Today I had a discussion with a friend of mine. He asked me ‘Why do they put the clocks back?’ I in all honesty tried to give him an answer but found my self fumbling around. I just could not give him a straight answer. I said ‘it’s, so its lighter at night.’ he said. ‘no, no its for the farmers and pit workers.

We may disagree but we did agree that we didn’t know the biggest question that surround the changing of the clocks, which is, ‘why?’ You know, why do we have to mess about with the time anyway?

Two weeks ago I was getting up at 06:00am with ease. Now I’m having trouble because in my body it thinks its 05:00am. And I’m staying up later. So I thought I would do a bit of research and find out why we turn the clocks back and forward like we just can’t make up our minds.

The British Summer Time is a period that begins on the last Sunday of March and ends on the last Sunday of October. Its introduction in 1916 was to due to a builder placing the proposal. (I bet you didn’t see that one coming) His name was William Willett and after promoting the time change he sadly missed it, as he died in march 1915. Only missing the change by a single year. His proposal was that the clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes in four incremental steps during April and reversed the same way during September. Nights would remain lighter, increasing recreation time and also saving millions in lighting costs. (Always come down to money.)

We had a few hiccups during world war two when British Double Summer Time came into play and we were 2 hours ahead of GMT. In the 60’s we had a few experiments, even keeping GMT+1 throughout the whole year. This took place between 27 October 1968 and 31 October 1971. By this time it was about accidents on the road. Making the roads lighter when busiest. There has been various reasons why we have changed to a British summer time over the last hundred years. I fear that this maybe be a bit outdated in todays new fast paced, media fueled society.

As it stands today people are trying to get a trial in-place for a set all year round time. Unfortunately it keeps being blocked. It seems that the most favored time would be GMT +1 hr.

These are the reasons why we have british summer time, it also seems the general rule that we keep it all year round. For me I think, well why not. Its not the time that bothers me but the change. I don’t think Mr william Willett would have bothered if he were born in today world.