WHO remembers the chapper-uppers? Before alarm clocks were a thing, you could earn a bit of a cash going round workers’ houses and tapping on their windows to wake them up for the early shift. The Blantyre Project, a website dedicated to the history of the South Lanarkshire mining village, reckons these men, usually employed by the colliery to ensure its staff did not sleep in, could earn up to 6d. The late Blantyre historian James Cornfield even wrote a poem about them, called The Rapper-Up Man. “In days gone by in the miners rows, there lived a man who always rose/At an early hour from slumber deep to waken miners from their sleep/By rapping on the window pane, no matter the weather wind or rain/Be it Wullie, Mick or Dan, he was always known as the Rapper-Up Man….”