The notion of Daylight Saving Time developed during the first World War. The Germans tried it first in 1915, putting their clocks an hour forward in the summertime. Then Britain and Ireland followed suit a year later, and the Americans in 1918.
The idea has been with us in one form or another most of the time since then. Indeed for a brief period, from 1968 to 1971, GMT in wintertime was abandoned altogether, and Irish and British clocks stayed one hour ahead of Greenwich right throughout the year. It gave a little extra daylight in the winter evenings, but the dark mornings were not popular, and after a few years we returned to the "Spring forward - Fall back" system we have enjoyed since then. As a consequence, all clocks will be retarded by an hour between bedtime tonight and first reveille tomorrow morning.
Now, putting back the clock involves moving the hands in a direction we regard as anticlockwise, and this might lead an inquiring mind to wonder why clocks are designed to rotate the way they do. There is, after all, nothing natural or inevitable about a clockwise sense of motion, and it is no more difficult to build timepieces that run, as we would call it, anti-clockwise, than it is to design them in the traditional way. Indeed anti-clockwise clocks are occasionally found in public houses, displayed as a novelty to tease, amuse and momentarily disorientate the unsuspecting patrons.
The accepted convention can be traced to the daily movement of the sun. The very earliest clock was just the sun itself, its passage westwards in the sky providing a convenient, albeit rough, approximation of the hour. Then, more than 3,000 years ago, the Egyptians learned to use a moving shadow as a measure of the time, an idea from which the sundial soon evolved.
And it so happens that as the sun moves from east to west across the southern sky, the shadow on a sundial moves in what we now would call a clockwise direction around the graduations on the dial. It seems reasonable to assume that the first clock-makers imported this familiar pattern when they learned to measure and display the time by other means.
A corollary is the interesting thought that had the mechanical measurement of time originated in the southern hemisphere, all our clocks might well run anti-clockwise. In the antipodes, although the sun rises in the east and sets in the west the same as it does here, the shadow on a sundial, because of the northerly position of the sun, moves in an anti-clockwise sense around the dial.