A long vanished job

 

Mrs Mary Smith wakes the dockers of Limehouse, London, with her peashooter in 1927. A long vanished job.

When alarm clocks were unreliable and expensive, a knocker-upper was a person whose primary job it was to wake people up. In the 1930s, Mary Smith in this image earned six pence a week by shooting dry peas out of a pea shooter at the windows of employees that weren't waking up in East London. She would not leave a window until she was sure that the workers had woken up.

This very famous photograph captured by 

John Topham was the first he ever licensed. He sold it for five pounds (a week's wages back then) to the Daily Mirror, and decided to give up his career as a policeman and become a freelance photographer for the rest of his life.