Black Thursday + 81

This day…..81 years ago was dubbed “Black Thursday” – generally regarded as the start of the Great Crash of 1929. During the 1920’s, US share prices had gone mad, as investors piled in – many of them buying shares for just a few dollars down and borrowing the rest of the price.

It was all fine so long as stocks kept climbing, but in September 1929, they began to stall. Thursday, 24 October was the first real day of panic, with a record 12.9 million shares traded. As the market began to fall, banks and investment companies piled in, buying huge blocks of shares to try to hold the line.

But even they did not have the money to stave off the inevitable. October 28, “Black Monday”, saw the market fall by 12%, and it was followed by a similar fall on “Black Tuesday.” Politicians fell over each other in the rush to proclaim that there was no problem, but this was actually the beginning of the Great Depression, which overhung the world’s economy for a decade, and blighted millions of lives.

Last week, the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, warned that Britain faces a grim decade was we try to recover from the banking crisis.

Caribbean catastrophe

On this day....107 years ago, the volcano Montagne Pelée erupted above the town of St Pierre on the Caribbean island of Martinique. Apart from a minor eruption in 1851, there hadn’t been a peep out of the mountain for a long time, but in April 1902, it started to grumble, and on the bright sunny morning of May 8, 1902, it went berserk.

As people gathered in the churches of St Pierre - the “Paris of the West Indies” – for eight o’ clock mass, smoke blotted out the sun, and boiling lava poured down the hill into the town killing everyone in its wake. More than a dozen ships were destroyed in the harbour; one having its masts and funnel sheared off “as if they had been cut by a knife.”

Of St Pierre’s 26,000 inhabitants, only a handful survived. One was a convicted murderer awaiting execution who was saved thanks to the thick walls and tiny windows of his prison. He was reprieved, and began a new career with Barnum & Bailey’s circus – sitting in a replica of his cell as the “lone” survivor of the “Silent City of Death”.

St Pierre would be partially rebuilt, only to be hit by another eruption in 1929, and would never again recover its colourful and rather racy reputation. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.