Spring Forward, Fall Back
SPRING FORWARD, FALL BACK
On the 29th of this month many of us will bask in the joy of knowing that the clocks go back at 2a.m. and we get an extra hour in bed. The idea has been around a long time and so has the controversy over its benefits or otherwise.
The idea of aligning waking hours to daylight hours is usually credited to the American Benjamin Franklin who first proposed the idea in 1784. Franklin was dismayed by the wasting of daylight hours and so proposed a way in which everyone would benefit from getting up as soon as it was light enough. He published that old proverb ‘early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.’ In a satirical letter to the editor of The Journal of Paris, Franklin suggested that waking up earlier in the summer would economise on candle usage; and calculated considerable savings. He proposed, tongue-in-cheek, taxing window shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public at sunrise by ringing church bells and firing cannons!
British Summer Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time, was the brainchild of a builder from Kent called William Willett. On his way back from riding his horse in Petts Wood in 1905, he noticed many of the blinds and curtains in the neighbouring houses were still drawn, even though it was light. This led him to consider the idea of adapting the time to better fit daylight hours. It seems Willett had an ulterior motive for his suggestion. He was an avid golfer who disliked cutting short his round at dusk.
Willett’s proposal, which he published in 1907, was to advance the clock during the summer months. His original proposal was for the clocks to be put forward by 80 minutes in total, in four steps of 20 minutes each Sunday at 2am during April and turned back in the same way in September. He argued that this would mean longer daylight hours for recreation, improving health and also saving the country money in lighting costs. Liberal Party MP Robert Pearce introduced the first Daylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on 12 February 1908 but it failed to become law.
The idea resurfaced during World War One when the need to conserve coal made the suggestion of daylight saving more pertinent. The Summer Time Act was finally passed in the UK on 17th May 1916. Backed by press advertisements, the clocks went forward one hour on the following Sunday, 21st May. To return to GMT on 1st October 1916, people were advised to put their clocks forward by 11 hours rather than turning the hands back an hour, as in those days this would break the mechanism.
Sadly William Willett died of the flu in 1915 aged 58 and didn’t live to see his ideas become law. Fittingly though, there is a memorial sundial in Petts Wood, set permanently to Daylight Saving Time, in his honour. His ideas still form the basis of the system we use today. Advocates for it claim the lighter summer mornings save energy, reduce traffic accidents and get people out leading to them becoming more active with associated health benefits. Critics claim darker winter mornings are more dangerous for children going to school and mean farmers working longer hours before daylight.
Whichever side of the argument you favour, the fact remains that we need to make a note to put our clocks back at 2a.m. on October 29th. Nowadays of course our mobile phones, computers and laptops do not need reminding of this momentous event