From Pea-Shooters to Sonorous Voices: Time-Keeping, Then & Now

Early this morning I saw that Shaun Usher, whose blog Letters of Note is one of my favorite websites, had tweeted this historic photo and humorous message:

“Before alarm clocks there were knocker-upper’s. Mary Smith earned sixpence a week shooting dried peas at sleeping workers windows. Limehouse Fields. London. Undated. Photograph from Philip Davies’ Lost London: 1870 – 1945.”

Keeping with the time-keeping theme, later in the day I saw that Lucas Wittmann, Books Editor of the Daily Beast had tweeted about this obituary from The Economist, remembering the life of Brian Cobby, who for decades was the voice of what is known in Britain as “the talking clock.” From the magazine:

“For many people in Britain for much of the 20th century, indulging the national weakness for exact timekeeping, Time spoke from the other end of a telephone line. His number could be dialled; and from a room presumed full of chittering and whirring timepieces, Time would inform them that ‘At the third stroke, the time. . . will be ten twenty-seven and fifty seconds.’ His companion robot then chimed in: Pip—pip—pip.”

I’m grateful to Usher and Wittman, and the two publications, for publishing these rich evocations of time-keeping from the past two centuries. Here’s a full shot of the knocker-upper image: