3-028-598 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

A Dutch Watchman, 1870. Engraving of a sketch by Mr. R. T. Pritchett. '...the watchman - or clapperman, as he is called, from the wooden clapper which he carries and uses so unmercifully in his rounds - is no relic of the past...but a veritable being, who walks the earth a.d. 1870, in company with policemen, in the good town Scheveningen, a fashionable watering-place of the Netherlands. From eleven p.m. to seven a.m. the clapperman is on his beat, making night hideous with the click-clack of his wooden clapper and his curious cry of the hour. If he should see a window open he is to inform the inhabitants; and in case of fire he has to clap consecutively and call the fire-engine keepers...His beat is so arranged that he may pass each spot in it once an hour; and, that he may fulfil all his duties and cry and clap loudly enough, he is under the surveillance of the police. The clapperman is on duty only four hours at a time...In 1851 the nightwatch was abolished on account of the noise it made being objectionable to some persons in authority; but, at the demand of the burghers, the clappermen were soon reinstated, and they still make their rounds, with their instruments of torture to the ear, murdering sleep'. From "Illustrated London News", 1870.