Who Owned the Morning? Crowley, Wedgwood and the Fines for Being Late

Order 103 of the Crowley ironworks law book begins with an accusation. The ironmaster, John Crowley, writes that some workmen have pretended “a sort of right to loyter,” that others think “bare attendance without being employed in business is sufficient,” and that a few are “so impudent as to glory in their villany.” He therefore creates “an account of time by a Monitor.” Around the year 1700 a man was appointed to enter every day-labourer’s hours in a time-sheet, “to the minute,” under two headings: “Come” and “Run.”

That order is where the historian E. P. Thompson began his case, in “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (Past & Present, no. 38, December 1967, pp. 56-97), that being on time for an employer is a learned relationship, not a natural one. I read the essay in a full-text copy hosted by libcom.org rather than the journal original, so page references are Thompson’s own notes, not mine. His answer to why waking on time feels like an outside obligation is historical: for several generations in Britain, the person who owned the clock and the bell was the person who docked your pay, and the habit of rising to it was built under that arrangement.

What did Crowley’s rules actually say about the clock?

Thompson quotes enough of Orders 40 and 103 to show how much the owner cared about who controlled the time. Verse 31 of the Monitor’s order complains that clerks had been reckoning “by clocks going the fastest and the bell ringing before the hour for their going from business,” and by slow clocks and late bells at the start of the day. It orders that “no person upon the account doth reckon by any other clock, bell, watch or dyall but the Monitor’s, which clock is never to be altered but by the clock-keeper.” Order 40 sets the Warden of the Mill to ring a bell every morning at 5, then at 8 for breakfast, half an hour later for work, at noon, at one, and at eight at night “to ring for leaving work and all to be lock’d up.” The Warden’s weekly time-book had to be delivered with an affidavit swearing the hours were charged “without favour or affection, ill-will or hatred.”

Thompson calls this, already in 1700, “the familiar landscape of disciplined industrial capitalism, with the time-sheet, the time-keeper, the informers and the fines.” He calls the law book “extraordinary”: more than 100,000 words written to govern a labour force Crowley found refractory. That is a document about a problem he had not solved, not a description of a habit people already had.

How did Josiah Wedgwood handle late potters?

The potter’s case is more modest and, I think, more revealing. Thompson says Wedgwood, “that supposedly-formidable disciplinarian,” was reduced at Etruria to enforcing discipline “in surprisingly muted terms,” because a pot-bank had no machinery to set the pace of work the way a mill engine did. The instructions to his Clerk of the Manufactory, which Thompson dates to about 1780 from the Wedgwood papers at Barlaston, tell the clerk to be first at the works each morning, to single out those who “come regularly to their time” with “presents or other marks suitable to their ages,” and to take an account of the time lost by those who do not. Wage-earners lose pay for the minutes missed. Piece-workers, after “frequent notice,” are sent back to breakfast-time.

Later rules were harder. A set Thompson cites from about 1810, headed “Some regulations and rules for this manufactory more than 30 years back,” includes: “Any of the workmen forceing their way through the Lodge after the time alow’d by the Master forfeits 2/-d.” Thompson adds that N. McKendrick, in a 1961 Historical Journal article I did not open, showed Wedgwood introducing “the first recorded system of clocking-in.” In a footnote Thompson also says Wedgwood “seems to have been the first to replace the horn by the bell in the Potteries,” citing Eliza Meteyard’s 1865 biography, which I also did not read. The word “seems” is Thompson’s, and it should stay attached. The works also appears in the history of the watchman’s clock: the V&A holds an 1806 one said to have been used at Etruria, and what such a record proved about a guard is narrower than it looks.

Then comes a sentence that deflates the heroic version: once Josiah’s own strong presence was withdrawn, Thompson writes, “the incorrigible potters returned to many of their older ways.” Time-discipline in the Potteries took generations. It depended on a particular man standing at a particular gate.

Who was allowed to know what time it was?

The sharpest evidence in the essay comes from the early textile mills, in testimony Thompson quotes from nineteenth-century inquiries. One witness said of Mr. Braid’s mill: “There was nobody but the master and the master’s son who had a watch, and we did not know the time.” A worker who owned one had it taken and put “into the master’s custody because he had told the men the time of day.” A Dundee witness said factory clocks “were often put forward in the morning and back at night,” and that “a workman then was afraid to carry a watch,” since dismissal for knowing too much about “the science of horology” was not unusual. Before Sadler’s Committee a witness described a clock whose minute hand sat at the weight, so that it dropped three minutes at once and left the dinner break at twenty-seven minutes instead of thirty.

Thompson’s reading is that the workers’ next move was not to reject the clock. The first generation was taught the importance of time by masters, the second formed short-time committees for a ten-hour day, and the third struck for overtime or time-and-a-half. They had, he writes, “accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them.” Time had become something to be argued over minute by minute.

Where do the knocker-ups fit?

Less firmly than people often assume. Thompson says that in the clothing districts of the West Riding and in the Potteries “the horn was still used to awaken people in the mornings,” that farmers sometimes roused labourers from their cottages, and that “no doubt the knocker-up will have started with the earliest mills.” That last clause is an inference, not a finding. The detailed picture of the paid knocker-up with a pole or a pea-shooter belongs to a later period, which this survey of knocker-ups and other human alarms covers, and the cheap alarm clock that retired the trade came later still. What Thompson adds is the earlier layer: before most workers could afford a watch (he notes that efficient ones stayed beyond an artisan’s reach for decades), the wake-up signal belonged to whoever ran the work. Time arrived from outside, by horn or bell, and was paid for in pay if you missed it.

He is also clear that this was not only a factory matter. In 1755 the Rev. J. Clayton, writing for the officers of Manchester, condemned “that slothful spending the Morning in Bed” and said early rising would introduce “an exact Regularity into their Families.” Fines, bells and sermons arrived together.

What does this say about waking up today?

The evidence is thinner here, and I want to mark where it stops. Thompson’s essay is a documentary argument about British employers between roughly 1700 and the early nineteenth century. It does not measure anyone’s sleep or feelings, and it says nothing about whether a modern alarm tone feels like pressure. The inference is mine: an adult who rises at an appointed hour has inherited a rule whose first enforcer was a third party with a bell and a ledger, so the sense that someone else is owed your morning has a long pedigree. Earlier institutions worked the same way for different reasons. The Rule of Saint Benedict, for one, dealt with latecomers by making them visible, not by docking anything.

What changed, as the clock moved to the bedside table, is that the person who noticed lateness disappeared. Crowley’s Monitor wrote your minutes down. A modern alarm only makes a noise, and silencing it costs nothing that anyone else will see. The two things Thompson’s mill owners had, a clock the sleeper could not adjust and an outside party who registered the gap, are the two things a phone alarm lacks. DontSnooze restores the second one in a small way: if you do not record the proof within 30 seconds, a random camera-roll photo goes to your friends, so someone other than you finds out about the lateness. Why that kind of audience tends to matter is the subject of a separate post on performing better when watched.

The mill owners are a poor model of how that should feel: they held the clock and kept workers from knowing the time. A friend who sees one embarrassing picture is a lighter instrument, and nobody is docking a wage. What carries over from the 1700s is smaller than the whole apparatus: an hour that is written down, and a person who can see whether you kept it.