Horse trials
Five Household Cavalry horses bolted in central London, with two reaching Limehouse before being calmed down. It may have been a shocking sight in the 21st century but it would have been ordinary life in the 19th century.
– By the 1890s there were 300,000 horses in London. It was not uncommon for them to bolt in the street. Between 1854 and 1861, 62 people are recorded by Guy’s Hospital as having died as a result of collisions with horse-drawn vehicles. A bigger day-to-day problem was with dung, 1,000 tons of which were produced by the animals every day.
– The last time a horse bolted in a London street was during the Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 when a police horse was spooked and ran riderless into crowds.
Shark horror
A British man was badly injured in a shark attack off Tobago. How many people are attacked by sharks and where are you mostly likely to be set upon?
– In 2021 there were 73 documented attacks on humans by sharks around the world, 28 of which were in Florida.
– The number has steadily been increasing decade on decade over the past century, from 39 in 1900-09 to 799 in 2010-19.
– The only decade which saw a reversal in numbers was the 1970s, the decade of the film Jaws.
– The number of documented attacks since 1580 records is as follows:
US 1,640
Australia 706
South Africa 262
Brazil 114
The Caribbean 77
New Zealand 58
Papua New Guinea 48
Reunion Island 47
Mexico 42
There have been three attacks in Britain in all that time.
Source: Florida Museum
Boat people
The number of migrants arriving in Britain illegally in small boats was 6,265 between 1 January and 21 April this year, up from 5,049 in the same period last year. Where, ultimately, are they coming from?
Vietnam 1,266
Afghanistan 1,186
Iran 709
Syria 694
Eritrea 528
Iraq 425
Sudan 410
Source: Home Office
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