Stroud Time
It’s a funny thing, Time, isn’t it, when you stop to think about it. And I’m not talking Einstein. Just that we measure it in so many different ways: watch, clock, phone, analogue, digital, sun, moon, religion, the seasons, calendar, years, decades, eras, aeons … and yet it all seems so straightforward.
But do you remember 1752 when we switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and lost 11 days? The day after September 3 was September 14: ‘Give us back our eleven days’ became the cry with the fear of loss of wages and reported riots in Bristol. Imagine losing 11 days …
And in that age before industrialisation and the capitalist adage that ‘Time is Money’, there was a tradition of ‘St Monday’, when handloom weavers, for example, would take the day off if they were on top of their work. But the development of the factory system with attendant clock and hooter and clocking-in and clocking-out literally put paid to that. But it wasn’t until the railways developed that time became nationally uniform.
The definition of time according to the sun meant that noon at Stroud, for example, was nine minutes later than noon at Greenwich (Stroud being ninety miles west of the meridian). But time carried on much as it had done before for the first twenty years or so of railways in this country, despite the confusion this could cause with the railways growing so rapidly (from 25 miles of line in 1825 to over 2,000 in 1844; that doubled in four years and nearly trebled by 1851). For example, just as gauges varied at Gloucester, so did time: three clocks gave different times: the Birmingham & Gloucester Railway operated on Birmingham time; the Bristol & Gloucester Railway went for Bristol time, whilst the GWR ran on London time. What price, Bradshaw?
The GWR had adopted London time throughout its railway in November 1840 and five years later came Greenwich Mean Time: Railway Time. But there was some idiosyncratic stubbornness hither and thither – some town clocks in the west country had two different minute hands so as to indicate both local and London time. Stroud was particularly obdurate, ‘being among the last 2% of towns to alter its public clocks’.
But help was at hand: a clock set up in 1858 at the top of Gloucester Street, with GMT (You can see it at the Museum in the Park in Stroud). A clock, showing GMT, had been in town since 1845, but it was not a truth universally acknowledged: insouciant canal horses, bargees and officials weren’t alone …