Time, gentlemen please!

Last weekend we went on a guided visit in Villena. The title was something like Gnomones y saetillas, and, after I’d booked it, I began to wonder whether I had made a big mistake. A gnomon is the part of a sundial that casts the shadow; the saetillas are the little grooves or lines which turn that shadow into a reading of the time. It sounded dangerously technical. In fact, it turned out to be really interesting because they led us into a much bigger story about time, its measurement and its ownership.

The visit began, as so much of old European life does, with the Church. Before clocks were common, the bells of the church were how people measured time. They rang for the various services and masses: the daily offices of prayer — Matins and Lauds, traditionally during the night or early morning, Prime, Terce, Sext and None through the working day, then Vespers in the evening and Compline before sleep. They also announced Mass, funerals, feasts, emergencies and, no doubt, the occasional piece of local news. Nobody ordinary had any sort of timepiece.The idea was that people would get up to the sound of the bells, do a bit of praying, get out to work. Everyone lived and worked within earshot of the local church. The bells did not merely mark time; they organised it. 

So the Church defined time, and it owned time. Ordinary people followed it. Our guide mentioned that siesta, the Spanish afternoon nap, probably came from one of the bell calls: sexta was the sixth canonical hour, around midday. Just lisp the word a few times and you'll see why.

Later the municipalities got in on the act. Towns began to create a civic time, often with clocks on municipal towers or on the casa consistorial itself. These were cutting-edge technology in their day, but they still needed bells to strike the hour. A clock face wasn't much good if you were harvesting grapes a couple of kilometres away, but the old technology — boing, boing — worked fine. This gave people something secular with which to plan their days, from the opening of markets and shops to the arrival of visiting dignitaries.

Sometimes there was a sort of rivalry between Church and civil power over how time was distributed. Different towers had different bells; people could distinguish which institution was speaking. One bell called you to prayer; another told you that the town was open for business. Either could call you to help extinguish a fire in a neighbour’s home.

But this was still not personal time. Each town, each area, had its own time. Before standard time zones, communities commonly used local solar time: noon was when the sun was at its highest. In Spain, each place kept its own time, or perhaps that of the provincial capital, until well into the nineteenth century. Time still didn't belong to people. It belonged to the parish, the municipality or, perhaps, the local guilds. Only the very rich would have individual timepieces, so only they had much control over their own schedules. A fine clock in the hall, or a pocket watch on a chain, was as much a statement of status as a certain way of not missing the local stagecoach.

Then came the railways, and time stopped being purely local. A train timetable stumbles when stations run on their own sun-based clocks. Catching the 8:32 from Villena that arrived at 8:58 in Petrer on the Almansa–Alicante line, meant relying on a single, shared clock standard across the entire network. Railway companies enforced synchronisation: station clocks were standardised, stationmasters carried verified pocket watches, and staff kept strictly to the minute. The railway did not merely move people; it disciplined time.

Britain’s railway companies adopted Greenwich Mean Time as ‘railway time’ in the 1840s, and by 1880 it had become Britain’s legal standard. Around the same time, the Canadian engineer Sandford Fleming proposed dividing the world into twenty-four one-hour zones, and the International Meridian Conference of 1884 chose Greenwich as the world’s prime meridian. Spain followed in 1901, adopting Greenwich time as its official standard, so that the clocks of Villena, Petrer, Almansa and Alicante would agree with those at railway stations elsewhere in the country. The railways had already been moving towards standardisation; now the country had a common official time.

At the same time, personal timepieces were becoming more common: more people had the time in their pockets. But time was also something now decided and organised by politicians, businesses and schedulers. The clock in your waistcoat pocket might feel personal, but the hour it showed was no longer something decided in your local community, as those first town hall clocks had been.

As science and technology progressed, timekeeping became more accurate and, in one sense, more democratic. Greenwich Mean Time, and later Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), gave the world a shared reference. Time zones were meant to follow geography, but they were also bent and warped to fit politics, empire and local convenience so that, for instance, a colony, island or region could share the same time as its rulers or neighbours.

Spain is a particularly good example. In 1940, Franco moved peninsular Spain and the Balearics forward an hour, from GMT to Central European Time, putting Madrid on the same footing as Berlin and Rome, alongside the Fascists and Nazis. There may have been practical and economic arguments for the change, but it's a much better story as a toadying whim to Hitler and Mussolini. Time had become political. A clock could be an instrument of administration, war and ideology as easily as a way of knowing when to catch a train.

People were sharing time now in a new way. Listening to Lord Haw-Haw, El Consultorio de Elena Francis or Workers' Playtime meant being by the wireless at the right hour. Time became a shared experience: the same programme, the same news bulletin, the same favourite serial, heard simultaneously in thousands of households. Later it was the same with television. I often wondered why Mike Nelson and his underwater adventures in Sea Hunt started without me if I wasn't home in time. The schedule was public time, imposed from outside, and if you weren't in front of the set at the right moment, the moment had gone. People in the 1950s, 60s and so on had more personal access to time than their forebears — watches, alarm clocks, radios with programme listings — but broadcasters, employers, schools and timetables still told us when to gather round.

Nowadays we share a standard time, but we also bend it to our own needs. Flexitime and remote working let us set our own hours, and if Sea Hunt were still airing, we’d simply stream it on demand. Yet while rigid timetables have loosened, our days have not necessarily freed up; we just construct our own schedules around the school run, a game of pádel or a video call to colleagues in Brazil.

Meanwhile, our timepieces have evolved from passive observers into active monitors, tracking our steps, heart rates and blood sugar. Where the church bell once marked only the broad divisions of the day, the smartphone screen counts every minute. We may have gained the freedom to work or watch TV whenever we choose, but only the bravest hearts will ignore the midnight call from the boss whatever the legislation says. 

And just as our guide through time in Villena led us eventually to Demeter — the goddess loosely responsible for winter and summer — who suggested that perhaps the only time that really matters is personal time: the times we cherish, and the times we quietly forget.