Changing times
Jacqueline Wadsworth recalls the confusion that broke out in Britain when ‘local time’ was replaced by GMT and daylight saving
Agreat deal has been written about the impact railways had on Victorian life in Britain, but one change that affected our ancestors’ lives more intimately than most is rarely mentioned – the fact that time itself had to change.
Before the coming of the railways in the 1840s, Britain’s regions abided by their own ‘ local time’ which was reckoned by the sun. The further west you lived, the later your day started. So Bristol, for example, was just over ten minutes behind London.
Railway time
When train journeys began to link all corners of Britain, timetables needed to be drawn up using one standard time rather than a plethora of local ones. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), a British invention enabling sailors to navigate at sea, was therefore gradually adopted and became known as ‘railway time’.
However, the concept of Greenwich Mean Time was difficult to understand when most people still relied on church bells to tell the time, or sundials scratched onto church walls that had served communities for centuries. Few ventured far from home because travelling any distance was arduous and expensive. Long journeys were made by unreliable stagecoaches, and many timetables stated simply that departure was at ‘dawn’ and arrival at ‘dusk’. It hardly mattered that clocks around Britain did not tick in unison.
Even in towns and cities, time-keeping was fairly basic. Lamplighters would wake householders, perhaps in exchange for a penny, as they went on their rounds extinguishing gas lamps. And the sound of the factory hooter made sure people got to work on time.
But these tried and tested methods were of no use to people who now needed to know
the new, more precise ‘railway time’, and The Times’ letters pages were full of grumbles, complaints and suggestions.
At Aldershot Army Camp in 1855 the nearest public clock was three miles away, prompting one officer to write: “Sir – You would, indeed, do us all a kindness here if you could induce the authorities to allow a morning and evening gun to fire that we might know the time, as we are far away from any town, and the inquiries as to railway time are endless. There is a great gun (an 18-pounder) close to the General’s hut; and surely the expense of the powder can be of little importance, when it will give the correct time to 14,000 men, which is about the number here.”
Another correspondent proposed: “Sir – Much confusion as to the distinction between Greenwich or railway time and local mean time would be avoided, and much instruction diffused, if cheap, popular maps of Great Britain, such as common school maps and those of ‘Bradshaw’ and the various other railway guides; were ruled with meridians at every 1¼ degree from Greenwich, corresponding to five minutes’ difference of time.”
The first rail company to adopt GMT was the Great Western Railway in November 1840. Those catching a train at noon from Temple Meads Station in Bristol had to remember it would pull out at around 11.49am ‘Bristol time’. Other companies were not as quick off the mark. The Liverpool & Manchester Railway did not reset its clocks until 1846; the Caledonian Railway waited until 1847; and it wasn’t until 1848 that the London & South Western abandoned ‘ local time’ in favour of GMT.
The result could be chaotic with stations bristling with irritated passengers who had missed their connections. One indignant traveller wrote to The Times about the bickering between two rail companies which refused to synchronise their times: “I beg to call your attention to the great inconvenience arising to travellers out of the feuds which I hear subsist between the Great Western and Birmingham & Bristol companies.”
The correspondent explained how he had missed a GWR connection at Bristol because it departed five minutes earlier than advertised on the Birmingham & Bristol timetable. ‘It was of little comfort to be told that the Birmingham & Bristol keep Bristol time (though make no announcement of it, but leave the public to find it out for themselves), while the Great Western keep London time,” he fumed, adding drily: “It is of little purpose that we incur the risk of moving at the rate of from 30 to 50 miles an hour if the fruits of our boldness are to be taken from us by such delays.”
Matters were made worse for rail-users by the fact that, even though clocks inside the station may have been set to GMT, public clocks outside often still told the old ‘ local time’. This was particularly common in the South West. “If the large towns such as Bath, Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth were to adopt
Greenwich time, a great source of complaint would be obviated,” wrote The Times in 1852.
Public clocks
Local pride was often to blame for this resistance to GMT, with city fathers keen to protect their traditional time in the face of what were perceived as aggressive rail companies. In Exeter, the Dean of Exeter Cathedral was reluctant to change because the cathedral clock had always been the principal timekeeper for the city. Compromise was eventually reached when some clocks were fitted with two minute hands, one displaying ‘railway time’, the other ‘ local time’.
This happened elsewhere too. In Oxford the great clock on Tom Tower displayed two minute hands, as did the clock at Bristol’s Corn Exchange which can still be seen at St Nicholas Market, with a red hand for ‘railway time’ and a black hand for ‘ local time’.
By 1855, most public clocks in Britain had been standardised, and the stragglers were pulled into line by the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act of 1880 which gave legal status to GMT throughout Great Britain (although the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey and Ireland adopted GMT later).
Over the next few decades, people gradually adjusted to the new standard time which was often proudly displayed on parlour mantelpieces. Thanks to the growth in manufacturing, timepieces could be produced cheaply and in large numbers, and ordinary families were now able to afford clocks for their homes.
Some people sported their own personal timepieces, although social norms had to be observed: wristwatches were worn almost exclusively by women, often as bracelets, while men used pocket watches. It wasn’t until the First World War that wristwatches for soldiers started being produced, with luminous dials and unbreakable glass. The need for precise synchronisation in battle meant an easily accessible watch-face was vital – this was no time for men to be fumbling around in their pockets! The British War Department began issuing watches in 1917.
Daylight saving time
Meanwhile, as the 20th century dawned, another ‘time crusader’ was emerging in Britain with new plans to reset the nation’s clocks. But this time it had nothing to do with the rail companies.
Builder William Willett was a fan of the great outdoors and while out riding his horse in Petts Wood, near his Kent home, one beautiful summer morning, it saddened him to see so many curtains still drawn. So in
1907 he published a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight, which suggested moving the nation’s clocks forward in spring by 20 minutes, to encourage people to make more use of the daylight.
Other benefits were cited too: a reduction in expenditure on lighting, fewer shunting accidents on the railways, and more daylight hours after work for the training of the country’s new Territorial Force.
William had prominent supporters, among them a young Winston Churchill and Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Royalty may also have been cheering him on from the wings, because in 1901 King Edward VII was known to have put the clocks back 30 minutes at Sandringham so he could hunt for longer.
Others dismissed the idea as a ‘utopian dream’ and in 1908 the first attempt to move clocks forward one hour in summer, the Daylight Saving Bill, was rejected by the House of Commons. But the seeds were sown and eight years later, at the height of the First World War, the time was ripe for daylight saving.
In 1916, Britain was running desperately short of coal, which was the chief source of power for the Navy, the railways, and the armaments industry. Not only was Britain now having to supply allies whose coalfields were occupied by the Germans, but labour at the pits was short because miners had volunteered in their thousands for service at the front.
William Willett’s scheme offered longer evenings with less demand for
Wristwatches were worn almost exclusively by women, often as bracelets
coal-powered lighting and on 17 May 1916, Parliament passed the Summer Time Act as a means of saving energy for the war effort. Just a few weeks earlier, Germany had done the same. Sadly, Willett never saw the results of his labour. He died in 1915.
Households duly put their clocks forward an hour on Sunday 21 May, but the lost hour took a bit of getting used to, especially if you had no clock or servant to wake you. In his daily log of 1916, the head of All Saints School at Winterbourne Down, near Bristol, recorded: “Began with ‘new time’ on 22 [May]. Attendance very poor in the morning, but improved in the afternoon.”
Similarly, at the nearby Frenchay National School: “First attendance under Summer Time Act. The attendance in the am was slightly affected by the change.”
By and large, however, the public accepted ‘British summer time’ far more readily than ‘railway time’, perhaps because the war gave them more important things to worry about. One young Weymouth lady, Madge Sneyd-Kynnersley, wrote matter-of-factly in her diary: “Daylight Savings Bill (ie, Summer Time B) began. All clocks put on one hour at 2am to save coal.” And when the clocks went back five months later, it didn’t even warrant a mention. “In bed with cold all day,” was all she reported.
Neither were The Times letters pages filled with grumbles and complaints as they had been about ‘railway time’ the previous century. Tinkering with the time was old news – the people of Britain had seen it all before.