Daylight Saving Time begins on Sunday, a week before the sun crosses the Tropic of Capricorn on its way to further lighten our darkness. Like income tax, DST was implemented as a First Great War measure, in that case to save the energy required for defence industries. Imperial Germany did it first, in 1916. Britain and North America soon followed suit.

A plan to “interfere with nature”, as many put it, had been suggested during the 1899-1902 South African (Boer) War. The recruitment of soldiers had revealed an alarmingly high rejection rate among would-be volunteers because of their physical condition. Pale and overweight urban workers portended a national emergency. Conflict in Europe was already foreseen.

In 1904 a British parliamentary Select Committee on Physical Deterioration resulted in a Shop Hours Act, the Early Shop Closing movement and a Summer Time proposal. All were designed to allow people exercise and recreation time out of doors at the end of the work day.

As long ago as 1784, Benjamin Franklin had suggested in Paris an idea for lessening the need for candles and oil lamps. He wrote about the folly of sleeping during the early hours of summer daylight and of working or entertaining on into the shadows and darkness of night.

He did not advocate adjusting clocks; rather, he suggested changing business and social schedules in order to save the cost of artificial lighting.

The apostle of “saving daylight” by changing the clocks was a Londoner, William Willett. In 1907 he began to argue publicly that 210 extra hours of daylight could be enjoyed each year by moving the clock hands forward 80 minutes in the spring and turning them back again in the autumn. That would also result in an annual saving of £2.5 million in lighting fuel, an amount which at the time equalled the annual cost of servicing the national debt.

Daylight Saving Time in Canada used to be in force from the end of March to the end of October. In 2007, following a lead by the U.S. Congress, a threeweek extension was promoted as an energy saver.

When a Bill to Promote the Earlier Use of Daylight in Certain Months was introduced in the U.K. Parliament in 1908 it got a mixed reception. Its advocates spoke of the opportunity for shop clerks to indulge in healthful recreation after work hours. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, among others, enthused that it would “prevent the physical deterioration of the race which is now becoming a problem”.

Northern MPs thought there were already enough summertime daylight hours, especially up in Scotland. Aberdeen, like York Factory MB, is north of the 57th parallel. Letters to The Times complained that ‘Summer Time’ would put morning chores an hour earlier and necessitate the picking and transporting of crops that were still wet with dew. Greater spoilage would result.

Urban interests pointed out that there were other industries in the world than agriculture. Farmers worked by the sun but an increasing number, especially those in factories, worked by the clock. Nonetheless, the Marquess of Lansdowne, both a former Governor General of Canada and Viceroy of India, opined that Greenwich Mean Time, like parliamentary democracy, was fundamental to Britain’s contribution to the world and should not be altered.

Further Summer Time bills were introduced in Britain annually from 1911 to 1914. The Government declined to support them even though it was pointed out that Canada and New Zealand were already at the point of introducing the change. President Taft of the U.S.A. was in favour of it and so was Winston Churchill, president of the British Board of Trade.

Churchill mocked the contention that annual tampering with household and personal timepieces, let alone with the nation’s five thousand public clocks, the Houses of Parliament’s Big Ben included, would ruin their mechanisms. Gas and electricity suppliers, however, argued that their profits and their shareholders’ dividends would suffer.

DST has been most popular in countries in the northern latitudes. Equatorial countries and the State of Hawaii where daylight hours are similar all year round feel no need for it. Alone among major industrial nations, China, Japan and India have so far not opted for it.

As early as 1895, London-born George V. Hudson had suggested a two-hour summertime advance in New Zealand where he had lived since 1883. While that idea was put into practice in the U.K. during the Second Great War, some states in Australia, New Zealand’s sister Commonwealth nation in the southern hemisphere, have never opted for any seasonal change. In Canada legislation about daylight saving(s) is a provincial matter. Only Saskatchewan refuses the annual “spring forward, fall back”. In the U.S.A. the State of Arizona which is in the Mountain Time zone changes (except for the city of Phoenix) to Pacific Daylight Time from March to October.

The late Barbara Frum used to tell those of us who shared a studio with her at the CBC Toronto headquarters – then located directly across Jarvis Street from the old Four Seasons Inn – that, since her work made her the slave of time, she struck a blow for freedom by not wearing a watch.

It is amusing to remember the arguments of those who were convinced that Summer Time would deprive workers of an hour of sleep for half the year and send them off to factory or office servitude an hour sooner each day. And all for the sake of games and/or aerobics for the few! Others said the proposed plan would benefit mainly the well-to-do who had country clubs and automobiles.

William Willett, cited above, is considered to be “the father of Summer/Daylight Time”. There is a memorial to him in a park at Chislehurst, Kent, once his home. His first suggestion was to have clocks changed gradually by being advanced 20 minutes on each of the four Sundays in April and set back by the same amount on the Sundays in September. The bother involved in those eight changes was a chief objection to the idea. The current legislation requires less strain on clocks and those who adjust them.