Once again we are on the eve of the mad annual ritual of the clocks. Tomorrow morning, all official time sources from Big Ben to the BBC will be lying about the time, and if you have any sense, all the myriad clocks in your home will be lying too. They will say that it is 9.00 a.m. when it is in fact 8.00.
Churches, shops cafes, railways, buses, TV stations and everyone else will join in the mass deception. You can stand aside if you like, but unless your life is totally private, you will (at the very least) inconvenience yourself.
If you are, like me, a habitual early riser who has been enjoying the steadily increasing amount of light in the early morning, the change will be an annoying nuisance. It was fully light around six. Now you will have to wait till seven o’clock for the same amount of light. More likely, you will wake naturally when you normally do, and find that it is physically impossible to catch the train you have been getting regularly for months . Or, by the use of hideous jarring alarms, the nastiest way of waking up outside actual captivity, you will cudgel your brain and body into rising earlier each day, with the inevitable groggy and unpleasant results, not unlike jetlag.
At the other end of the day, the equally enjoyable slow and dusky advance of afternoon into evening will suddenly be violently accelerated. A change that would once have involved weeks of patient acclimatisation will be accomplished in a day, a disorienting experience for anyone remotely sensitive to his surroundings.
What’s it for? Nobody really knows. All sorts of claims are made for it – the most absurd being that it increases the amount of daylight, which cannot be true. It increases the amount of daylight only for late sleepers (politicians are often in this class, and journalists) who have seldom seen the dawn and didn’t like it the last time they did see it. These people wasted hours of light in the morning. Now, one of those hours has been transferred to the evening, so they can, allegedly, play tennis or otherwise romp around in the extra daylight.
They won’t, of course, they’ll go to the pub, or watch the TV, oblivious of what is going on outside anyway.
The rest of us, struggling to get children to go to bed when it is still light, will silently curse them.
And we will be told it’s good for the economy, or saves fuel, or increases tourism, or some such excuse. Is there has there ever been, any hard evidence for this?
It was not alluded to during the very few short debates when Parliament agreed to begin this ritual, originally in May 1916 (it first happened by law on the 20th of that month, the first and second readings of the Act having been taken by the House of Lords on the 16th) and in a tearing hurry, under the usual catch-all excuse that we were at war and therefore must do everything to become more efficient, etc . Opposition was unpatriotic. The idea had originally been encouraged by a miserable building tycoon called William Willett, and a bug-hunter from New Zealand, George Hudson. Mr Willett was cross that other people stayed in bed on summer mornings while he was out riding his horse, and thought they ought to be made to get up. He was also annoyed because he had to stop playing golf earlier in the evening than he wanted to, because it was too dark to see to play. Mr Hudson, thanks to working shifts, found he had lots of time to hunt insects when most people would have been at work, and was filled with a passion to spread the benefit to others. wanted more time to hunt insects.
There are obvious alternative solutions to both these problems – one, let other people live the way they want to, and two, start your golf game earlier. As for Mr Hudson, he needed to understand that not all of us are the same.
The idea, a bit like the man-made global warming cult, is fanatical and dictatorial. We are all to be made to live differently, for our own good, even if the evidence that it *is* for our own good is sparse and open to contest.
Introducing the measure on 16th May 1916, the Marquess of Lansdowne (later to be famous for a noble but doomed attempt to end the Great War in a negotiated settlement), said :
‘‘It has often been said that if in this country any one were able at five o'clock on a summer's morning to lift the roofs off the houses he would see that, in spite of bright daylight, the greater part of the population was sound asleep with closed shutters; that if, again, he were able to perform a similar operation at ten o'clock in the evening, he would find a great part of the population using artificial light in order to make up for their own mismanagement earlier in the day. The object of this Bill is to introduce a small measure of additional Common sense into these arrangements.’
it is a measure which conduces to efficiency and economy, and there can, I think, be no doubt whatever that this Bill will have those results. Our proposal is that in the five summer months we should push on the clock by one hour, and thereby encourage people to begin the day and the night earlier than they have hitherto been in the habit of doing. The arguments in favour of the proposal seem to me fairly obvious. It is, of course, the case that the hours of daylight are limited, and it seems to follow that it is our duty to turn them to the best account that we can. I understand that the result of this Bill will be that during the summer months 130 additional hours of daylight will be available in consequence of it.
I will not take upon myself to name to the House the sum which it is believed will be saved to the country by this change in the law. The estimates must obviously be very conjectural. I have seen it placed as high as £10,000,000 a year, but I should be sorry to assume any responsibility for that or any other figure. It is quite clear, however, that if we can get people to consume sunlight instead of electric light and lamp light, the national bill for illuminants must be reduced to a material extent. ‘
Not a fact in sight, you see (the estimates of fuel saved are ’conjectural’, a grandiose way of saying ‘guesswork’) , and the barmy claim of 130 additional hours of daylight is made.
Lord Balfour of Burleigh offered some opposition: ‘I know quite well that it is hopeless now to oppose the Bill. I congratulate myself that at any rate it is ostensibly a Bill only for the duration of the war, and that the chief reason put forward on its behalf is that there will be a certain economy and saving of light and of coal during a portion of the year. I sincerely hope that it will be recognised on all sides that it is put forward as a temporary war measure, and that if we do not oppose it strenuously on this occasion it is because we trust that before it becomes a permanent institution of the country a real opportunity will be given of considering it. In my humble opinion I prophesy—we will see whether my prophesy comes true—that it will be a very serious burden on the, in the Parliamentary sense, least articulate portion of the population. I believe it will do an immense amount of injury to the women of the working classes. They will have to get up an hour earlier in the morning than they do at the present time, and although the clock will decree the ordinary hour of going to bed when it comes to evening I believe that the children for whom they are responsible and the male population will be sitting up later owing to the length of daylight, and that they will have their period of rest curtailed. I think this is very hard upon the women of the working classes, and I believe this will be one of the evil effects of the Bill. And I do not myself for a moment believe that children will go to bed before daylight ends; they, too, will be deprived of a certain part of their rest.’
So did many Lords speaking for the (then) powerful agricultural interest, pointing out that farming proceeds according to the sun and not the clock, and that much work cannot begin until the sun has burned the dew off the fields.
When it came up for peacetime renewal in 1922, One MP noted:
‘ The Board of Education was evidently doubtful as to the effect of this Measure on the children of the country, and they issued instructions that inquiries should be made among local education authorities as to their opinions upon it. In the White Paper which has been issued as the result of that, it is stated that reference was made to 299 authorities, of which only 183 were in favour, while 27 were uncertain. One of the chief reasons for objection is indicated in the White Paper: It is said there that this would not have been so damaging to the children of the country had it not been that parental control was lacking and that the children could not be induced to go to bed.
‘In an Appendix to the White Paper it is stated that an instruction was issued on the matter to parents of school children it is called, "A Message to Parents," and it states, "Many children have been found of late not to do justice to their lessons because they have had too little sleep." This is in consequence of Summer Time, and in consequence of tinkering with the sun. The children consequently stay up an hour later and get an hour's sleep less. Surely the consideration of the children's health and the consideration of agriculture being a very serious business to the country, as opposed to the pleasure which is really what the Bill seeks to encourage—surely these matters are so important that it would be better for the Government to drop the Bill altogether.’
I have not been able to trace the White Paper that is mentioned here, and would be glad if anyone can identify it and tell me where I might find it.
A Mr Lunn weighed in : ‘Had it not been for the reason that two of my colleagues have spoken in support of this Bill, I should not have desired to speak on this occasion. I know that my own association, the Yorkshire Miners' Association, are unanimously against this Measure, and they have always been opposed to it, because we are satisfied that it is not in the interests of the miner or the industrial worker who has to get up in the middle of the night to go to his work. We are also satisfied that it is not in the interests of the miner's wife. The wife of a man who has to go to work at such an early hour, and who is the mother of a young family, has perhaps the hardest lot of any class or section of the community.
‘There are thousands of miners' wives who have to get up in the middle of the night, and a Bill like this forces them to get up earlier than they would otherwise have to do. Sometimes there is a double shift at the colliery Where the son or the lodger works, and then the wife is kept up waiting for the conclusion of the second shift. If she has any young children they will not go to bed because of this Bill and the longer daylight, and the wife has to get the children to school next morning earlier and get them up. I cannot understand why any representative of an industrial community can support this Bill and I am quite prepared to accept the position taken up on behalf of agriculture. I do not suppose that there is any Agricultural Labourers' Union or any body of agricultural workers who would support this Bill. With regard to the views expressed by the hon. Member for St. Helens (Mr. Sexton), I would like to point out that be is a bachelor whilst most of the Members of the Labour party are married men. I hope this Bill does not get a Second Reading. Those who support this Bill are in a minority, and they are not the most useful section of the community. After everything has been said, the people who do the hard work and who have built up this nation ought to be considered and so ought their wives and families. For these reasons I take the view that we ought to reject this Bill.’
And Mr Macquisten said : ‘I fully agree with the remark made by the last speaker, that this is one of the most absurd Measures that was ever passed. It has now been passed by this House every year since 1916. It was passed during the period of the War, when. according to the suggestion made by the right hon. Gentleman the Member for the City of London (Sir F. Banbury), we were all mad. I do not know why he should place to that a limitation of time. This Bill is an absurd proposition on the face of it. What is the good of telling lies about the time? It amounts to that? It enacts by Act of Parliament a lie, and it states that that is the time which is not the time, and it is perfectly absurd. There are about 45,000,000 inhabitants in this country, and, therefore, you can take it that there are 7,000,000 households containing at least 7,000,000 clocks. Every one of those clocks has a face, and you cannot expect to train the rising generation in veracity if they have facing them every morning a gross misstatement of fact.’
During the Second World War, Double Summer Time was imposed, again on the unanswerable claim that it would help win the war (I cannot find any debate on this) . Did it? Does anyone know? It seems unlikely given these highly unusual exact figures supplied to the House of Commons on 4th March 1947 by Chuter Ede, then Home Secretary. Mr Ede was seeking to bring back Double Summer Time in peacetime because of a national fuel crisis:
He said:
‘… in some urban centres double summer time was welcomed during the war period. But, in agricultural areas it was always resented, and even in urban areas a large number of people thought double summer time had a detrimental effect on the health of children,
‘I was very careful in the statement I made not to emphasise the amount of fuel that will actually be saved by this arrangement, for the saving of fuel is so small in its absolute figures as to be fairly negligible. The best estimate I can give is that there will be a saving of some 120,000 tons of coal in respect of the generating stations, and 10,000 tons in respect of gas and domestic supplies, as far as the additional period of single summer time is concerned. The period of double summer time which we propose will enable an additional saving to be made of some 20,000 tons, making a total of 150,000 tons in all. It is therefore quite clear that if it were merely a question of the absolute saving of fuel, it would not be right to introduce this Bill. What I was very careful to point out was that the enactment of this Measure would enable us to make more effective use of the fuel which is available, and that is the ground on which I must rest my case.
‘I can assure the House that as far as my own personal predilections are concerned, I would be the last person to want to introduce summer time at all.
Tom Driberg, that old rogue, spoke for grammar school pupils in his Essex seat:
‘This Measure is also rather unfortunate in its effect on schoolchildren. With the increasing tendency to urbanise rural schools, which I deplore—the tendency to transport children daily long distances to and from their schools in the nearest town—the question of summer time becomes a serious consideration. I had occasion recently to draw the attention of my right hon. Friend the Minister of Education to the case of a dozen or two children in my own constituency who attend a grammar school some 15 miles away, and who now have to leave their homes by 6.30 each morning in order to be at school by 9 o'clock. Under double summer time, they will have to leave their homes at what would normally be 4.30 each morning, and still be away for 12 hours daily.’
And Sir Alan Herbert, the lawyer and wit who then occupied one of Oxford University’ s two seats and so gloried in the title of ‘Junior Burgess’ (abolished a year later when we finally introduced universal suffrage democracy, one man, one vote, no more), made the first reference I can find to ‘Berlin Time’, the ‘reform’ repeatedly proposed by persons who claim it has nothing to do with an attempt to impose a universal EU time, but can never explain why this nightmarish departure from nature (tried and swiftly rejected by the people of Portugal) is justified in any other way:
‘I hate to think that Big Ben, that great bell which has been such a voice in the councils of the world, will be heard booming, through the B.B.C., all around the world, for half the summer, Berlin time, and for the rest of the summer, Moscow time. I do not need to inform hon. Members that Berlin lies in longitude 15 degrees East, and that Moscow is in longitude 3o degrees East—rather more—and that if we advance the clock one hour, we shall use Berlin time, and if we advance it two hours, Moscow time.
‘I think that summer time, single or double, is the most frightful confession of weakness of which the human race has ever been guilty. By all means let us change our habits according to the seasons. Even the dumb animals do that. Even the uneducated cock does not crow at the same time all the year round. But let us change our habits without necessarily changing the clocks. I do not see why it is not possible for us to get up one hour earlier because it is good for us, because it is good for trade, or even because it is good for the country, but it is possible if we are deceived by a silly mechanical trick with the clock. That is an idea which must be repugnant surely to anybody who has the smallest respect for the human race. Surely, in the normal times to which the Home Secretary referred—I do not say now—especially when the Government either run or control so many things, it should be the simplest thing in the world for the Government to say that, from a certain date, all Government offices would begin work one hour earlier, and it was hoped that industry would follow suit.’
Well, that era passed and we went back to the moderate craziness of Single Summer Time, which we have stuck to ever since, out of inertia rather than reason. I am sure that those who would make an effort to impose decimal coinage or metric measurements, and applaud it, in the name of progress, would likewise oppose any attempt to restore our clocks to the truth, and truth to our clocks. Anything which disorients and uproots is progress. Anything which reassures and is particular and customary, is condemned.
