29/10/2021
For all of our followers in the UK and those currently using British Summer Time (Daylight Saving Time), a reminder that the clocks go back one hour this weekend, for those of you that want to be precise the change occurs at 02:00 Sunday 31 October, so it's an extra hour in bed!! just as well as the weather looks terrible.
How about some historic facts about the clocks changing:
It was Benjamin Franklin - an inventor, philosopher and American political heavyweight - first proposed the idea in a letter he wrote when in Paris in 1784. In it he joked that Parisians should be roused from their slumbers an hour earlier by ringing church bells and firing cannons in the street.
So, we’ve been using it since the 1700s? Well… no. The idea didn’t actually resurface until 1895, when New Zealand scientist George Vernon Hudson proposed to his government that the clocks should go forward by two hours every summer. He wasn’t successful.
The idea really took off when a builder called William Willett (who just so happens to be the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay frontman Chris Martin) campaigned in Britain to change the clocks. It’s thought he was annoyed that his golfing would be interrupted by the sun going down, so he wanted to change the law to make sure there would be more light in the evening. Like his forebears he also failed, but he campaigned for the clocks to change until he died of influenza in March 1915.
In the spring of 1916, during World War One, the German army turned the clocks forward as a way of conserving energy. Many (but not all) European governments followed suit shortly afterwards - including the UK