As Daylight Saving comes to an end, let us remember the local naturalist who came up with the idea so he could spend more time searching for insects in the Karori Bush.
Here in the south, the signs are everywhere. Beanies are creeping onto heads and people are starting to murmur about lighting their fires. The skies dim as we savour the last crunchy cucumbers and juicy tomatoes from the garden and forage for twigs and branches like little church mice. But it is this Sunday that will bring the most concrete signifier of the changing seasons when we all, in the words of Jon Toogood, put our clocks back for the winter.
While many New Zealanders credit “The Shihad Method” with reminding them how Daylight Saving works, and everyone knows about Māui slowing the sun to make the days longer, less are aware that the modern concept of changing the clocks was invented by a local nature-lover named George Hudson. Moving from London to New Zealand as a bug-obsessed teen in 1881, Hudson “never lost any available opportunity to enjoy his hobby”, his obituary reads.
Working shifts as a post officer, Hudson spent all his spare time outdoors amassing what would become the largest personal collection of New Zealand insects. “He was intolerant of ‘armchair naturalists’ but believed in going in the field in search of nature,” the obituary continues. “He made many excursions into the virgin country of New Zealand, collecting and observing.” Even when indoors he’d bring the nature to him, going so far as to rear glowworms in his kitchen.
Dr Julia Kasper, lead curator of invertebrates at Te Papa, is a big Hudson fan. “He’s a bit of a hero,” she says. “He was a very interesting character, but he was also very humble.” Distancing himself from the snooty scientific community, she says he was much more interested in sharing his findings with the public. Over the course of his life, he published seven books about insects, including three volumes on butterflies and moths with over 2,500 colour illustrations.
Along with his love of insects, Hudson also had a passion for astronomy and eventually discovered a new star, Nova Aquilae, in 1918. “He was a man of many talents,” laughs Kasper. “It was always secondary to insects, but he was so knowledgeable about the stars, planets and time.” In 1895, these hobbies collided when Hudson presented a paper – ‘On Seasonal Time Adjustment in Countries South of Latitude 30′ – to the Wellington Philosophical Society.
A published abstract of the presentation lays it all out: “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working hours of the day within the period of daylight and, by utilising the early morning, so to reduce the excessive use of artificial light.” Or, as he would later rephrase it, “a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling or any other outdoor pursuit desired.”
Hudson’s pitch did not go down well with the Dragon’s Den of the time. “The paper evoked a storm of derision,” writes his grandson George Gibbs in his biography An Exquisite Legacy. “Criticism ranged from someone who considered humans were not far enough advanced to adopt the plan, to those who claimed his suggestion wholly scientific and impractical. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years.”
While it was largely ridiculed, Hudson’s theory did get a surprising groundswell of support in Christchurch, where 1000 copies of his paper were distributed throughout the garden city. “Serious attempts were made by a number of persons to bring about a practical application of the scheme therein suggested,” Hudson noted of Christchurch’s embrace of the concept. “I should state that these steps were taken entirely independently of any action on my part.”
Hudson would give his pitch another go two years later in front of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1898. “I am convinced that all those who believe an abundance of outdoor recreation is the most effective means of securing human health and happiness should support this scheme,” he said, later pointing out that both breadwinners and school students are forced to “remain indoors during the very season when the beauties of nature are at their best.”
Still, Hudson’s idea failed to get any traction here. A decade later in the UK, a builder named William Willett presented a similar pitch and, by 1916, Germany and the UK had adopted the time-shifting measure to save fuel on lighting during the war. It wasn’t until 1927 that New Zealand first observed an extra hour of daylight saving time, shrinking to a half hour in 1928, extending it for all of 1941 during WWII, discontinuing it in 1946, and reintroducing it in 1975.
Hudson received a T.K. Sidey medal for his pioneering idea in 1934, but his legacy extends far beyond long, light summer nights. His insect collection, now in Te Papa and still in its original kauri cabinetry, is one of the most scientifically valuable private collections in New Zealand, Kasper tells me. “Multiple research projects still use the collection to this day,” she explains. “The specimens are always being used for active research to find and describe new species.”
Another enormous project has been decoding the screeds of information associated with his collection, which Hudson recorded in the pages of a post office register. “It was a bit unusual because he gave every insect a little code written in that book, and then the code contained information as to when and where he found it.” A team of volunteers around the country have worked to decipher the information over several years, and now it is available to search digitally.
“Now we have a database that we can ask to show all the specimens of certain species that have been found, for example, in 1922 in Karori,” Kasper says. “And we can compare our data set with his old data set to see what has changed in different populations.” It also means that his work continues to raise awareness and strengthen our understanding of wildlife to this day. “We think this is something Hudson would have wanted, because he was so keen to communicate with the public.”
So as we all prepare to turn our clocks back, Kasper hopes Aotearoa keeps the “very cool” Hudson in their minds. “He was curious, he was determined, and he always went out and observed. These days everyone just spends all their time on devices, when we should all go out and look,” she says. “Bellyflop into vegetation and observe what happens in the microcosmos, look at mating ladybirds for an hour, just see what’s out there.” While it’s still light out, of course.
