Written by Ailsa Fraser
If you were in Britain yesterday, you participated in the annual spring changing of the clocks. At 01:00, while most people slept, nothing about time changed expect for the way we all agreed to keep it. In winter, Britain runs on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT); now, we have switched to British Summer Time (BST), or Daylight Saving Time (DST). As such, the time displayed on most digital services leapt forward by an hour, to 02:00, and life continued on. There might have been – and probably was – a great deal of confusion as people woke on Sunday morning either later or much more tried than usual, and even more associated complaining. But life continued on.
We have been doing this for over a century.
The reason we struggle to adapt at first to the clocks changing is a straightforward one, if rarely given much thought. Time is measured in different ways, and the twenty-four-hour clock does not map them all. The sun rises and sets in spite of clocks. Our bodies’ circadian rhythms still march to their own drums, until we get them in line. Depending on the stress and intensity of a situation, our brains can consider some time far longer or shorter than when they are measured in seconds, and the length of a day is not static or unchanging. We have been using the broad strokes of our current time regime for millennia – the Sumerians were the first to use twenty-four-hour clocks – with only a few glitches, like the eighteenth-century French revolutionaries’ experiment with a metric system. The measurement of time has always been a tool for control by states. There are records of Roman citizens complaining, after the introduction of a sundial to their town, of their lives being run by it. Such complaints can be found throughout history.
Time regimes have been used by dictators as far afield as Germany and China to unite disparate nations under one government. The clock manages our lives and has done since its invention. As a tool of unification and subjugation, a time regime is an effective and pervasive one; under capitalism it became even more so. The phrase ‘time is money’ was first recorded in 1719, becoming increasingly popular, and it remains common today. Suddenly, time was something we could waste. Both puritans and factory owners condemned the waste of time, for the waste of God’s gift in the former case and for the waste of their own profits in the latter. Until the 1950s in Britain, factory owners would employ ‘knocker-uppers’ to wake their workers in the morning to prevent them lying in, no matter the rhythm of an individual’s body. But of the examples of the time controlling our lives at odds with the natural rhythms of the sun or our bodies, DST is the most obvious – and it attracts fierce competition debate every year. Is it worth the bother? Should we ditch DST and just stay on one time year-round? Why do we even use DST in the first place?
For the same reasons we always have – health and productivity. These reasons are precisely why some argue we should abolish it.
The first person to conceive of DST was George Vernon Hudson, a New Zealand postman. During his work, he observed early in the mornings how often people slept in after the sun had risen in the summer, thus not getting the full benefit of the daylight when it came in. He wrote a paper for the Wellington Philosophical Society suggesting the clocks he shifted forward an hour so the sun would rise later and people would wake with the daylight. No one listened to Hudson, but in 1970 an English businessman, William Willet, wrote a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight arguing much the same thing. He campaigned for it for the rest of his life, and bills to introduce Summer Time were introduced to Parliament several times – in 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912-13, and 1914.
The debate was endless, but always came back to those two key themes of health and productivity. Industrial capitalism and dominant protestant work ethics made these a potent political cocktail. Labour was central to society and its moral code, but people were becoming aware that there were limits to what the human body could perform without rest. The nineteenth century had featured many paternalistic health reforms aimed at the labouring poor, and contemporaries were still concerned with these changes, particularly out of fears of ‘degeneracy’ and the future of the British people. As women working in shops became more socially acceptable, for example, there was concern on the impact such labour and exposure to the public could have on a shopgirl’s health, and on her future children. DST was billed as a preventative medicine, for all the working class. By not using sunlight where it was freely available, people had to waste resources on lighting, as well as restrict themselves in their activities. Those in favour of the bill argued that with an hour more of sunlight in the evenings, people could engage in outdoor activities in the evenings after work, boosting their health through exercise. Similarly, getting up early was associated with good health and work ethic, so DST seemed to encourage such moral behaviour. Through attending to the health of the nation and minimising energy costs, DST promised to improve productivity both directly and through the health of workers.
Opponents to the bill disagreed. Britain had already seen a decades-long campaign to transform timekeeping across the empire to be consistent and omnipotent. But its efficacy had been limited. Even by the First World War, there were scandals that public clocks across London did not necessarily keep the ‘correct’ time. Village clocks would differ from neighbouring villages. Many people still lived their lives as they wanted to, despite the forced changes—and they were not happy about being handed yet another change. Farmers insisted their cows would not recognise the time change and still demand milking at the same time. Workers like bakers, who already rose early, objected to being expected to work in the dark. Members of Parliament who opposed the bills even met the proponents’ arguments like for like. It would in fact be detrimental for health: an extra hour spent on leisure had to come from somewhere in a daily schedule, so workers might lose an hour of sleep or experience disrupted mealtimes. Children would suffer by their mothers being out, rather than attending to their needs. The bill was too much effort for too much damage, with too little gain.
DST was defeated every time it was introduced to Parliament prior to the First World War. But then, during the war, the Germans passed it instead. Having an extra hour of daylight allowed factory workers to work without candles and lights for longer, saving much-needed resources for the war effort. Not wanting to give Germany an advantage, Britain rushed to follow. In May 1916, DST passed into law. It was too late for Willet to witness—he had died of influenza in 1915—but at the end of the day, its benefits to productivity could not be denied. In wartime, that was paramount.
But are we still at war?
By 1918, it had been introduced in several different countries both across and outside of Europe. While its adoption has been a patchy story across the world—even today, North America changes the clocks at a different time to Europe—in Britain it has been constant since the First World War, with a three-year exception. From 1968 to 1971, Britain went on DST year-round, to shift the brunt of the daylight into the evenings rather than the morning. That experiment ended in fury. In Scotland, it meant the sun would not rise until nearly 10:00 in winter, and public irritation saw permanent DST scrapped. But we still use DST every year, without fail. And every year, without fail, people take to the internet to ask: why do we still need it?
There is extensive literature exploring the benefits and drawbacks of continuing to use DST. The research has turned up multiple findings. Our energy habits have changed significantly in the last hundred years, and today, what energy we might save on lighting we expend anyway on heating and air conditioning. Still, the roads are safer with DST. Accidents become 7% more common in the dark, so the brighter evenings reduces risk; likewise, a study in Germany suggested people are far more willing to cycle. However, numerous studies also uncover consequences to health of losing sleep in March and the confusion of the clock changes similarly impacts quality of life. These negative effects are small, but considering a quarter of the world’s population today follows DST, they are widespread. Even worse—the confusion can cause financial markets significant losses for a few days after the switch. The British Sleep Society officially recommends abolishing DST and remaining on GMT year-round, to better align with our body clocks. Notably, all of these findings share a common concern with the politicians who first debated the introduction of DST: an interest in health and productivity.
With the British Sleep Society’s official recommendation, it appears to me the times are changing. Time regimes are never all-encompassing. Even before DST, the British government had failed to fully enforce GMT on people in Britain, let alone across the empire. Meanwhile, DST received constant vitriol from its first proposal. In 2019, the European Union voted to allow from 2021 member states to choose independently whether to observe DST or not. Whether the British government will take the British Sleep Society’s recommendation is unclear, but it remains evident that continued interest in DST is linked to health and productivity, same as ever. Sleep has only become more important to us. And productivity is still the altar at which we worship. But today, we no longer need natural light to work in the same way we used to. If we abolish DST, it will not be because we have abolished the paternalistic approach to public health and productivity that saw it introduced; instead, we moved beyond it. We have become detached from the natural rhythms of the day. When the sun rises or sets no longer matters.
If time is a tool of control, DST is no longer a useful one. Once, it was thought to help our health and productivity, and that was what made it such an attractive prospect, especially during wartime. Now, however, it has a negative impact on both, and our time regime is sufficiently detached from the motions of the sun that its relevance decreases year by year. Britain is a unique case study in that most countries have not had DST constantly for over one hundred years, but even here, its grip will eventually weaken. It has had a long century of dominance. But for DST, time is running out.
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