Back to the Victorians calendar
Imagine it's about 1851. You live near Exeter and are going to catch the train to London. The train leaves at 9.30am. You pull out your pocket watch as you enter the station. It says 9.20am. Good, you think, I've made it. But as you get to the platform you find the train has gone although it did leave on time. How could this happen?
Unfortunately, until 1880, every town or city in England set their own time. Down in Exeter you could be as much as ten minutes behind London time and the trains ran to London time. Obviously as the railways grew this had to change and so, in 1880, Parliament passed the Definition of Time Act. Everywhere in Great Britain would stick to London Time, called GMT or Greenwich Mean Time.
In Bristol, at the Corn Exchange, they had, and still have, a clock with two minute hands. One would show the time in London, also known as railway time, and the other, the black one as you look at it, would show the time in Bristol.
As you know, I hope, the earth is a globe and it turns so that sunset and sunrise are at different times depending where you are. The further west you go, the later the sun sets and rises. On the day I wrote this I checked sunrise and sunset times.
London Sunrise 6.38am Sunset 7.31pm
Land's End Sunrise 7.00am Sunset 7.53pm
Liverpool Sunrise 6.48am Sunset 7.45pm
Forward to 1883AD
