British Summer Time

Today the clocks go forward, we add an hour and suddenly instead of being up at a normal time we’re lying in bed late! In actual fact, since it is Sunday, Mothering Sunday to be precise, we aren’t in any rush to get up!

I wondered when the idea of changing the time happened, and it was in 1916 during the first world war when it first started. It wasn’t a politician but a builder, William Willet who first suggested it and campaigned for it, but sadly died the year before it was implemented for the first time. Willett wasn’t just a man who went out and physically built houses; he and his father before him had a company which built modern style houses in the late nineteenth century.

I suppose in older times, there was no need for changing the clocks because people got up and began their day when it was light, and went home and then to bed when it was dark; once there was almost universal artificial light provided by electricity or gas, then the day could be controlled. I guess that the pressures of longer working days from the time of the industrial revolution also had a part to play in the regulation of the hours of work.

That great inventor Benjamin Franklin also proposed the idea and other people also realised that working time might be wasted by people not getting up and using summer daylight. Willett is supposed to have been out early, riding, and noticed the number of curtains still drawn at bedroom windows, and having no doubt enjoyed being out in the bright summer morning he concluded that other people should be encouraged to do the same!

Willett suggested that the clocks be put forward by eighty minutes… not all at once but in increments, during April, then reversed incrementally in September… that sounds such a muddle!

In 1916, during the first war, when no doubt there were pressures to use daylight, save energy, and maybe extend the working day, British Summer Time was first introduced. During the second world war, the clocks were not put back in the autumn, and then double summer time between 1941-5 and 1946-7… it must have led to a lot of errors and mistakes! After the war in 1947, time reverted to the pattern of BST. There was an experiment in 1998, following a campaign about road safety, and from farmers and others, for BST to become standard tome, not GMT in Britain. However in 2001 Britain returned to the normal pattern of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) in winter and BST in summer… and so it remains!