EVERYONE knows about British Summer Time and Greenwich Mean Time but this week we seem to have been operating on Chester Time - one hour behind everyone else in the country.

Anyone glancing at the Eastgate Clock or the timepiece atop Chester Town Hall will have noticed they have been put back an hour - a whole week before GMT is due to take over from BST.

And it seems EU officials are to blame.

Whitchurch based J B Joyce and Co, founded in 1690, looks after public clocks across Northern Ireland and the West of England, including Chester city centre.

Years ago, engineers fitted electric-ally operated clocks with a backup device to keep them accurate after a power cut. It was programmed with the dates on which the clocks should be moved backwards and forwards each autumn and spring.

But trouble struck when the EU changed the dates for the move from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time in 2004 and 2005.

This week, as 12 months ago, clocks in Chester were suddenly turned an hour back, seven days before the official date.

Despairing engineers at the company say the problem, which left shoppers and passers-by puzzled, will not arise in 2006.

The bad news is they believe EU officials will be sitting down to decide the dates for future years.

The company says the only action it would be able to take is to produce new chips with the revised dates and charge its customers, which it would prefer not to do.

The difficulty could be overcome if there was permanent summer time, which J B Joyce believes would be welcomed by many people.

Informed of the circumstances by The Chronicle, a relieved Town Hall official said he was pleased neither the company nor the city council was responsible for the error.

Other areas in which winter time descended unexpectedly included Helsby, where the company services three clocks.