
Today, ‘Black Friday’ is
the day after Thanksgiving. Retailers offer reduced prices which is supposed to
get customers into a frenzy on the high street (although this year the majority
of the British public went online instead). However, going back even further, ‘Black
Friday’ actually originates from the seventeenth-century: 1610 to be precise. It
had little do with slashed prices or the transaction of goods but applied to
any Friday in which an exam fell in schools. It was only in the twentieth
century when it began to have associations with Thanksgiving: typically, black
Friday was the day when employees were absent from work the day after the
American holiday. It was in 1961 when ‘Black Friday’ was associated with shopping
and preparation for Christmas.
There have been many
Black Fridays in history – notably, on Friday 6 December 1745 when The Young
Pretender (Charles Edward Stuart) landed in London. On Friday 11 May 1866, the
London banking house Overand, Gurney & Co collapsed prompting the Times to
say that ‘The day will probably be long remembered in the city of London as the
“Black Friday”.’ This was probably the first time the phrase had links with
finance. Three years later, on Friday 24 September 1869, there was an
introduction of a large amount of gold into the markets causing financial panic, linking the day to the phrase.
Other days have also
been labelled ‘black’, such as Monday, more specifically Easter Monday which
was labelled ‘black’ as early as 1389, possibly referring to a bad storm on
Easter Monday 1360 which lead to the
deaths of many soldiers in Edward III’s army during the Hundred Years’ War.
Another theory suggests Monday was so-called ‘black’ because of the 1209
massacre of English settlers on Easter Monday. In 1735, Monday was called ‘black’
as it referred to the day after school holidays. A more recent Black Monday refers
to Monday 19 October 1987 and the stock market crash. Whichever theory is most
accurate, ‘black’ in this sense suggested that the day was unlucky or
unpleasant, which to some it still is i.e. the day after the weekend.
Interestingly, another colour also refers to Monday – blue, referring to a day
people choose not to work, possibly recovering from the weekend's excessives.
Furthermore, ‘Black Wednesday’
referred to the 16 September 1992 when there was a great surge of sales of the pound.
‘Black Thursday’ marks he Wall Street Crash on the 16 September 1929 and the
first day of panic selling on the NYSE, followed by ‘Black Tuesday’ the following
week. ‘Black Saturday’ took place on 10 September 1547 and denotes the day of the
Battle of Pinkie Cleugh which saw Scotland defeated.
But why assign a usually
negative colour to a day? A popular theory suggests the surge in sales was
reflected by the colour of balance sheets – a day when retailers would
transition from being ‘in the red’ to ‘being in the black’ (turning a profit).
Historically, red and black ink symbolised credit and debit. However, this
theory is probably too good to be true and probably does originate from ‘black’
being used to apply to days of disaster. Perhaps the negative connotations
of ‘black’ for our modern sense of ‘black Friday’ refer to the chaos in which
it creates in shops and surrounding areas as well as the holes left in our finances in the new year.
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