Sorry, What? Chris Martin’s Relative Invented Daylight Savings Time

Remember those people who (rather controversially) accused Lola Young of being a “nepo baby” because her aunt wrote The Gruffalo?

I wonder what they’d think about Chris Martin, whose great-great-grandfather was responsible for British Summer Time (BST) taking off in the UK.

Yup – it turns out the band member, who sings a song called Clocks, is a direct descendant of builder William Willett. And Willett is a big part of the reason your clocks change on the last Sunday of every March.

He was a builder from Kent.

And one day, when he was out and about in the summer, he noticed that some curtains were drawn even though it was light outside.

This struck the apparently very industrious Will as an enormous waste of time, energy, and working hours.

In fact, he was so annoyed by it that he self-funded a pamphlet called The Waste Of Daylight.

“For nearly half the year the sun shines for several hours each day, while we are asleep, and is rapidly nearing the horizon when we reach home after the work of the day is over. There then remains only a brief spell of declining daylight in which to spend the short period of leisure at our disposal…

The brief period of daylight, now at our disposal, between the hours of work and sleep, is frequently insufficient for mostforms of recreation, but the daily addition of an hour after 6 o’clock in the evening, would multiply several times, the usefulness of that which we already have, and the benefits afforded by parks and open
spaces would be doubled.”

So tireless was Willett’s campaign that it eventually caught the ear of MP Robert Pearce, who brought the idea of British Summer Time before the House of Commons in 1908.

But it wouldn’t come into place until almost a decade later.

Germany adopted daylight savings in 1916, so we took it on weeks later.

And even though Benjamin Franklin first called for something similar in the 1700s, America took on daylight savings time in 1918, the first March after it joined the First World War.

Both the UK and the US followed something called “double summer time,” occasionally nicknamed “Churchill time,” during the Second World War, too.

Since 2007, though, the US daylight saving time (DST) has begun weeks before BST.