20th March. The Spring Equinox: a new season for labour…
The official start of Spring was 1st March in the UK. The Met Office divides the year into four seasons and so the months of March, April and May are ‘Spring’. To be fair the Met Office do also point out that the start date of astronomical Spring is March 20th, the Equinox.
The labour movement festival of May Day which celebrates the new birth of Spring is firmly within that framework, hence all the (Walter Crane inspired) garlands and flowers that go with some of the imagery of the day.
Neither March 1st or March 20th are dates that work for the traditional British Spring however which began during February. The logic of this was that as more daylight appeared fields could be ploughed and crops sown.
Ronald Hutton writes of the date of Spring in Stations of the Sun:
During the Twentieth Century the notional beginning of spring came itself to be moved backwards to the vernal equinox, by a slow process induced by the mass media. This was part of the American system of reckoning seasons from solstices and equinoxes, which works admirably in the climate of most of the USA, but is nonsensical in the rhythm of the British year.
Raph Samuel in his survey of Victorian seasonal labour also noted that the impact of Spring:
The ebb and flow of wayfaring life in nineteenth-century England was strongly influenced by the weather. The months from March to October were the time when travelling people were to be found on the roads, and when they were joined by every class of occasional itinerant.
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