On Facebook I saw a cartoon (above). It said that men are always right on the following dates: 29th, 30th and 31st February. Of course, these dates do not normally exist but 2024 has a 29th February, being a Leap Year. These posts go out on the last day of the month, which is 29th February this time and so I thought it might be relevant to look at the Leap year issue, which will at least be relevant to the date. It may not seem important but there is a reason for it.
To explain the Leap Year, process I have had to resort to Wikipedia, my normal source of information. You can read the full account here but it basically comes down to the differences between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The Julian calendar was, as its name suggests, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC and made a year match the movement of the sun. The Gregorian calendar came into effect in 1582 and was that bit more accurate.
The earth moves around the sun in 365 and a quarter days, which means that you have to elbow in an extra day every four years to make up for the quarter day. That is why we have Leap Years. However, it is not quite that simple. The exact time it takes for the earth to rotate around the sun is 365.245 days, which means that the more accurate Gregorian calendar misses out the Leap Year in dates divisible by 100 but not in those divisible by 400.
The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 and named after – but not invented by the Pope at the time, Gregory the Thirteenth. The real inventor of the new and more accurate calendar was Aloysius Lillius and it was suggested by a German mathematician and astronomer called Christopher Clavius. Both men, however, have been largely forgotten by history and Pope Gregory is remembered simply because he gave its name to the more accurate calendar.
The slightly slower rotation of the earth around the sun means that 1600 and 2000 are Leap Years but 1900 and 1500 are not. Over time this in turn led to the Julian and Gregorian calendars being out of sync by eleven days and in the eighteenth century the more accurate Gregorian calendar won out over the less accurate Julian one. Britain ended up admitting defeat and aligning with the Gregorian calendar by an Act of Parliament in the year 1752.
This in turn led to eleven ‘lost’ days in that year as the two calendars aligned and, predictably enough, a lot of muttering about bloody foreigners stealing days from us. There is nothing new in the world. This just an early precursor of Brexit and by which we think we can solve all our problems be breaking away from countries that we had previously quite happily done business with. And that has not turned out well - in my opinion, at least.
I was wondering how serious the riots and objections to the ‘lost’ eleven days really were so, inevitably, I looked it up on the internet. The satirical painter William Hogarth showed an election scene in which a Tory poster is shown demanding these eleven ‘lost’ days back. The site I found this on (historic-uk.com) also says that ‘most historians now believe that these protests never happened [and were] the Georgian equivalent of an urban myth’.
There was probably a fair bit of grumbling about the ‘lost’ days and complaints about new-fangled ideas but most people accepted the new system and grudgingly admitted that there was a certain amount of sense in being aligned with the rest of Europe. After all, we still did a lot of business with European countries and it seemed sensible to be on the same calendar (or page) as them, even if we did not like the idea of synchronising with a European system.
There was nothing imaginary about the Brexit vote, however. Those who wanted to break from Europe won that one and got their way. That surely was only the start of the process. It now behoves those who were in favour of breaking with Europe to show that the process can be successful and profitable for us as a country. If it had been left to people like me, nothing much would have happened and we would be trading with Europe as we were.
My partner and I went to Spain (which, incidentally, did not convert to the new calendar until 1926) before the Brexit referendum. We reached our hotel barely an hour after the plane touched down and were greeted pleasantly by the staff, who all spoke perfect English, and checked in quickly. I wondered why we considered it necessary to hate these people so much, what possible benefits could come from breaking with them and making Britain more bolshy.
It is apparently far harder now for people who actually make things to export them to European countries because they have to jump through a series of totally unnecessary hoops and fill in multiple forms to do so. The trade wins which were supposed to come about after Brexit seem to me to be totally imaginary. As one of my friends said when we had the original vote on the subject ‘The future for Britain has to be in Europe - surely.’
I see no reason to contradict him fifty years later. It is up to the Brexiteers to prove that their system of an independent Britain is going to work better than one which is integrated into Europe and there is not much sign that this is happening now. Just as the calendar was changed, despite the objections of those who considered it a popish plot and a European impertinence, so Brexit does not seem like the sensible solution to Britain’s problems.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatourist guide.blogspot.com
