In the Dark

It’s 29th October 2023, which marks the end of “Summer Time” in Europe. Accordingly, the temperature in Barcelona has plummetted to 22°C. I have to make a flying visit to the UK next week and I suspect that I’m in for a bit of a shock, having adjusted to these balmy climes.  I have numerous telecons next week too and, since  some parts of the world will be still on Daylight Saving Time (or whatever) there’s potential for confusion in the timing.

Some time ago, before the Covid-19 Pandemic, the European Parliament approved a directive that would abolish `Daylight Saving Time’.  Unfortunately that plan has been ‘paused’ and there’s no sign of it happening for the foreseeable future.  I’ve long felt that the annual ritual of putting the clocks forward in the Spring and back again in the Autumn was a waste of time effort, so I’ll be glad when this silly practice is terminated. It would be far better in my view to stick with a single Mean Time throughout the year. I’m only disappointed that this hasn’t happened already.

The marvellous poster above is from 1916, when British Summer Time was introduced. I was surprised to learn recently that the practice of changing clocks backwards and forwards in the UK is only about a hundred years old and was introduced as an emergency measure in wartime. To be honest I’m also surprised that the practice persists to this day, as I can’t see any real advantage in it. Any institution or organisation that really wants to change its working hours in summer can easily do so, but the world of work is far more flexible nowadays than it was a hundred years ago and I think very few would feel the need.

Anyway, while I am on about Mean Time, here is a another poster from 1916.

Until October 1916, clocks in Ireland were set to Dublin Mean Time, as defined at Dunsink Observatory, rather than at Greenwich. The adoption of GMT in Ireland was driven largely by the fact that the British authorities found that the time difference between Dublin and London had confused telegraphic communications during the Easter Rising earlier in 1916. Its imposition was therefore, at least in part, intended to bring Ireland under closer control. This did not go down well with Irish nationalists.

Ireland had not moved to Summer Time with Britain in May 1916 because of the Easter Rising. Dublin Mean Time was 25 minutes 21 seconds behind GMT but the change to GMT was introduced in Ireland at the same time as BST ended in the UK, hence the alteration by one hour minus 25 minutes 21 seconds, i.e. 34 minutes and 39 seconds as in the poster.

Britain will probably never scrap British Summer Time on the grounds that whatever the EU does must necessarily be bad. What will happen to Northern Ireland when Ireland scraps Daylight Saving Time is yet to be seen.

This entry was posted on October 29, 2023 at 11:20 am and is filed under Barcelona, History with tags Daylight Saving Time, Dublin Mean Time, Greenwich Mean Time. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.