19 November 2015
Dull November
by Chin Chin
November in the Northern Hemisphere can be a fairly depressing season. The nights are drawing in and the chill of winter is beginning to bite. It will soon be Christmas and not only have you failed to buy your presents but you are constantly reminded of the fact by the decorations in every shop window. How you cope with this depends on where you are. If you live in the north of Sweden it is quite simple. You lock yourself away with your bottles of spirits and your copy of Strindberg. After a bit, if you haven’t committed suicide by then, you lose interest in literature and sit dreaming of the sort of perversions which we know to be commonplace from reading books like “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. We English handle it differently. November is the start of winter and winter is the season of tax returns. Better get going if you want to avoid the fine for missing the end of January deadline.
Actually you have missed one deadline already. If the return is to be submitted in physical form, it had to be in by the end of October. If you haven’t done it now, you’re going to have to run the gauntlet of electronic filing – a process protected by the Revenue’s sinister system of gateways. It is a shame really because it spoils the atmosphere. Income tax dates back to the days of Pitt the Younger and there were other taxes before that. Filling in a long brown form gives a warm feeling of continuity with the past. Never mind, there is plenty of history in the system to be going on with, beginning with the date on which the fiscal year ends.
April 5th may seem an odd choice and you might be excused for wondering how they came up with it. Was it the birthday of a king perhaps? Did representatives of Parliament bow their way into his bedchamber with plates of gold and say, “your present my liege.” No, that doesn’t sound like English constitutional history and indeed it is not. Actually it is all the fault of Julius Caesar.
Before Julius Caesar, the calendar was a terrible mess. Rome had a sort of committee to work out what adjustments should be made to keep in line with the solar year. It was rather like the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, I suppose. As you can imagine they were all over the place and Caesar, a fine administrator as well as a fine general, decided that something had to be done about it. There was only one chap who was up to the job and that was Sosogenes, an astronomer living in Alexandria. He came up with the Julian calendar, the name no doubt a neat piece of marketing by his PR people, and that continued to be used in England until 1750.
Good try though the Julian calendar was, Sosogenes did not have an electronic clock and so, understandably, he got it very slightly wrong. Nowadays we adjust the leap year system by not having one at the end of the century (unless it is also a change of millennium) but Sosogenes knew nothing about that. By 1750 things were eleven days out and Easter, then celebrated on 21 March, was getting further and further away from the equinox.
Clearly that would never do and the answer was to swallow our prejudices and switch to the Gregorian calendar which had been introduced by Pope Gregory XIII and was then used throughout most of Europe. Actually, that involved two changes. The first was that the start of the year moved from Lady Day, the 25th March, to I January. They did that by running 1751 as a short year beginning on 25 March but ending at the end of December, so, if you see a document dated 1 February 1751, you will know that it is a fake. That aligned the year end but did not deal with the eleven days.
To sort that they left out eleven days of 1752 so that 2 September was followed by 14 September. Again you should be suspicious of any document dated 10 September 1752 but people at the time had a greater concern. To fit in with some nasty European system (thank goodness this sort of prejudice has now disappeared) they were being done out of eleven days of their lives. It was nonsense of course but others had a more serious worry. The tax year had always ended with the Julian year on 24 March. If eleven days were left out, the tax year ending on 24 March 1752 would be 11 days shorter. To avoid that, the end of the tax year was moved to 4 April.
There remained one further adjustment to make. 1800 would have been a leap year under the Julian calendar but not under the Gregorian one so the change had resulted in a further day being lost. To compensate, the end of the tax year was moved another day to 5 April.
At this point you might think two things. The first is that there should have been another adjustment in 1900. That seems right but perhaps they’d all lost interest in the topic. The second is that it all seems very complicated. If you really think that you haven’t tried to input the data into the tax return which is waiting on your computer.
