David Olusoga’s Hidden Histories
The 3rd September 1752 did not exist. Neither did the 4th or the 5th, or indeed any of the days up to the 13th. In Britain those dates simply didn’t happen.
People went to bed on the night of Wednesday
2 September and woke the next morning to discover it was Thursday 14 September. They were not dreaming and they had not slept for 11 days.
The lost days were the casualties of a new law. Under the Calendar (New Style) Act of 1750, Britain abandoned the old Julian calendar and adopted the ‘new style’ Gregorian calendar.
The Julian calendar had been created during Julius Caesar’s rule as dictator of the Roman republic, and for a millennium and a half had been widely used across western Europe. However, it contained a tiny but critical flaw. It assumed the length of a year to be 365.25 days, whereas really it was slightly shorter at 365.2422 days.
Over the centuries, this tiny discrepancy meant that the dates in the calendar and the timings of the equinoxes increasingly diverged – first by minutes, then by hours and finally by days. This became increasingly problematic, in particular for the church, as Easter was calculated using the date of the spring equinox.
To solve this problem, the 16th-century pope Gregory XIII had issued a new calendar: the Gregorian calendar, named after him. It used a more accurate means of calculating the length of the year, and in 1582, Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, Italy and other Catholic states adopted it. However, a number of Protestant countries, including Britain, rejected it.
Gradually, over the next 200 years, most Protestant nations relented and converted to the Gregorian calendar. But Britain held out, sticking with the Julian calendar. So by 1750, not only was there a discrepancy between the dates on the calendar and the arrival of the equinoxes, there were 11 days’ difference between dates in Europe and those in Britain. This meant, for example, that back in the 16th century, when the gap between the two calendars was just 10 days, the Spanish recorded their armada reaching the Cornish coast on 29 July 1588, but in English sources the armada appears on 19 July. Confusing, to say the least.
The Calendar Act of 1750 was the moment Georgian Britain finally came into alignment with the continent. It also remedied another quirk of the Julian calendar: the date of new year. The Julian year started with the Feast of Annunciation on 25 March, which was the official Christian new year. However, by the 18th century, new year in Britain was commonly being celebrated on 1 January. What this meant was that on the eve of 31 December 1750, for example, when the clocks struck midnight, it remained 1750. The year 1751 did not begin until the end of 24 March. To solve this confusion, the new law determined that 1751, which had begun on 25 March, finished on 31 December and lasted just 282 days, so that 1752 could begin on 1 January. And nine months later, in September, came the calendar nudge that consigned 11 days to history as the people of Britain slept.