Simon's Blog - British Summer Time

So less than a week after spring has officialy sprung and we suddenly find ourselves in British Summer Time.

Of course this is nothing to do with the seasonal situation, it's the annual clock change that takes us into Daylight Saving Time.

So to get you in the mood for a fiddly situation with the one on your oven or in your car, I've been up the iconic Cvic Centre Clock Tower in Southampton to meet Andy Skinner of the SeaCity Museum.

So how did we end up with British Summer Time?

Well, it was first seriously proposed in 1907 by a man from Surrey, William Willett, who was a builder by trade and a keen horse rider in his spare time. He realised that there was a huge waste of useful daylight first thing in the morning for about half of the year. His idea was to advance the clocks by 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in March and then knock them back off again on the ones in October. And he reckoned that this would save around £2.5m in lighting costs.

In 1908 the Daylight Saving Bill was proposed in the House of Commons by the MP Robert Pearce but was defeated on the grounds that it would disrupt trade with other nations, keep children up late and also cause problems for farmers.

However in a bid to conserve energy in World War 1, Germany adopted daylight saving time in April 1916 and we followed suit a couple of weeks later.

So happy 100th Birthday British Summer Time.