Re: Colonel Blimp's Armistice

Editor's note:  Wow.

From: Leo Enticknap [[email protected]]
 Norman Holland writes:

> Here is an armistice day / veterans day
conundrum: in the Colonel Blimp movie, he and another person are talking
right at the end of the war; you can hear the cannons in the background.
Abruptly, the thunder of the cannons stops. They look at each other and
realize that the war is over. Colonel Blimp observes that it is ten
o'clock. However, we all know that the war ended on the eleventh hour of
the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The people who created it knew
it too. I can't believe this is just a mistake.

That scene in 'Blimp'
takes place in Flanders (Belgium), doesn't it (can't remember)? If so,
the explanation probably has something to do with the fact that
Belgium's time zone changed at the moment of the armistice.

Belgium was
under occupation for the duration of WWI, and the Germans imposed the
Central European Time (CET) zone on all its occupied territories. From
1892-1914 and then 1918-1949, Belgium was on Western European Time
(WET), which for our purposes is the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
and Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), and also the time in the UK when
daylight saving is not in operation.

At midday on 11 November 1918,
Belgium went back to WET, i.e. the clocks were changed from midday to
1100. So maybe Colonel Blimp was frightfully well organised, and put his
watch back a little too early? Or maybe he was frightfully DISorganised,
and never bothered putting it forward when he left Blighty? Or maybe he
didn't put it forward as an act of resistance, i.e. refusing to
recognise the German-imposed CET timezone?

An added complication is
that Daylight Saving Time started to be introduced around Europe during
WWI (in the UK, with the Summer Time Act 1916), but as the reversion
back to GMT happened on the last Sunday in October, i.e. a week and a
half before the armistice, this isn't a factor here.

Leo

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