FIDDLING WITH CLOCKS

FIDDLING WITH CLOCKS

 
At one o’clock in the morning of March 30^th this year we will put our clocks forward for one hour. In my case, I’ll run round the house and reset all the clocks in each room before I go to bed. Nevertheless, there’s always one I forget. I’m sure most folk are the same.

No matter what the weather will throw at us on the day, we will have moved over to British Summer Time. We will endure darker mornings for a while longer but enjoy longer evenings.

  British Summer Time was introduced during the First World War as a daylight saving measure. It added an hour to the previous standard; Greenwich Mean Time. GMT – initially known as ‘Railway Time’- was adopted as a standard for timekeeping throughout Great Britain and Ireland. Previously every town and city had their own mean time based on the movements of the sun. Railway timetables would have been impossible without some form of standardisation. GMT has been the universal standard ever since.  All time zones around the world are plus or minus GMT or UTC (Co-ordinated Universal Time).

  Around this time of the year, a bunch of enthusiasts for the European Union and all its works begin to agitate for the UK to adopt Central European Time.  Some confuse this with the practice of changing clocks twice yearly which they seem to regard as an intolerable chore.

  In fact, all the countries that adhere to Central European Time also change their clocks at the same time as us. Before 1996, there was often a week between French and British clock changes when both nations were on the same time zone.

  The problem with this for Northern Ireland residents would come in the winter. From February 1968 to October 1971 the British government experimented with all-year round BST – then renamed British Standard Time. I remember this well. At the time I was in my last year at primary school and my first two years at secondary school. 

  The big problem was that dawn did not rise till after 10:00am!  We all had to go to school in the dark. The plan to reduce the number of deaths on the road in the evenings worked – at the cost of more deaths and injuries on the roads in the morning. We schoolchildren were issued with reflective armbands to wear on our clothes on the way to school and other reflectors to attach to our schoolbags. The experiment failed and was abandoned. We reverted to GMT in the winter of 1971.

  The Euro-enthusiasts would not be alone in fiddling with time zones for purely political reasons.  The latest example comes from Venezuela.  Last December Venezuelans set their clocks back half an hour. The South American country is now 4½ hours behind GMT. Only Newfoundland in Canada is in this unusual half-hour time zone. No doubt the controversial leftist President Hugo Chavez wants his country to stand out from his neighbours.  It does now. Whether or not the decision makes any sense is another matter entirely. Apart from Newfoundland, there are no other half-hour time zones in the Americas, Europe or Africa.

  Asia revels in such eccentricity. Iran is 3½ hours ahead; Afghanistan 4½ hours; India and Sri Lanka 5½ hours and Burma 6½ hours. Nepal is even more eccentric. The Himalayan kingdom is 5¾ hours ahead of GMT. South Australia and the Northern Territory are 9½ ahead of GMT. The tiny Western Australian town of Eucla is 8¾ hour ahead of GMT. Until its abolition in 1916, Dublin Mean Time was 25 minutes behind GMT.