Hello GMT: Clocks Go Back Tonight – 27 October 2012

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Clocks go back one hour ‘tonight’.

The Andrew Burdett Blog wishes to remind readers to put their clocks and watches back by one hour tonight.

Good news! Tomorrow (Sunday) is the annual Extra-Hour-in-Bed Day as British Summer Time (BST) comes to an end, and we welcome back Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). But what a summer it’s been: think of the Jubilee, and the Olympics and Paralympics, and my horrible knee – all that’s happened since we last fiddled with that twiddly thing (known as the ‘stem’) on the side of our timepieces.

We end up with the strange paradox whereby the minute following the first 1:59am tomorrow (Sunday, 28 October 2012) morning is 1:00am again.

CHANGING TIMES: Don't forget to put your clock watch BACK tonight. (img_5468)

Why do the clocks change?

The excellent website of Woodlands Junior School in Kent explains:

We’ve been changing our clocks forwards and backwards in the UK since 1916. It’s all to do with saving the hours of daylight, and was started by a man called William Willett, a London builder, who lived in Petts Wood in Kent (near our school).

William Willett first proposed the idea of British Summer Time in 1907 in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Waste of Daylight’. Willett had noticed that the summer mornings’ light was wasted while people slept, and that the time would be better utilised in the afternoon by putting the clocks forward. After campaigning for years the British Government finally adopted the system a year after Willett’s death.


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Andrew Burdett

Andrew Burdett is a twenty-something from Maidenhead in Berkshire, working for ITV News.