Black Monday as the stock market suffers the biggest crash in history

This week in 1987, the world’s stock market collapsed after shares on Wall Street suffered a wave of panic selling. The Dow Jones industrial average fell by a record 508 points – a drop of 22.5 per cent.

On Wall Street, share prices plummeted across the board in frenzied trading that saw collective losses worse than the infamous “Black Monday” in October 1929.

In London, the value of quoted shares fell by £50billion.

The previous sharpest one day fall was on March 1, 1974 after Labour’s indecisive election victory, when shares fell 7.1 per cent.

In the wake of the 1987 crash, which also became known as Black Monday, markets around the world were put on restricted trading.

The effects of the crash were not as crippling as expected because it was not followed by a depression.

Also this week in 1987, southern Britain began a massive clear-up operation after the worst night of storms in living memory.

The storms cost a total of 18 lives and an estimated £1bn in repairs and clear-up costs.

Hundreds of people were injured. Around 15 million trees were lost and hundreds of thousands of homes were without power for more than 24 hours.

In sport, champion jockey Lester Piggott was sentenced to three years imprsionment after being found guilty of an alleged tax fraud of over £3m.

Piggott, who won the Epsom Derby no fewer than nine times and rode to victory 5,300 times during a glittering career, used different names to stash his earnings in secret bank accounts in Switzerland, the Bahamas, Singapore and the Cayman Islands.

During court proceedings, the judge said that Piggott even misled his own accountants “until the matter was forced out of you last year”.

When Piggott was eventually released from prison, he came out of retirement and rode to a famous victory in the Breeders’ Cup Mile in America.