A History of British Summer Time

August 2, 2016

• Topical

On 25th October the clocks will once again fall back for the year, marking the end of British Summer Time – also known as Daylight Saving Time — and giving us an extra hour in bed. But where does the practice of clock-changing come from?

The idea was first proposed in Britain by a keen horse-rider, William Willett, who disliked the ‘waste’ of useful daylight first thing in the morning during the summer months. Though the sun had been up for hours during his rides through the local woods in Chislehurst and Petts Wood, people were still asleep in bed.

Willett was not the first to propose such a scheme; in 1895 an entomologist in New Zealand, George Vernon Hudson, presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society outlining a daylight saving scheme which was trialled successfully in New Zealand in 1927. 

In 1907 Willett published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight, outlining plans to encourage people out of bed earlier in summer by changing the time on the nation’s clocks. He spent the rest of his life fighting to get acceptance of the scheme, but died in 1915, having failed to do so. The following year, however, Germany introduced the system; at this point, Britain and Germany were at war, and any system that could save fuel and money was worth trying. The Summer Time Act of 1916 was quickly passed by Parliament and the first day of British Summer Time, 21 May 1916, and the practice has continued ever since.

There have been a few changes over the years, however. During the Second World War, Britain adopted Double British Summer Time, with the clocks one hour ahead of Greenwich in winter and two hours ahead in summer. Although this ended in 1945 In 1947, due to severe fuel shortages, clocks were advanced by one hour on two occasions during the spring, and put back by one hour on two occasions during the autumn, meaning that Britain was back on Double Summer Time during that summer. Between 1968-1971 there was another experiment, known as British Standard Time, where the clocks went forward as usual in March 1968, but did not return to Greenwich Mean Time until autumn 1971. There had been some advantages of this experiment — while there had been an increase in casualties in the morning, there had been a substantially greater decrease in casualties in the evening, with a total of around 2,500 fewer people killed and seriously injured during the first two winters of the experiment, at a time when around 1,000 people a day were killed or injured on the roads. On balance, however, the government decided to return to the original system of British Summer Time.

Changes to Daylight Saving laws are constantly debated in Parliament, as it impossible to find a solution that pleases everyone. However, challenges to the status quo are almost always overturned, and the system looks set to remain for the foreseeable future.

Do you have any further facts on clock-changing? Let us know at Kings Tutors.