DAYLIGHT SAVING BILL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19731, 2 September 1927, Page 14

DAYLIGHT SAVING BILL.

Sir, —"A.C." and others have, to my way of thinking, loft out the most important factor against daylight saving, viz., the country school children. Can Mr. Sidey or "A.C.," or anyone else, give us a guarantee that the infantile paralysis epidemic will not occur again this summer, and advancing the clock an hour means that our children, who have to walk from one to five miles to and from school, will be let out at the hottest hour of the day to walk home. Farmer.

Sir, —I trust you will afford me a final opportunity of commenting upon the correspondence relating to the above subject. I regret that correspondents have not afforded, as I asked, specific instances of difficulties. By so doing they would go a long way toward proving their case, or else would prove to themselves that their difficulties are not insurmountable. Apart from the town milk suppliers' complaint, to which I would reply that if townsmen want the bill they must be content to absorb their breakfast porridge with the previous evening's milk (as I do) there appears to be three main aspects of the case which present apparent difficulties. Firstly, the co-operation of supplier with factory; secondly, the co-operation of factory with train; and thirdly, the co-operation of supplier with train. Nothing has appeared which proves any real obstacle to the first two. The third will be a real difficulty, probably, if railway timetables "are not adjusted. Responsible officials have, however, once again intimated that these cases can easily be met. Keforins frequently require readjustments which, in anticipation, seem formidable, but in actual practice cause but slight temporary inconvenience, and so I believe it will be found with daylight saving. Whatever happens, I venture to predict that the earlier rising of farmers who now get up at daylight will not be among the results, simply because it is impracticable. Arrangements will have to be made to suit them, and X shall be surprised if the intelligence of the community is not equal to the occasion. '

Sir, —Referring to the farmers' objection to davlight saving, I would like to make the following observations. There is roughly one hour difference in the time of sunrise in November, as compared with September, consequently if the clock were advanced one hour in the first-named month the daylight available to the farmer to enable him to catch trains and cream deliveries would be precisely the same as in September under mean time. Conditions in this respect would be identical in the months named, would be much better in November than in June, July and August, and better still in December and January. Perhaps the farmer will say that the available daylight on September mornings is not sufficient and imposes a hardship from which he is entitled to have some relief in the summer months. So far, however, he has not said this. C.H.N.

Si r| —Your various correspondents who have replied to "A.C.'s" recent letter overlook the fact that the time of day at which cows have to be milked is not fixed by Act of Parliament, but is generally determined by circumstances which are, within reasonable limits, already under the farmers' control, and will obviously remain so. Most of the milk goes direct from the farms to butter or cheese factories. Some of these are co-operative and others owned by companies, but in either case the factory manager fixes the time for arrival of milk to suit his suppliers. If it is now 8.30 a.m. the Act does not forbid his extending it to 9.30 a.m. summer time. When a city milkman goes his rounds at the hours when milking is in progress on the farms, one assumes that a day or a night is allowed for collection, forwarding and distribution to consumers. If the milk left the farms an hour later in the mornings or evenings it seems quite likely that it could still he in time for the usual delivery, the following evening or'inorning in town. If the afternoon delivery were a trifle late, would anybody mind ? Most of the milk appears to travel by motor-lorry, and the train difficulty, so often quoted, has never yet been substantiated by any authentic case of a train which collects any considerable quantity of milk at, say, 7 a.m., and with no possible alternative or amendment to time-table. It is the writer's belief that this much-quoted difficulty is now non-e::istent. The first instance of daylight saving by means of altering the clock met with in the writer's experience was on a New Zealand farm, over 20 years ago, and it has been adopted by many farmers and other workers in the country (with or without altering the clock) because of its obvious merits. Unfortunately the majority of people cannot get the benefits of it without the assistance of an Act of Parliament, but it does not seem logical to deny the majority of New Zealanders the advantages of daylight saving in order to save the dairy factories from having to readjust their receiving times to suit their suppliers. Good Mobning.