02 November 2017
A Matter Of Time
An extra hour in bed.
By Chin Chin
We all know, without perhaps being quite sure why, that time goes at different speeds in different frames of reference. That is one of the more startling conclusions of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. Still, there is nothing in that theory which allows it to go backwards. That only happens in two circumstances: when you cross the international dateline and instantly go back a day, and when the clocks are put back each year in the autumn. As London is a long way from the dateline, most of us will only encounter the second experience.
Last Sunday morning the clocks went back and so, I suppose, we all became an hour younger in theory than we are physically. If we remembered to change our alarms and got up at the usual time, our bodies and minds will have been one hour more jaded than they should have been – although, fortunately, that hour having been spent asleep, the effect may have been set off by greater alertness. Still, for those of us who like to get something for nothing, there is a feeling that somehow we have cheated nature and gained an extra hour to which we were not really entitled. Just as we unfairly lose one when the clocks move back to British Summer Time in the spring.
As it is only one hour a year, by and large we can put up with it without complaint. Imagine though how it must been in 1752 when the Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 came into force and dictated that the day after Wednesday 2 September would be Thursday 14 September, leaving out the eleven days which should have fallen in between. This wasn’t a plot by the government to confuse everyone, but rather an attempt to sort out an inconsistency. Until the 1750 reform we had been working by reference to the Julian calendar which dated from Roman days. Although the calendar was named after Julius Caesar it is unlikely that he himself had time to work on it so presumably it was left to underlings less thorough than the great man himself.
“Well, Gaius” Marcus would have said to his companion. “There seem to be 365 days in the year so all we need to do is to split them up into 12 months and stick names on them. Just give me the list of names and then we can go down to the forum for lunch.” Gaius reached into his pocket and came out with a scruffy tablet on which were scratched some names.
“But Gaius there are twelve months but only eight name here. Look – January, February, March, April, May, June, July, and August. What are we supposed to call the other four?”
“By Jupiter” replied Gaius (who had spent his youth reading the then fashionable adventure stories about Asterix the Gaul), “I would have sworn that there were twelve names this morning. Four of them must have rubbed off. What shall we do? Big Jules wants the job done so we had better just give some of the month numbers. What about September for the seventh month, October for the eighth month, November for the ninth month and December for the tenth month?”
“Brilliant” said Marcus, slightly inaccurately, and off they went to eat their lunch.
Forward now to the sixteenth century, where the Pope, Gregory VIII, was a very worried man. The most important festival of the year was Easter and people had begun to notice that it was drifting about a bit. In particular its traditional date of twenty-first March was moving steadily away from the spring equinox. To have the anchor point of the Christian year moving around was enough to make a pope queasy, and Gregory must have felt a little like the captain of a ship whose cargo had not been properly secured. What to do? Ask his astronomers. of course; no doubt to his complete amazement, rather than finding ways of covering their ignorance, they actually came up with the answer. The year was not 365 days after all, and to get it right a system of leap years had to be introduced. France, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain adopted the new system at once but Britain, then as now chary of academic theory, stuck with the old rules on the basis that it would be all right in the end. But it wasn’t. Gradually the two systems moved further and further apart, everyone got more and more confused and the diaries of those who went on the Grand Tour became cluttered with complicated calculations. Something had to give and, since the Gregorian calendar gave the right length for the solar year, it was Britain which had to move and not its continental neighbours.
The first change needed to synchronise the systems was to move the year-end. December was to become the last (rather than the tenth) month, January becoming the first. That is why our year ends with a month whose name is clearly based on the number ten but actually comes in at number 12.
That, however, was not enough. The days themselves were different and the fact that we had less of them to our year meant that we were now 11 days behind. How to catch up? Drop eleven days was the obvious answer but it was an answer that was difficult to explain to the less educated. The result was riots. “Give us back our eleven days” roared the mob. One would like to think that they were assuaged by gentle explanation but in the eighteenth century the explanation probably took the form of force. How different things were then! Still, one thing was saved from the wreckage. Moving the calendar forward 11 days meant that the tax year would end 11 days earlier. That would never do as it would have affected the rich and powerful. The answer? To move the tax year end back a corresponding 11 days. As the tax year had formerly ended on 25 March (Lady Day) it would now end on 5 April, and so it has ever since.
Is unlikely that we will ever get eleven days out of kilter again, but is quite possible for things to go wrong by smaller amounts. The Russian railways, for obvious reasons, run on Moscow time. Otherwise there would be chaos. If you travel on the trans-Siberian, however, you cross a time zone almost once a day and meals on the train are served by reference to local time. It’s obvious when you think about it, but for the first couple of days you don’t think about it at all. Once upon a time it cost me my dinner.
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