Technology | 2009.10.23
Britain's struggle with changing times
As you try to remember whether to turn clocks back or forward an hour tomorrow night (it\'s back), you might like to spare a thought for the Victorians. For it seems Britons carried on wrestling with different time zones for years after a national standard was introduced in the 1840s.
David Rooney, curator of transport at the Science Museum and formerly of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and James Nye, secretary of the Electrical Horology Group, both historians of time, have just won a prize from the Society for the History of Technology for their research into the surprisingly tortuous history of time.
The railways adopted Greenwich time in the 1840s as the standard for all their timetables and clocks. Previous historians assumed it was then adopted across the country, even though it only became law in 1880.
Instead, poring over company records, museum collections, local bylaws and parliamentary debates, Rooney and Nye have concluded that for more than 30 years there was a free-for-all, with many places continuing on local time which could vary from Greenwich by up to half an hour.
The pressure to introduce a national standard came from the need to regulate factory working hours – and from the ardent desire of parliamentarians, who could drink round the clock in their own clubs, to regulate the drinking hours of the feckless working classes.
Factory acts from 1802 gradually tackled hours and conditions, and in 1844 stated for the first time that working hours of "children and young persons" should be regulated by "a clock open to public view". But what time that clock showed was still up for grabs. In Truro, Rooney points out, local time was 20 minutes behind London time, so anyone wanting to catch a train needed to know both times. A court case in Dorchester in 1858 ruled the legal time was the local mean time, not Greenwich.
In 1872, after thousands of hours of parliamentary debate, and 31 statutes since 1828, the Licensing Act first introduced nationwide restrictions on the sale of alcohol. "Issues of class, freedom, public health and morality came together in legislation that is a perfect exemplar of 19th-century standardisation and regulations – and time was the tool by which it could be policed," as Rooney and Nye put it.
Publicans faced losing their licences unless they knew the exact time; national standard time followed within eight years.
Daylight saving, proposed in 1895 by a New Zealand entomologist, George Vernon Hudson, which is still passionately debated twice every year as the clocks go forwards and back, came in 1916 as Britain scrambled to catch up with the perceived greater efficiency of Germany, which introduced the measure in 1915.
Germany introduced it after a passionate 10-year international campaign by an Englishman, William Willett, who liked horse riding before breakfast, hated having to finishing his afternoon golf round after dusk, and resented how poorly the time fitted both his hobbies.
Clocks go back by one hour tomorrow tonight as Britain moves from British summer time to Greenwich mean time.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/o[...]ocks-victorians-research-prize
