Hello all -
Happy Sunday!
If you had lived in Great Britain 272 years ago tomorrow, in September 1752, you would have gone to bed on the 2nd and woken up on the 14th. Eleven days would have disappeared, never to be retrieved. How come?
Well, let’s step back and look at how everyday folk arranged the yearly cycle back in the Middle Ages, say around 500 CE.
The year divided into Quarter Days, named after Christian festivals, to make them easy to remember.
Lady Day: (Feast of the Annunciation), 25 March; New Year’s Day. Night and day were balanced, marking the beginning of the agricultural year. It was time for farmers to get planting.
Midsummer Day: (Feast of St. John the Baptist), 24 June; falling near the summer solstice, the longest day. A time for festivals, celebrating nature, fertility and community.
Michaelmas: (Feast of St. Michael and All Angels), 29 September; a celebration of the end of the harvest season and the beginning of autumn.
Christmas: (Feast of the Nativity), 25 December; the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus. It’s all about the family, gifts and feasting for the winter.
This natural view of the annual cycle sat well with the calendar mechanism of the day, the Julian Calendar.
Introduced by Julius Caesar in 49 BCE, the Julian calendar followed the solar cycle, aligning with the Earth’s rotation around the sun. It assumed a year was 365.25 days long.
This was an improvement on the previous Roman calendar, based on lunar cycles, which aligned with the Moon’s rotation about the Earth. The Roman calendar encouraged higgledy-piggledy theories regarding the length of a year and needed regular tweaking.
The Julian calendar kept the twelve dividers, the months, to track the lunar cycle, more or less. You may remember from school learning that the months were named after Roman Gods and significant figures, so January/Janus, March/Mars, May/Maia, not forgetting July, which Caesar named in honour of……. himself.
A day was added to each four-year cycle to make sense of the extra 0.25 days; the leap year was established. February received the extra day not as the shortest month but because, at the time, it was the last month of the year.
Fast-forward to 2 September 1752; the Gregorian calendar was adopted (named after Pope Gregory XIII). This allowed Britain to fall in step with most of Western Europe, which had converted back in 1582.
The Gregorian calendar calculated the solar year to be 365.2425 days. This greater precision meant less tampering was necessary.
There was a slight problem. Adhering to the Julian calendar meant losing 11 minutes each year to those countries that had already adopted the Gregorian calendar. By 1752, Great Britain was 11 days behind Western Europe.
The solution… simply remove 11 days from the calendar. The 3rd of September 1752 became the 14th of September 1752. Job done.
Some folk thought that their lives had been truncated by 11 days. Apart from that misunderstanding and minor readjustments for Quarter Days, the changeover went smoothly. Today, the Gregorian calendar is the calendar of choice for most countries worldwide.
In the UK, the 5th of April marks the end of the tax year. On this day, individuals and corporations calculate the amount of tax due to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs.
This date may seem a little random… until you remember that the old New Year’s Day was 25 March.
The Inland Revenue, as HMRC was then known, didn’t want to lose their 11 days of tax receipts. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted, they moved the tax year-end date back 11 days to…… 4th April.
In 1800, another one-day leap year adjustment was applied and, hey presto, 5th April is now the last day of the UK tax year.
*I have used BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) instead of the more traditional BC and AD.
Podcast episode... a look back
Episode 48. Alex’s Wish for Duchenne
Saturday, 7 September, is World Duchenne Awareness Day. Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is a life-limiting and aggressive form of progressive muscle weakness, mainly appearing in boys.
Recently, I was lucky enough to talk to Emma Hallam, whose son, Alex, has Duchenne. Despite the seriousness of the prognosis, the episode was filled with Emma’s positivity in tackling Duchenne head-on. She founded Alex’s Wish, a charity that raises money to fund research to ultimately defeat Duchenne. Emma is high-energy, ambitious for the cause and unstoppable.
Although the episode may still be fresh in your memory, I hope you get another chance to listen. Also, head over to the show notes page to see how you might be able to support Alex’s Wish.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music or just about any other podcast player of your choice. Check out the show notes for the links and transcript to learn more.
My favourite quotes from the episode...
Our strap line is 'Cure Duchenne'. That's our ultimate aim… to cure this devastating condition for every single child.
This generation of boys will either be the last to die of Duchenne or the first to survive.
We should never take our lives for granted. What is in our control is we can live today the best day, because no tomorrow is guaranteed for anybody.
When life gives you lemons, you make lemon meringue pie.
By the way...
Happy birthday to our Prime Minister Keir Starmer for tomorrow.
But it was the birthday of two Americans who came to my attention this week. Tracy Smothers was born on 2 September 1962, and Anthony Weiner on 4 September 1964. There’s no reason why you should have heard of either of them.
Even if you had, you’d have noticed very little in common… unless you were versed in the world of aptronyms.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an aptronym is “a person’s name that matches their job or one of their main characteristics”.
You see, Anthony Weiner (pronounced 'weener') was a former New York congressman who was exposed, on more than one occasion, for sending sexually explicit photos to unsuspecting women.
Forced to resign from politics, and after doing porridge for a couple of years for his misdemeanours, Weiner became a host on WABC radio in New York and CEO of the company IceStone.
The problem is, once an aptronym… always an aptronym.
Oh, and as for Tracy Smothers... he was a professional wrestler.
Dates with History
Tomorrow...
This is the week to remember the Great Fire of London, 2 - 5 September 1666. The fire started in Pudding Lane, in the area we call today the City of London.
The primary building construction material of the day was wood, and soon the fire was uncontrollable. A spark from the oven in Thomas Farynor’s bakery ignited some firewood, and the rest really was history.
Over 10,000 homes were destroyed, as were numerous shops and churches, including the original St Paul’s Cathedral at the top of Ludgate Hill. Despite the devastation, there were only six recorded deaths.
The fire was extinguished with the help of gunpowder to demolish huge swathes of buildings to create fire breaks.
King Charles II ordered the rebuilding of London, not surprisingly, from stone and brick. The architect Sir Christopher Wren is remembered for much of this rebuilding, including the St Paul’s Cathedral that stands today.
The Monument was built to commemorate the 1666 Great Fire of London. It stands close to London Bridge and even closer to the original source of the fire. The Monument is 202 feet tall, the exact length from its base to the spot in Puddling Lane where the fire started.
Tuesday…
This week in history proved popular for countries turning their road management systems upside down.
57 years ago, 3 September 1967, Sweden converted from driving on the left-hand side to the right-hand side of the road. This aligned with its Scandinavian neighbours, Norway and Finland, who had converted many years earlier.
At the time, Swedish road vehicles were dominated by American imports, which were left-hand drives. Driving a left-hand drive vehicle on the left is trickier than it sounds. Numerous head-on collisions resulted as cars pulled out to overtake blind. Ouch.
On the morning of the changeover, traffic was restricted from 1 a.m. onwards. At precisely 4.50 a.m., the light traffic was halted for ten minutes. Cars stopped wherever they were and switched sides. Ten minutes later, they continued their journey… on the other side of the road.
In preparation, $75,000,000 of road infrastructure was updated, with over 350,000 new road signs installed overnight. No one died from the changeover.
Side note: The image above is a staged photo of Kings Street Stockholm, Kungsgatan, in 1967. Over the years it has become synonymous with the Swedish switch from left-hand side to right-hand side driving. Unfortunately, it is a hoax. No traffic was allowed in Stockholm at changeover time and the whole process went very smoothly, unlike the picture. Great photo though!
Afghanistan had carried out a similar exercise 22 years earlier on the same day, 2 September 1945. South Korea followed a few days later, 8 September 1945. More recently, Samoa switched (from right-hand side to left-hand side) 15 years ago on 7 September 2009.
Question of the week...
The Russian city of Saint Petersburg was named after its founder, Tsar Peter the Great, in 1703. 211 years later, remembered today, 1 September 1914, its name was changed to Petrograd to give a more Slavic, anti-German slant. What was its name subsequently changed to, ten years later, in 1924?(answer at bottom of newsletter)
And finally...
Just in case you’ve never quite got your head around the leap year rule, as defined by the Gregorian calendar, here it is:
A year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4. So, 2024 is a leap year.
Exception: A year marking the turn of a century, e.g. 2000, 2100, 2200, can only be a leap year if it is divisible by 400.
This means that 1600 and 2000 were leap years, with the next century leap year set for 2400 (i.e. don’t worry too much).
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Thank you for joining me. Have a great week!
Steve
HOST & CHIEF STORY HUNTER
P:S: Incidentally, I am always keen to receive your feedback to help me continuously improve this newsletter and the podcast. Just hit reply to this email and...... let it rip! I respond to every email that I receive.
Answer to Question of the week: Leningrad, following the death of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Next weekend also marks the 33rd anniversary, 8 September 1991, of another renaming of the city back to Saint Petersburg.
NEXT WEEK'S BREEZER
Dodging the doodlebugs
LAST WEEK'S BREEZER
Ashes to ashes, ducks to ducks
Attribution (cover): Pope Gregory XIII: Esaias van Hulsen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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