The man with the pole, by Lucius Kettering

An original essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this essay, published in a magazine in 1862, the writer describes following a knocker-up, a man paid to wake mill workers by tapping on their windows, on his early morning round in a Lancashire town.

Long before any clock in the house would wake them, the spinners of this town are roused by a man with a pole. I followed one of them on Tuesday, a small, brisk old man named Amos Rushton, who has been knocking up the people of Weavers’ Row and the streets about it for twenty-three years.

He starts at a quarter past four. His pole is a long, light cane with a few wires fixed to the end, and with it he can reach a bedroom window two storeys up and rattle it without breaking the glass. He has seventy-eight customers, each of whom pays him threepence a week, and each has a different hour: the carders at a quarter to five, the spinners at five, the overlookers at half past. He does not move on from a window until a face appears at it or a voice calls down, ‘All right, Amos!’, for if a hand is late at the mill gate he is fined, and blames Amos for it.

At one house in Clough Street he tapped very softly, and only once. ‘There’s a new baby,’ he said. ‘The father must be at the gate by five, but I won’t wake the little one.’ I asked him who woke him in the morning. ‘Nobody,’ he said. ‘I never sleep past four. It would ruin me.’

(a) How much does each customer pay Amos Rushton? (b) Why does Amos wait at each window until someone answers? (c) What does his behaviour at the house in Clough Street suggest about him?