The Spectator

Black Friday When and where did the term ‘Black Friday’ originate? — It was used to describe a collapse in financial markets on 24 September 1869, prompted by the revelation of a Wall Street conspiracy to drive up the gold price. But in modern usage it was coined by police in 1950s Philadelphia, who had all leave cancelled following Thanksgiving after an influx of shoppers and American football fans into the city centre. — In 1961 retailers in the city saw the potential to boost business by adopting the term. Another explanation is that they saw it as the day by which they would have taken sufficient revenue to ensure making a profit for the year — the day when their accounts moved from red to black. Weighing up Brexit The CBI welcomed the deal on Brexit.

Hard bitten A British tourist died after contracting rabies from a cat bite in Morocco. Whatever happened to the prominent anti-rabies posters at British ports? — The last case of rabies contracted in the UK was in 1922 but rising cross-Channel traffic led to a fear that infected animals could unwittingly be brought in. — A 1974 regulation introduced long spells of quarantine and those once-familiar posters, then restrictions were eased in the 1990s thanks to pet passports. — The last case of human infection in France was in 1923, but the country was not declared rabies-free until 2001 – a status it lost for two years from 2008. — Worldwide, rabies kills 59,000 people a year, 95 per cent in Africa or Asia and 99 per cent with infections from dogs.

It is cricket The use of a baseball expression, backstop, for possible arrangements over the Irish border could upset some Brexiteers. Yet the concept of a ‘backstop’ can be traced to a much more British game, cricket. The use of ‘backstop’ for what we would now call a wicket keeper was first recorded in the Oxford Dictionary in 1819. Seventy years later it cropped up in baseball, as a name for a fence rather than a person. When, in 1890, baseball players started calling the catcher a backstop too, the fence became, in effect, a backstop to the backstop. Big swims Ross Edgley became the first person to swim round the British coast, covering 1,791 miles in four months, starting and finishing in Margate.