Is It That Time Again?

Unless Peter Hitchens wanted British Summer Time all year, or even BST+1 for more than half of it, then he needs to drop the whole matter. If this debate ever really did begin in earnest, then the proponents of that would win. The Britain last seen in my 1980s childhood, of tea at five and of grown adults routinely in bed by nine or even eight, is a thing of the past. For the sake of the people for whom he spoke on so many other issues, and indeed on this one, Hitchens needs to let it go.

One of those issues is the glory of the railways, and it is only because of those that the United Kingdom is a single time zone at all. Railway timetables necessitated that, so in 1847 the Railway Clearing House adopted Greenwich Mean Time, known thereafter as "railway time". But it did not become the legal time throughout Great Britain until 1880, or anywhere in Ireland until as late as 1916. After all, it is not dawn, or noon, or dusk, at the same time throughout these Islands. But the variation is sufficiently slight as to allow for, say, one hour's deviation in the months when most people would wish for the hours to be that little bit lighter between clocking off and turning in.

There is something similar about Hitchens's other hobbyhorse. Long ago, I was taught that a gentleman drank champagne by the pint. The only Briton ever to have been President of the European Commission was later known for taking a pint of claret to his desk in the House of Lords to get him through the afternoon. But it turned out in 2023 that only 1.3 per cent of people wanted any extended use of the imperial system, with a mere 0.4 per cent wanting to revert to it exclusively.

The peculiarly British compromise between the metric and the imperial systems is the most lasting monument to this country's bitterest culture war in living memory, the one between scientists and humanities graduates in the 30 or 40 years after the Second World War. The question of turning away from the Old Empire and towards Europe was secondary. Much of the Old Empire was going metric at the time, and almost all of it has now done so. Rather, this was and is about whether the weights and measures used in everyday life, and taught in schools, should be the ones used in science, or the ones named in Shakespeare.

Only named, of course. The imperial system dates only from 1824, making it barely 200 years old. Far from being Arthurian, it suppressed numerous customary weights and measures across these Islands and the Empire, replacing them with ones that often bore the same names, as certain customary units on the Continent still have names such as livre, but which had most definitely been devised by a committee. Scottish pints and gallons were more than halved.

Britain joined the EU in 1973. New Zealand has had only metric road signs, which there has never been any serious suggestion that Britain might adopt, since 1972. Was that the work of the EU? Although New Zealanders still sometimes give their height in feet and inches, and by convention announce their children's birth weights in pounds and ounces, they have, again since 1972, measured even milk in the metric system, unlike the practice in Britain.

By 1973, all schools in Australia were teaching only the metric system. Was that the work of the EU, too? All road signs there converted to metric in July 1974, and all cars made after that year have had only metric speedometers. Australians now rarely even convert their babies' birth weights into pounds and ounces, and such units are employed for trading purposes only when exporting to the United States. 

Where there is residual use of imperial units in casual conversation in Australia, then it tends to be attributed to the cultural transmission of American English. But the reason why the American system is different, despite using much of the same vocabulary, is because it is older. Nor does it ring true that the United States went to the Moon using non-metric units. If, for the sake of argument, that were the case, then it was more than 50 years ago. There is no way that the Americans are doing anything remotely comparable in anything other than the metric system today, even if they were doing so in the 1960s, which itself strikes me as highly unlikely.

Corresponding to the lazy assumption that the imperial system is ancient is the lazy assumption that the metric system is foreign. Unlike, I believe that it is correct to say, any part of the imperial system, the metric system was invented by an Englishman. It has a very long history in this country, having been devised by John Wilkins, who managed to be both a brother-in-law of Oliver Cromwell and later a bishop in the Church of England. It is not a product of the French Revolution. The first attempt to mandate it in Britain was made in 1818, six years before the imperial system existed. Britain legalised the use of the metric system in 1875. Numerous industries have used nothing else in a very long time, if ever. Even leaving aside how long ago Imperial Britain's industrial zenith was, the bald claim that that was achieved entirely by the application of the imperial system does not stand up to the slightest analysis.

Why not teach both systems? Have you ever met British scientists and my lot, British humanities graduates? In any case, who could possibly teach the imperial system these days? But at popular level, a remarkably enduring compromise has taken hold. Britain is the only country in the world where the use of two completely different systems of weights and measures, but with only one of them taught in schools, could result in anything other than total collapse. We should cherish the fact that in ordinary conversation everyone gave their height and weight in imperial measures when only the metric system had been taught in schools since before most people had been born.

The only problem is the legal ban on selling certain items in imperial measures by name, a piece of domestic legislation enacted by a Conservative Government. By all means let that ban be repealed. In practice, that repeal would change almost nothing. Corporate retail giants would have absolutely no intention of adopting the imperial system, but small traders should be free to use it if customers wanted it. At a significant markup, I expect. Almost no one under 60 would ask for imperial, since almost no one under 60 would ever have been taught it, but let those who wanted it have it. If they could afford it.

I hate to advocate for the other side, but Britain is in fact rather good at science. Yet imagine that the imperial system really were to be reincorporated into school Maths. Would you fail if you could not do it? That would be most people these days, deprived of the Maths certificate necessary to progress to further scientific education, for want of competence in a system that was not used for such purposes anywhere in the world. If you could find anyone to do so, then by all means teach it. But even those of us who probably quoted Shakespeare in our sleep ought not to wish to make anything else conditional on it. It is not as if it is anything important like Classics.

Have you ever had any trouble buying a pint of beer? Good luck to any licensed premises that sought to revert to the old measures of spirits, since those were shorter. The never threatened pint of milk or beer will always be readily available in the Irish Republic, which will never leave the EU, and which may well adopt Central European Time, as Northern Ireland would certainly do in that event. Our own and so many other traditional weights and measures survive for the sale of bread or beer all across Europe because they are perfectly adequate, and even ideal, for the sale of bread or beer. But they are at least arguably too imprecise for anything much more than that, and an international scientific and technological culture could not function without a universally accepted system of weights and measures. And so on.