonies revolted against a German king and his German mercenaries.

Walker — who now lives in France and writes the hugely successful “Bruno” detective books set in the Perigord region — once told me, “It’s exciting living in a country where the president can order up an aircraft carrier to settle a dispute.”

He, an Englishman, and I, a former British colonial, shared our admiration for the United States. For America’s birthday, I have counted some things I most like and admire about this country of endless experimentation. Also, alas, I admit it is getting harder to feel as proud of it as I once did.

America, for me, has always embodied a special freedom: the freedom to try. The wonderful thing about it is that you can try a business, an idea, a way of living, or even a way of thinking. I read in “The Waist-High Culture,” the 1958 book by Thomas Griffith, that Europe was a “no” culture and the United States was a “yes” culture. So true.

In my first year here, I wrote to a family member in England, marveling at the size and scope of the American market. I wrote to her, “You could make a fortune here making glass beads, so long as they were good glass beads.” I still believe that.

The other great freedom, which I treasure, is that you can move across the country and start all over again. If you feel you have failed in New York, you can take a fresh sheet and try again in Chicago, Austin or San Francisco. You can have failed in marriage, in business, in a career, and in some very public way, but you can go on anew somewhere else.

You can’t do that in what are, in many ways, city-states — for example, in the way England is dominated by London and France by Paris. There is geographic freedom in the United States that has an exhilaration all its own.

I was intoxicated by America from the first. I didn’t dwell on the sins of the past, from the cruelty of the Puritans, the pioneers and the planters to the folly of Prohibition. When I arrived, I embraced all that was in the present; the civil rights movement was underway and gathering strength, and it was possible to believe that the United States would continue to be the shining example of how you get it right, how you correct big and small errors, and how you let people prosper. John F. Kennedy was president, and it was a new day.

When I covered Congress, I was enchanted with it: the committee power centers, the indifference to party discipline, and a system where you really did need majority approval to get a law passed.

Overall, members of Congress were among the hardest-working (and some were the hardest-drinking) around. They sought to understand issues from atomic energy to cancer. Congress wasn’t perfect, but it aspired to get things right.

For many years, I participated in the Humbert Summer School — a think tank — in the west of Ireland. I used to enjoy talking up the presidential system as superior to the parliamentary one, where a simple majority can wreak havoc.

Now, alas, Congress is experiencing the evils of parliamentary government and none of the virtues, particularly swift legislating. Party discipline — as in the case of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California shunning Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming — has supplanted the old tolerance for differences within the party. It began with the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, abetted by the proliferation of single-point-of-view talk radio.

Like all unchecked decay, it has gotten worse.

America the Beautiful, I wish you a happy birthday. I thank you for your generosity over these decades, and I say sincerely, “Mind how you go.” The world needs your seeking to be fair and just, and full of possibility, not divided and rancorous, and a threat to yourself.

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