So when do we turn the clocks back?

By Cameron Macphail

In October in the UK summertime officially ends and the clocks go back, making mornings slightly lighter and evenings darker.

The time changes on October 25 at 2:00 am which means you'll have a shorter night out if you're out clubbing until the wee hours but an extra hour in bed on Sunday morning if you like to be sensible. To remember which way to set your watch, there's a useful (albeit slightly American) mnemonic: “spring forward, fall back”.

In 1907, a Englishman called William Willett introduced the idea of British Summer Time, also known as Daylight Saving Time in order to prevent people from wasting valuable hours of light during summer mornings.

He published a pamphlet called 'The Waste of Daylight' in a bid to get people out of bed earlier by changing the nation’s clocks. He proposed that the clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes in four incremental steps during April and reversed the same way during September.

Willett then spent the rest of his life trying to convince people his scheme was a good one.

Sadly, he died of influenza in 1915 at the age of 58; a year before the Germans adopted his clock-changing plan on April 30, 1916 when the clocks were set forward at 11 pm. Britain followed suit a month later on May 21.

By then Britain and Germany had been fighting each other in the First World War (1914-18), and a system that could take pressure off the economy was worth trying.

The Summer Time Act of 1916 was quickly passed by Parliament and the first day of British Summer Time, 21 May 1916, was widely reported in the press.

Back then the hands on many of the clocks could not be turned back without breaking the mechanism. Instead, owners had to put the clock forward by 11 hours when Summer Time came to an end. The Home Office put out special posters telling people how to reset their clocks to GMT, and national newspapers also gave advice.

Supporters for the proposal argued that such a scheme could reduce domestic coal consumption and increase the supplies available for manufacturing and the war effort during the First World War.

The idea was not a new one, however. In 1895 an entomologist in New Zealand, George Vernon Hudson, came up with the idea to the Wellington Philosophical Society outlining a daylight saving scheme which was trialled successfully in the country in 1927.

Willett, who died at his home near near Bromley in Surrey, is commemorated for his efforts by a memorial sundial in nearby Petts Wood, set permanently to Daylight Saving Time.

The Daylight Inn in Petts Wood is named in his honour and there's a road there called Willett Way.

Willett is a great-great-grandfather of Coldplay singer Chris Martin. This is Coldplay performing the song 'Clocks' from their 2002 album 'A Rush of Blood to the Head'. (There's also a song called 'Daylight' on there.) Coincidence?

Today clocks are almost always set one hour back or ahead, but throughout history there have been several variations, like half adjustment (30 minutes) or double adjustment (two hours), and adjustments of 20 and 40 minutes have also been used. A two-hour adjustment was used in several countries during the 1940s and elsewhere at times.

A half adjustment was sometimes used in New Zealand in the first half of the 20th century. Australia's Lord Howe Island (UTC+10:30) follows a DST schedule in which clocks are moved 30 minutes forward to UTC+11, which is Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) during DST.

An undated photograph shows the World Heritage protected Lord Howe Island with Ned's Beach in foreground and Mount Lidgbird and Mount Gower behind

In 1940 during the Second World War, the clocks in Britain were not put back by an hour at the end of Summer Time. In subsequent years, clocks continued to be advanced by one hour each spring and put back by an hour each autumn until July 1945. During these summers, therefore, Britain was two hours ahead of GMT and operating on British Double Summer Time (BDST).

The clocks were brought back in line with GMT at the end of summer in 1945. In 1947, due to severe fuel shortages, clocks were advanced by one hour on two occasions during the spring, and put back by one hour on two occasions during the autumn, meaning that Britain was back on BDST during that summer.

There have been various trials over the decades from double summer time (GMT + 2 hours) during the Second World War to permanent British Summer Time (GMT + 1 hour) during the late 1960s but the current system of changing the clocks at the end of March and October has been in place since 1972.

Those in favour say that it would reduce traffic accidents, save energy, boost tourism and encourage more people to exercise outdoors. In the 1980s, the golf industry estimated that one extra month of daylight savings could generate up to $400 million (£246.6 million) a year in extra sales and fees.

Daylight Savings Time “affects everything from Mid-East terrorism to the attendance at London music halls, voter turnout to street crime, gardening to the profits of radio stations,” said David Prerau, author of Saving the Daylight: Why We Put the Clocks Forward.

This debate stretches years into the past, and the future of British time is still unclear.

Those against the change say its not clear if any energy savings are made while there are also potential health risks.

Critics claim that the darker mornings are dangerous for children walking to school and the energy saving argument may be invalid if people switch on fans and air-conditioning units during the lighter, warmer evenings. (But this is unlikely to bother people in the UK.)

In 2011, Conservative MP Rebecca Harris floated a bill calling for year-round daylight savings but it failed to complete its passage through Parliament before the end of the session and was dropped.

A YouGov poll that same year found that 53pc of Britons supported moving clocks forward an hour permanently while 32pc opposed the change. The proposals were met less warmly by the Scottish population; Alex Salmond called the campaign an attempt to “plunge Scotland into morning darkness" and his SNP colleague MP Angus MacNeil said any change would have "massive implications for the safety and wellbeing of everyone living north of Manchester".

"It is no secret that Tories in the south want to leave Scotland in darkness, but fixing the clocks to British summertime would mean that dawn wouldn't break in Scotland until nearly 9am," he said.

He had a point. Following a 1968 to 1971 trial, when BST was employed all year round northern Scotland saw a net increase in the number of people killed or seriously injured.

The sun wouldn’t rise until 10am in parts of Scotland and the country’s 1,000-or-so dairy farmers, who wake up before 5am, would have to work for hours in the dark. Other farmers and construction workers, who need sunlight to perform their jobs, would end up having to work later into the evening.

Some folks keen to reach a compromise have suggeested the clocks change at Hadrian's Wall and not at Calais.

Philip Broom writing on the National Farmer's Union website in 2011 said: "A definite no. Combining will not start until midday and then have to go on until 11 o’clock. Our day is long enough now."

'A Thomas', also writing on the NFU site, was worried that "younger people having loud parties or barbecues in gardens and youths hanging around on streets would make it a nightmare for people getting up for work early mornings."

In the UK the clocks will go forward again at 1am on Sunday, March 27, 2016.

EU countries which synchronise their DST include the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Bulgaria as well as most other European countries – including Norway and Switzerland. A few European countries don't use DST at all: Russia, Iceland, Georgia, Armenia and Belarus.

Many countries in the Northern Hemisphere (north of the equator) observe DST, but not all.

In the Southern Hemisphere (south of the equator) the participating countries start DST between September and November and end between March and April./Agencies