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your windows until you showed your face. Often the
the knocker-upper doubled up as the snuffer-outer
putting out the gas lamps on their rounds. In Baldock
in Hertfordshire until relatively recently you could
see the dent in the brickwork alongside the first floor
bedrooms of the draymens cottages in South Road
caused by the brewery knocker-upper. Mary Smith,
(left) photographed in 1931, used a pea shooter to
wake her clients in the East End. Her daughter Molly
Moore is believed to have been the last knocker-upper
in England. It begs the question though - did the
knocker-uppers knocker-upper wake the knocker-
upper up? Or did they just not go to bed?
Not far from Mary and her daughter Molly another
enterprising London family, the Belvilles, also made
their money selling accurate time. From 1836
onwards they would go once a week to the Royal
Observatory at Greenwich and set their own watches
to the Astronomer Royal’s Master Clock. Then,
spreading out all over London and southern England
they’d follow regular routes winding their clients
clocks and setting them to accurate Greenwich Mean
Time. When the last of this family of time travellers,
Elizabeth Belville (below), died in 1943 having
attended the Observatory daily at 9.00am to just short
of her 90
th
birthday, the family watch, a John Arnold
pocket chronometer, originally made for the Duke of
Sussex, was bequeathed to the Worshipful Company
of Clockmakers. It can be seen today at their small
museum at Guildhall in the City of London.
The Black Watch
Clive Sinclair’s 1975
Black Watch
hasn’t made it into
the museum with quite such fanfare. It was one of the
first digital watches ever produced and apart from the
fact that the internal chip could be ruined by the static
from your 1970s nylon clothes or carpets, the watch
ran fast or slow depending on the temperature and the
batteries only lasted ten days and in their woefully
short life had a worrying tendency to explode, you
probably thought you were the bees knees if you had
one! The Black Watch also came in a kit form and
was so difficult to put together that it could invoke
homicidal levels of exasperation in purchasers.
Practical Wireless
recommended two wooden clothes
pegs, two drawing pins and a piece of insulated wire
just to put the battery in. Oh and it turned out that the
plastic used for the casing was resistant to all known
forms of glue so they were designed to be clipped
together. It was a rotten design that didn’t work and
if you did persevere through four days of adjusting
the trimmer to get the blasted thing to run at the
correct speed chances are on day five the casing fell
apart, the battery gave up the ghost and your brushed
nylon sheets had sounded the final death knell. The
backlog of returned watches was so massive that it
still hadn’t been cleared after two years! Legend has
it that the watch was so awful that more were returned
than had ever been manufactured! Which reminds me
of the marvellously outrageous fact that the insurance
has been claimed on more Rolex watches reported
stolen on Spain’s Costa del Sol than have ever been
made.
So to finish in this our Silver Anniversary month I am
delighted to announce that in the 3rd year of Cameron
on the day after the Ides of June and for the 9th time,
we won the Group Travel Award for the Best Guided
Tours. Heartfelt thanks to everyone who voted for us.
We very much appreciate it. These are happy days.
P.S. As Clerk of Works in the 1960s Wally Webb
made headlines in the Evening Standard when he fair
near scalped himself in an accident in what was then
called St Stephen’s Tower. This tower is of course
best known for housing the famous clock, commonly
referred to by the name of the bell, Big Ben. It’s just
as well the GLC didn't give Wally a watch when he
retired. He wouldn't have worn it!