Leap Year Traditions May Be Embarrassing For Bachelors

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27860, 7 January 1956, Page 12

Leap Year Traditions May Be Embarrassing For Bachelors

Bachelors could find themselves in a few awkward situations in 1956, because it is Leap Year and tradition dies hard with any woman who is really anxious to wed. Already one eligible young man in Christchurch has had two proposals of marriage since January 1. but he has given non-committal replies to both, thus evading the obligation of buying two pairs vf white kid gloves in exchange for the answer “no” or the life-time responsibility of marriage by saying “yes” to either. It seems a bachelor's best defence is to avoid any definite answer to an assertive girl friend until the early hours of New Year’s Day, 195*7. Leap Year was started harmlessly enough in the days of Julius Caesar to put the calendar right. Astronomers in -46 B.C. decided that the solar year had 365 days 6 hours and some odd minutes and seconds. For convenience sake the six hours were set aside and added to the end of February once every four years. The idea of providing overlooked quarry with a chance to take a turn at hunting apparently began in Britain some time after the Romans left. In Scotland it was ordained by statute in

the thirteenth century that in a Leap Year “any maiden lady of both high' and low estate is at liberty to bespeak the man she likes.”

Whatever the reason for the decree, it was a popular piece of legislation with the Scottish lasses. The girls over in France heard about it in remarkably short time, considering the lack of public communications. and spinsters with power in the right quarters brought pressure to bear. After France came Italy with a similar provision on its statutes for unmarried women, in the fifteenth century. The custom was taken so seriously in Genoa and Florence that it was not safe for a bachelor to look sideways at a maiden in a Leap Year, according to one chonicler of the time. Children born on February 29 may also have a grudge against Leap Year, W strictly speaking, they are entitled to a birthday party only once in four years.

Through the centuries the birthdate of February 29 must have brought frustration of some kind to hundreds of persons as it did to Frederick, the Zl-year-old hero of “The Pirates of Penzance.” officially declared only four years and a half though he had actually come of age.