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Article—"Give us Back our Eleven Days !"
from Oct 1952
by StPetersYork
HOUSE CHESS
This year's competition was won by Temple for the first time since 1945. In the preliminary round Temple beat Rise 3i z and then beat Grove 3-1. In the other semi-final School House unexpectedly beat Manor 3-1. The final resulted in Temple beating School House 5-0. Temple's team was J. C. M. Herring, B. W. H. Carter, E. C. Sedman, C. J. Fox, A. Bloomfield.
An interesting bicentenary fell in the Summer holidays. Two hundred years ago the inhabitants of these islands went to bed on the 2nd September and woke the next morning to be told officially that the date was 14th September. To the untutored mind time has always been an elusive conception, and meddling with traditional methods of recording it is generally resented. The prolonged and stubborn opposition to William Willett's "Daylight Saving" proposals of 1907 is an example from our own time. But while the notion of "putting the clock on" to gain an extra hour of daylight was readily comprehensible, the reasons for the complete removal of eleven days from the lives of the citizens were quite beyond the grasp of the unlettered populace of the mid-eighteenth century. Bewilderment, growing rapidly to violent opposition, was the immediate reaction •to the Act of 1752 adopting in this country the Gregorian calendar prevailing widely on the Continent. The bill, instigated by the astronomer, Lord Macclesfield, and sponsored by the Earl of Chesterfield, also provided for the transference of the beginning of the civil year from 25th March to 1st January, thus shortening the year 1751 by some three months. (Our present financial year is, of course, a survival of the older system.)
The reforms smacked of Popery, and inevitably, too, the hidden hand of Jewry was discerned in the seeming chicanery. Credat Judceus Apella—tell that to the Jews. Since the days of Horace the "superstitions" of Mosaic observance had always been suspect to the western world. The slogans "No Jews !", "No wooden shoes !" provoked the London mob to rioting and violent demands for the return of "our eleven days". Authority sensibly enough preferred to call out the military rather than attempt the sweet reasonableness of an explanation of the comparatively simple astronomical and mathematical facts necessitating the change.
From the dawn of civilization the twin difficulties that the lunar month of 29-i days is not convenient with the solar year, and that the solar year itself is something in excess of 365 days, have always hampered the evolving of a satisfactory civil calendar. Neither the Egyptians nor the Greeks were able to find an answer to the problem, and it was left to Julius Caesar, with the help of the astronomer, 44
