29 February: Boreham on Leap Year

Father Time's Makeweight
Today [not in 2006!] we have the rare satisfaction of expressing our felicitations to those unhappy people who enjoy the celebration of a birthday only once in every four years.[1] In the shadowed careers of all such unfortunates there comes a time when they go to bed with sad thoughts on the night of February 28, and wake up with still sadder ones on the morning of March 1. They must feel like children who, after waiting for fully an hour at a railway station for the train that was to take them to the seaside, watch it rush through without stopping. They turn away cherishing a bitter disappointment. The classical case is the case of poor Frederic, the hero of "The Pirates of Penzance" —a case that is especially apposite in this particular year. It is his nurse who unfolds the pathetic story:

When Frederic was a little lad he proved so brave and daring,
His father
thought he'd 'prentice him to some career sea-faring,
I was, alas, his
nursery-maid, and so it fell to my lot
To take and bind the promising boy
apprentice to a pilot.
I was a stupid nursery-maid, on breakers always
steering,
And I did not catch the word aright, through being hard of
hearing.
Mistaking my instructions, which within my brain, did gyrate,
I
took and bound this promising boy apprentice to a pirate!

And so poor Frederic was covenanted to the pirates until his 21st birthday. On his coming-of-age, however, he broke away from his doubtful associates, moved in the most excellent society and became engaged to the beautiful Mabel Stanley. Then the trouble begins. Mabel finds Frederic in tears. What can be the matter? The matter is February 29! Frederic was born on that unhappy date, and the King of the Pirates has drawn his attention to it.

… A terrible disclosure
Has just been made to Mabel, my dearly loved
one,
I bound myself to serve the pirate captain
Until I reached my
one-and-twentieth birthday
And I was born in Leap Year, and that
birthday
Will not be reached by me till 1940.

And thus, around this awkward complication, Sir W. S. Gilbert weaves all the comedy and romance of the popular opera.

Commiseration of Youth
At marriages celebrated on February 29 it is the quintessence of bad form to make the slightest allusion to the silver or the golden wedding. For February 29 comes at best, only once in four years, not always then. And since neither 25 nor 50 is divisible by four the only hope that the bride and bridegroom can cherish is the hope of celebrating the diamond wedding 60 years hence on such a scale as will atone for the omission of the silver and the golden ones. The people who are born on February 29 do get a birthday every few years, and today they will probably forget their earlier deprivations and forgive the parsimony of a capricious calendar. They will enjoy a birthday at last and will probably celebrate it on a lordly scale. Anybody who has ever been present on such an occasion must have been amused at the unmistakable undertone of commiseration that mingles with the outbursts of congratulation. A good start, it is commonly believed, is half the battle. This being so, most people feel that these February 29 victims started shockingly. On the very threshold of existence they managed matters so clumsily as to get themselves born on a day that deprives them of 75 per cent of their fair share of birthdays. To youth, this is a most egregious blunder. A child will contemplate a person born on February 29 with eyes filled with unutterable pity and astonishment. If the ill-starred individual had been born armless or legless, the element of compassion could scarcely have been more pronounced. A birthday only once in four years! Only three birthdays in the whole course of childhood! Only about 20 in the allotted span of human existence! And fancy being unable, except in some awkward makeshift fashion, to celebrate one's coming-of-age at all. For, shuffle themselves as they may, the years can never bring the 21st birthday of a Leap Year again!

Mathematical Problem
But, in 1940, all such people will luxuriate in a birthday. Whether they will add one or four to their previous age is a point that must be left to their own honour and to their sense of the fitness of things. Miss Priscilla Pettigrew was born, it will be remembered, on February 29, and she held strongly that it would seem like cheating to add more than one to her age in virtue of a single birthday. "I'd be downright ashamed," she indignantly protested, "to add four to myself every time a birthday happened to come round! I couldn't bear to make honest folks believe I was that much older than I really am!" A conscience so sensitive and so scrupulous, presents us with a most affecting and most edifying moral spectacle, but it cannot be commended without reserve as a model for general emulation. Let the young people who, today, indulge in birthday festivities, be in no hurry to adopt Miss Pettigrew's method of computation! If, flushed with the excitement of the rare occasion, they feel attracted to the scheme, it will be necessary for their grave and reverend seniors, who never fail to recognise in a birthday an opportunity of administering liberal potations of good advice, to do their duty. These venerable wiseacres must, out of the hoarded wealth of their long experience, inform the happy birthday celebrants that a singular and tragic Nemesis has invariably overtaken those who have modelled their behaviour on that of the amiable and conscientious Priscilla. They have, it is true, added only one to their age on the arrival of each quadrennial birthday, but, on the other hand, it has been noticed that, in every case, they have died remarkably young. Miss Pettigrew herself was no exception. The bloom of her virgin beauty began to fade before she was 10. By the time she was 15 there was a perceptible stoop in her shoulders and the silver was rapidly creeping into her hair. With her 18th birthday still 18 months ahead of her, she went down to her grave looking strangely bent and wrinkled and old!

Eccentric Calendar
Perhaps we have been a trifle slipshod in referring to the birthdays of Twenty-Ninth-February children as being quadrennial. They are scarcely that. For Leap Year is an occasional, rather than a regular, visitor. Babies who are born on that awkward date cannot rely upon a birthday even once in four years. In his essay on "The New Year's Coming of Age," Charles Lamb describes the famous feast to which all the days had been invited. The greatest care had been taken properly to place the guests. The special days, the fast days, the festival days were all given seats at table that were deemed suitable to the honour usually paid them. The most baffling of all the invited guests was the Twenty-Ninth-of-February. His erratic appearances seemed to perplex everybody and nobody could be certain whether he intended being present or not. And yet, if the other days would only take the trouble to understand him, there is method in his seeming madness. He arrives in the course of every fourth year except at the end of a century, and then he only comes when the first two figures of the year's name are divisible by four. Thus the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not Leap Years while the year 1600 was and the year 2000 will be. Miss Priscilla Pettigrew was born, as everybody knows, on February 29, 1764. She celebrated her eighth birthday in 1796, but she had to wait until 1804 for her ninth! Those who were born on February 29 any time during the Nineteenth Century and who lived to the dawn of the Twentieth, suffered a similar deprivation when the year 1901 broke upon them. But those who come into the world this February 29, or on any February 29 this century, are safe. For the year 2000 will behave handsomely by them. If they wish to go eight years without a birthday they must contrive, by hook or by crook, to live until the year 2100 comes round.

Splinters Of Time
The fact is that February 29 is a piece of chronological padding. It is a matter of makeweight. The earth takes 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes 46 seconds to complete its circuit round the sun, and our Leap Year arrangement is the best contrivance yet invented for tucking the odd hours into the calendar. The ancients got over the difficulty by dividing the year into 12 months of 30 days each, and every now and again—whenever they found the seasons getting out of order—they took a holiday, giving the days neither numbers nor names, until they got the whole thing into shape once more. How the babies born in those unrecognised intervals managed their birthdays we are not told. Perhaps they never had any, in which case a modern Twenty-Ninth-Of-February child is, by comparison, in clover. However this may be, we trust that the people who, today celebrate their long-awaited birthdays will enter into all the joys that they have missed since, in 1936, they last enjoyed the felicity of such a celebration.

F W Boreham

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on February 24, 1940.