A Victorian child saw time and seasons differently from those of today. As Robert Louis Stevenson put it: ‘In winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day’.
But soon it would not be so simple. P.G. Wodehouse, a Victorian who lived on well into the modern era, had an eye for the absurd and plainly disliked the meddling with clocks which governments had begun to do during the First World War. He mocked it more than once in his inter-war novels, which are almost free from any other contact with the real world. In ‘Leave it to Psmith,’ he complains:
And in ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ he makes Bertie Wooster complain — during a disastrous attempt at diplomacy with the appalling Madeline Bassett — that sometimes darkness is exactly what you want, but the government will not let you have it. ‘What with all this daylight-saving stuff, we had hit the great open spaces at a moment when twilight had not yet begun to cheese it in favour of the shades of night.’
I bet Wodehouse’s modern readers are puzzled by these references, while his original enthusiasts saw the joke instantly. For us, the incessant fiddling with the clocks by the government is normal, but we do not understand it. For Wodehouse and his generation, it was the other way round. They understood it because it was abnormal.
I am with Plum Wodehouse. The more I think about state-sponsored clock-twiddling, the stranger it becomes. Once it was a fad like Esperanto or Volapuk, pursued by querulous fanatics and about as successful. But the Great War gave plenty of scope for futile gestures, and when the German Empire thrust its clocks forward in April 1916 in pursuit of victory, the faddists saw their chance and panicked our Parliament into following suit. We have been stuck with it ever since, sometimes even enduring double summer time.
Most people have no idea what it is for, and few even know which way the clocks should go in autumn or spring. Some genuinely believe that by pushing the clocks forward, we actually increase the amount of daylight — a belief even Madeline Bassett would have thought far-fetched. I have yet to discover any serious evidence that it saves fuel, makes us work harder or wins wars. After all the Germans, who pioneered it, lost two. These days it is generally defended on the grounds that if it is lighter later we will spend long sun-washed evenings painting landscapes, running energetically or performing Shakespeare, when of course we will either go to the pub, watch TV or play with our phones as usual.
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