Galway In Days Gone By

1921

Clocks falling back

Summer Time, as designed by statute of the British House of Commons, will end at 3 a.m. on the morning of Monday next, October 3. Thus, whilst the people sleep, time will be arrested, the clock will be thrown back an hour.

Time will, of course, move on its inexorable way quite irrespective of how man may mark its passage. Where the Summer Time has been kept, however, the hands of clocks and watches will be put back an hour on the Sunday night.

From the mechanical point of view, it is safer to put them forward eleven hours, or to stop them for an hour, as it is not good for the clocks or watches that the hands should be moved backwards.

In the county districts Summer Time was scarcely kept at all. The farmer was against it for two reasons: under Summer Time the world was not “aired” at the hour he or his hands would customarily start work, and he found that his workmen began by Winter Time but always stopped according to Summer Time!

Thus he lost a clear two hours. But there can be no doubt that in the towns and to all who work long hours in office, factory or shop, the institution of long summer evenings was a blessing; nor was the saving in artificial light to be despised.

Indeed, Summer Time brings more light to humanity, and enables us to live at smaller cost – facts which we hope the Irish legislature will not lose sight of next summer.

1946

Motorists stranded

Many motorists in Connemara were “caught napping” during the week-end when all the petrol pumps in the area went suddenly dry. Cars which set out on long journeys in the hope of replenishing petrol supplies en route were unable to return to their bases, and motorists stranded on the roadside were quite a common spectacle on Sunday.

For a long time past, motorists complain bitterly of the practice of some garage owners in reserving petrol supplies “for customers only.” Customers are those who lodge their coupons with the garage owner at the beginning of the month. This means that the garage owner’s licensed petrol pump becomes merely a storage tank for the convenience of a limited number of local motorists.

If the system is not illegal it ought to be so, and it certainly calls for investigation by the Department of Supplies.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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