Summer Time To-Morrow

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 194, 5 November 1927, Page 8

Summer Time To-Morrow

CLOCKS ADVANCE ONE HOUR No Change in Community Routine TAKE the clock ill the left hand, and with the right advance the hands one hour. This exercise to be completed betore So'runs the popular injunction tor to-night, the et e o summer time. While the country slumbers the oftioial turn - pieces of the Dominion will be put forward one hour, ana those who omit to follow suit will wake into an atmosp of confusion.

r introduce Summer Time in the home is obviously a simple enough performance, involving only the advancement of the family clock, though those who value their eight hours of sleep will need, in addition, to retire an hour earlier, so that the balance of their slumbers will not be upset. This is all simple, yet some people are still fogged and perplexed about Summer Time, and hardly know whether the clock goes forward, back, or is discarded altogether. They have no occasion for bewilderment. Beyond altering his household

clock, the ordinary citizen incurs no responsibilities through the change. His daily routine will still be governed by the old, familiar timetable, and schools, trains, ferries and trams will work to the accustomed schedule. Theatres alone, in the city, have been affected. Realising that people will stay longer on the tennis courts and bowling greens, and that they will dine correspondingly later, the theatre managements have decided not to start their evening sessions until 8.30 p.m. If it was carried further, this would tend to defeat the object of Summer Time by keeping people out later at night, but the actual half-hour postponement is nothing more than a concession to the community's convenience, and is hardly likely to interfere with its hours of rest.

Of the important community clocks in Auckland, the instruments belonging to the New Zealand Insurance Company and Wkitcombe and lombs. and those in the library tow er ana post office lobbies, will be altered precisely at two o’clock to-morrow morning. The Town Hall clock will be moved forward as soon as its chime of two has pealed across the sleeping city, and in all Government departments where officers are on duty the clocks are to be altered with meticulous care. There arises the grim possibility that a man could start a long-distance telephone call at one minute to two o’clock, finish it two minutes later, and be charged for a conversation of 62 minutes’ duration. To guard against this the forbidden practice of adjusting the automatic calculagraphs has to be condoned, on this occasion. by the Post and Telegraph Department, and in the instructions issued to cover the occasion it is noted that all checking cards must be “suitably enfaced.” RURAL EXCEPTIONS Though the city will without exception work to Summer Time, in the country there are isolated instances in which standard time will be observed. Owing to the effect of dew on crops and on the wool of sheep, shearers and harvesters will work to standard time. Many farmers still resent the change, and intend to carry on as at present. At least one county council, and a few farmers’ unions, will through this prejudice adhere to standard time. Opposition to the daylight saving has always been most pronounced from rural interests. It was so when William Willett, a Chelsea, England, builder, pioneered Summer Time propaganda back in 1907, and actually won its approval of the principle from a special Parliamentary Committee. Not until 2 a.m. on May 21, 1916, was the measure actually introduced, and then only as a war-time measure, which Germany had already adopted a few days before. England persevered with Summer Time every year, and in 1925 accepted it as a permanent institution. Meanwhile Messrs. G. V. Hudson and T. K. Sidey had been unsuccessfully advocating the principle in New Zealand, where its merits had for thirty years been recognised by bushmen and other worthy toilers. By accepting Summer Time, New Zealand steps into line with nearly all the Continental nations, though elsewhere the system is not unanimously approved. The United States repealed its Daylight Saving Act in 1919, and Canada has only a patchwork arrangement, under which the Canadian Pacific Railway, the country’s most powerful organisation, runs strictly to standard time.