[simonbarker87]

It wasn’t arbitrary - the guy who first proposed it was a big lover of the outdoors and thought it was mad that people in the UK missed out on all the summer sun from about 3am onwards, he proposed taking an hour from the morning sun and putting it at the end of the day so that people could enjoy some of that sun at the end of their working day (since this was in the early 1900s many men worked 12 hours in a mine shaft or in a factory so would have made a big impact) - in the end, what swung it was energy savings for running lamps during the world war 1 coal shortages. He never got to see it implemented, Germany trialled it first but since we were at war he didn’t know about that at the time.