British Silly Time (BST)
Here we go again, time to leave BST behind us and revert to Greenwich Meantime… To me it all seems a bit silly Greenwich Meantime (GMT) is the way things ‘should’ be but in the spring we have to put our clock forward by one hour in order to enter Bristish Summertime (BST) as part of a ‘Daylight Saving’ exercise! Why we need to save daylight hours during the summer when there is plenty of daylight is beyond me. I don’t actually mind the changing of the clocks. In fact I actually quite like it as it tends to accentuate the seasons a little more and I really enjoy the constant change of the seasons. However, the reasoning behind it always seems a little vague, which probably explains why the arguments for and against BST continue to rage.
So I thought I would do some research into the history of BST and it seems it was first suggested by William Willett, a London builder. Basically, he thought that you could improve the population’s health and happiness by putting the clocks forward by 20 minutes every Sunday in April and then putting them back 20 minutes every Sunday in September. This idea was never introduced, but a ‘Daylight Saving Bill’ was introduced in 1916.
Then in 1968 Britain decided to experiment with advancing time one hour ahead of GMT throughout the year. However, this made the mornings particularly dark throughout most of the year for people living in Scotland so this was abandoned in 1972 in favour of the system of GMT in the winter and BST in the summer that we have today.
Want to know more? Take a look at this site dedicated to Greenwich Meantime or the Wikipedia guide to Daylight Savings
