[HN Gopher] Knocker uppers: Waking up the workers in industrial ...
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Knocker uppers: Waking up the workers in industrial Britain (2016)
Author : DrZootron
Score : 82 points
Date : 2024-10-19 10:27 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| Xophmeister wrote:
| I'm glad the subtitle was included. "Knocker upper" has a very
| different meaning to me.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| They didn't come from a knocking shop.
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Etymology is very interesting. It makes me wonder if there's
| any relation to today's slang for being pregnant, knocked up.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| A hangover from this, mid-late 90's boarding school in the U.K.,
| one of the fags (household duties for first and second years -
| one-on-one fagging no longer officially existed, but did) was
| knocking up. Just comprised walking the corridors and banging on
| everyone's doors at 7:00-7:15 (seniors later, head of house
| last), as the bells weren't audible in much of the house.
|
| It was a doss fag - by mutual agreement we came to the
| arrangement that whoever was on milk would also do the knocking
| up, as everyone got mandatory milk at the same time anyway, so
| ironically, whoever was on knocking up used to get to lie in for
| the week.
| ahoka wrote:
| I find it fascinating that I don't understand a sentence of
| this.
| lsaferite wrote:
| In this case 'fag' seems to follow the definition: an English
| public-school boy who acts as servant to an older schoolmate
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fag
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| It's listed on that page as a synonym for toil or drudgery.
| So basically a chore is a fag. It seems like the definition
| you mention is likely the origin of today's gay pejorative.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's the same definition. A servant is a person who
| toils. This is a discussion about English public schools.
| zinckiwi wrote:
| Recommend Roald Dahl's "Boy" for a fascinating glimpse.
| duskwuff wrote:
| As well as a reminder that, at the time (~1930), it was
| really just a form of extended and unusually cruel hazing.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Something happened around 7:00-7:15, of that we can be sure.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| 'mandatory milk'
|
| Many primary schools in the UK in the 1960s/1970s would have
| had 'milk monitors' - pupils whose job was to help distribute
| small servings of milk to their classmates. The milk
| distribution was an attempt to offset child malnutrition. The
| role continues to evoke strong feelings today. The Brit ex
| prime minister Rishi Sunak was described as a 'jumped up milk
| monitor' and when (in the 1970s) Margaret Thatcher as
| education secretary (minister) cancelled the school milk
| programme, she was reviled as 'Thatcher Thatcher Milk
| Snatcher'.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I was "computer monitor" (no pun!) for a year in the 1990s,
| when I was about 10.
|
| I can't really remember the timing, but perhaps in the
| first half hour before lessons had started I would go to
| the classrooms of the 5-8 year olds, and if the teacher
| wanted I'd switch on the classroom computer and load the
| required program. (Maybe a different child did the 9-11
| year olds' classrooms?)
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| I found it fairly transparent, maybe because I've read more
| than one novel in that setting.
| oersted wrote:
| Gotta love british boarding school jargon. In the 90s no less!
| Sounds like 18th century.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| My school still exists: founded in 15xx. Fags still fagging
| in '24.
| nick3443 wrote:
| Ah pledging/hazing, a double edged sword. A possibility for
| camaraderie and mentorship which is often misused for abusive
| and degrading activities. I went through pledging/hazing in a
| college fraternity in the US and it was mostly harmless if
| immature and crass, but for activities or challenges involving
| alcohol I could see it easy to go overboard especially at
| fraternities with a more macho/party reputation or with the
| wrong people involved.
| morkalork wrote:
| Coming from a north american public school, I can't imagine
| one's family paying large sums of money to send you to a
| boarding school... just to be some older boy's servant. Get
| your own ass up, or don't, not my problem. I am by no means a
| rabid libertarian but that kind of environment would drive me
| to it.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Chances are your public school doesn't have boarders. If your
| parents/ siblings ever woke you up...they were fagging (if
| not voluntary). Admittedly, some fag systems were just pure
| bullying, but generally not. If course, the smokers - after
| being woke up - would go outside and suck on a fag, but
| that's another story.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| The writer known as Orwell doesn't seem to have been fond of
| it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887786
|
| [He went to boarding school on scholarship, so that may have
| been another reason to have been treated poorly by the full-
| fare students?]
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > ironically, whoever was on knocking up used to get to lie in
| for the week.
|
| I need to know more about "mandatory milk at the same time" to
| understand this
| dTal wrote:
| Translation:
|
| It appears that milk was delivered to the dormitories first
| thing in the morning, after the same fashion as "the
| milkman". Distributing said milk was a separate duty from
| waking up the students, but occurred around the same time;
| both duties being on a weekly rotation. Therefore it was
| mutually agreed that the student on milk duty would also bang
| on the doors as he went, thus relieving the student on
| Official Door Banging Duty that week from having to get up
| early to do it. It's unclear why this is described as as a
| "lie-in", as one would still presumably get woken up along
| with everyone else...
| etcd wrote:
| The waker uppers are up all night. Were there no alarm clocks at
| all? Can't a grandfather clock wake the waker upper?
| batch12 wrote:
| The article said they usually had inverted sleep schedules and
| they woke people who had odd or irregular shifts. Staying up
| all night was probably the best option for the work
| Symbiote wrote:
| They were probably too expensive, or not sufficiently reliable.
|
| > With the spread of electricity and affordable alarm clocks,
| however, knocking up had died out in most places by the 1940s
| and 1950s.
|
| > Yet it still continued in some pockets of industrial England
| until the early 1970s, immortalised in songs by the likes of
| folk singer-song writer Mike Canavan.
|
| The reason for that isn't clear.
| cut3 wrote:
| Clocks were expensive.
| etcd wrote:
| One should be enough to wake a million people, with fan out.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| I was trying to find the _Simpsons_ clip where Lisa borrows the
| Native American technique for pre-dawn ambush: drink so much
| water that your bladder wakes you up early!
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| It was Bart, https://comb.io/vs9gku.
| mk_stjames wrote:
| The last time I read about this I kept wondering how many times
| the person accidentally broke a window pane with the big long
| stick. Some of the houses were already 80+ years old at that
| point, and I've lived in houses with original window glass from
| pre-1900 - just single pane, wavy, very thin glass. You could
| breathe on them wrong and break a pane. I'd never have trusted
| myself to with a 3 meter long stick to poke up at a 2nd story
| window pane loud enough to wake someone up but not so hard as to
| break a thin windowpane...
| oersted wrote:
| He seems quite gentle in the video, he uses the windowsill as
| support and just vibrate the thin stick a bit.
|
| The pea shooter method looks quite fun :)
| jefffoster wrote:
| Interestingly they used to attach a sponge to the end. You
| might think that was because it doesn't break the glass, but
| really it was to ensure the nearby houses don't get woken up
| for free!
| cut3 wrote:
| Interesting solution to limit to one device or household.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| Lazy Edwardian industrial workers demanding 8 hours sleep after
| 16 hours work!
|
| "Oooohh we used to dream of living in a corridor..." -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| My ag coop magazine had a recent article on how pre-
| mechanisation (some places here, into the 1950s) agriculture
| worked: the tl;dr is no private life under strict hierarchy for
| 12+ hour days, so it's no wonder they'd run off to the city to
| get factory jobs instead.
|
| One pull quote was a 1920s era law: " _Servants and
| agricultural workers must be given, every other Sunday, at
| least 4 hours off_ "
| dTal wrote:
| _Of Mice And Men_ paints a portrait of this type of
| lifestyle.
| espadrine wrote:
| At this week's dotAI conference, Ines Montani (who works on the
| SpaCy project) highlighted this ex-job as a warning to AI
| builders, so that they do not work on systems that have no
| future, because better and cheaper alarm clocks (for knocker-
| uppers) are coming.
|
| In particular, she saw chatbots as being an inefficient user
| interface that would eventually be replaced by better integration
| between assistants and conventional UI.
| keiferski wrote:
| The philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford argued that the
| origin of modern industrial machines goes back further than the
| Industrial Revolution and Renaissance, all the way back to the
| regimented and time-based lives of medieval monks. Knocker uppers
| seem like a direct obvious example of this phenomenon of humans
| as proto machines.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
|
| https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/f/153578/fi...
|
| As a funny personal note: one of my ancestors actually had the
| last name (Polish _budzik_ ) translated as "alarm clock," which I
| assume means they had a similar sort of job as knocker uppers. I
| couldn't find any equivalent last names in English though.
| hifromwork wrote:
| >had the last name (Polish budzik) translated as "alarm clock,"
| which
|
| To add to your personal note, this is the modern translation,
| etymologically this is more like "the one doing the waking"
| (similarly to how English "computer" used to describe a
| person).
| keiferski wrote:
| Yeah I assumed it was more of a description for a person, not
| a reference to the device. I'm not sure there were even alarm
| clocks in rural Poland at the time.
|
| IIRC a lot of words in French also work this way: simple
| translations today, but with more elaborate historical
| etymologies.
| beAbU wrote:
| A common surname in South Africa is _Klopper_ , literally
| Knocker. Probably similar origin.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Reading about world war 2 has given me a new appreciation for
| just how _manual_ everything was.
|
| It's amazing that the Allies managed 2 major amphibious
| landings in June 1944: Normandy was one, Saipan the other.
| Saipan was about a thousand miles from the nearest Allied
| forward base, and >3000 miles from Pearl Harbor! All that with
| slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and filing cabinets.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| don't forget punched cards:
|
| https://pattonhq.com/ibm.html
|
| https://www.ww2online.org/image/large-replica-punch-cards-
| bu...
| cen4 wrote:
| Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down. People
| have more time to think about what they can achieve. I
| vaguely remember Planning for Normandy taking 2 years or
| something, just cause of all the resources they had to
| mobilize from around the world.
|
| Contrast with today's wars, were all the real time tech in
| the world is producing lot of half baked outcomes.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| A frequently repeated excuse for WWI germany is that
| Wilhelm II had expressed desire not to invade the west, but
| had been told by his military that it was too late to
| recall the trains. Apparently the guy in charge of the
| german army's logistics in 1914 wrote a book after the war
| to explain that not only _could_ he have turned everyone
| back before the border had he only received a command to do
| so, but also included appendices with the timetables for
| doing so.
|
| [my book with the reference is currently unavailable, but
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieffen_Plan#Der_Weltkrieg
| suggests it might have been Groener, _Das Testament des
| Grafen Schlieffen: Operativ Studien uber den Weltkrieg_
| (1929)]
| mlyle wrote:
| Note that we got a lot of half-baked outcomes and military
| disasters with manual processes, too.
| aftbit wrote:
| >Sometimes its a good thing that tools slow you down.
|
| This has been a major learning in devops too. Sometimes you
| want the tool to go slow, at least to start, to give a
| chance to Ctrl-C when you realize you've made a mistake. A
| bad deploy that gets replicated to 10% of your fleet could
| be far better than one that goes to 100%.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > All that with slide rules, typewriters, mimeographs, and
| filing cabinets.
|
| Well they did have radios, telephones and radar as well. The
| fire control systems of battleships and anti-aircraft guns
| led to massive advances in distributed analogue computing
| that provided early insights into human/machine interactions
| as well as the beginnings of system-level architecting. The
| Brits during the Battle of Britain exploited telephone
| networks and switchboards in innovative ways to create a
| highly fault (bomb) tolerant decentralised command and
| control system that formed an early version of the sensor-to-
| shooter kill chains we see today.
| bloopernova wrote:
| If you've not read _Most Secret War_ I highly recommend it.
| Dr R V Jones details some of the different systems involved
| in the Battle of Britain and it 's a great book too.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| I read 'The Secret War' by Brian Johnson which was based
| on a 1970s BBC series. I think it's an earlier version of
| the same thing.
|
| Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human
| and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before
| Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire
| control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one
| effect of the war was to force together the different
| groups that were working on analogue computation.
| kibwen wrote:
| Everyone reading this right now needs to check out this
| 1950s naval training video on the mechanical fire control
| computers of battleships:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4 For fun, before
| you watch, think for yourself how you'd implement addition,
| multiplication, squaring, etc. with only gears and other
| mechanisms.
| TomatoCo wrote:
| It's amazing what you can do with just gears, cams, and
| levers. Project-Rho provides a quick survey of
| mechanisms. https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket
| /astrodeck.php#...
| datavirtue wrote:
| My mom used to do this with a spray bottle.
| nimbius wrote:
| this is a fascinating delve into the rich tapestry of british
| history and tradition spanning the ages, and i think it merits
| preservation at some level.
|
| however as an American i nearly dropped a pot of coffee hearing
| my wife shout something about "knocking up charles dickens" from
| across the kitchen in front of our kids..
| markx2 wrote:
| Time related:
|
| "Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (5 March 1854 - 7 December 1943),
| also known as the Greenwich Time Lady, was a businesswoman from
| London. She, her mother Maria Elizabeth, and her father John
| Henry, sold people the time. This was done by setting Belville's
| watch to Greenwich Mean Time, as shown by the Greenwich clock,
| each day and then "selling" people the time by letting them look
| at the watch and adjust theirs"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Belville#History
| aivisol wrote:
| NTP server.
| gerdesj wrote:
| I configured timesync (using NTP) for the GWR office networks
| many years ago. Some years later I used theirs to act as a
| stable source for Scotrail's office network too.
|
| As I'm sure we all know here: The four horsemen of the IT
| apocalypse are NTP, DNS and BGP.
| TRiG_Ireland wrote:
| I found out about her first from the Citation Needed comedy
| show, but then later from the Futility Closet podcast, which
| pointed out that most of her clients actually needed the
| service, while some (private houses) were splurging on an
| extravagance. And also that new technology never immediately
| replaces old. In the early days, she was more reliable than the
| telegraph, which tended to break down.
|
| She had clients till the end of her life, though no one took
| over the business when she died.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| "the knocker-up soon found out that while he knocked up one who
| paid him, he knocked up several on each side who did not" -- I
| thought it was the employer who paid the knockers!
|
| I guess it makes sense, otherwise you can pretend you don't hear
| it and excuse yourself from working that day.
| gurjeet wrote:
| I find it very interesting how the same phrase is now used for a
| completely different meaning. Others might see a connection
| between this use and the one meant in the movie 'Knocked Up' [1],
| but not being a native speaker of the language, I don't.
|
| [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478311/
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