1970 in the United Kingdom

1970 in the United Kingdom:

Other years

1968 | 1969 | 1970 (1970) | 1971 | 1972

Sport and Music

1970 English cricket season Football England | Scotland 1970 in British music

Events from the year 1970 in the United Kingdom. This is a General Election year with a change of government.

Incumbents

• Monarch – Elizabeth II
• Prime Minister – Harold Wilson (until 19 June; Labour), Edward Heath (from 19 June; Conservative)

Events

• 1 January
  • Age of majority for most legal purposes reduced from 21 to 18 under terms of the Family Law Reform Act 1969.^[1]
  • Half crown coin ceases to be legal tender.^[2]
  • National Westminster Bank begins trading following merger of National Provincial Bank and Westminster Bank.^[3]
  • Control of London Transport passes from the London Transport Board (reporting to the Minister of Transport) to the London Transport Executive of the Greater London Council, except for country area (green) buses which pass to London Country Bus Services, a subsidiary of the National Bus Company.^[4]
• 18 January - The grave of Karl Marx is vandalised by anti-Germanic racists at Highgate in London.
• 21 January - Fraserburgh life-boat Duchess of Kent, on service to the Danish fishing vessel Opal, capsizes: five of six crew lost.
• 22 January - A Boeing 747 lands at Heathrow Airport, the first jumbo jet to land in Britain.^[5]
• 26 January - Rolling Stone Mick Jagger is fined £200 for possession of cannabis.
• February - Chrysler UK launches its new Hillman Avenger small family car, which will be built at the Ryton plant near Coventry and will compete with the likes of the Ford Escort and Vauxhall Viva.
• 13 February - Garden House riot, Cambridge: A demonstration at the Garden House Hotel by Cambridge University students against the Greek military junta leads to police intervention; eight students subsequently receive custodial sentences for their part in the affair.^[6]
• 19 February - The Prince of Wales joins the Royal Navy.
• 23 February - Rolls Royce asks the government for £50million towards the development of the RB 211-50 Airbus jet engine.
• 2 March - Ian Smith declares Rhodesia a republic breaking all ties with the British Crown, four years after the declaration of independence. Wilson's government refuses to recognise the new state.^[7]
• 6 March - The importation of pets is banned after an outbreak of rabies in Newmarket, Suffolk.^[8]
• 12 March - The quarantine period for cats and dogs is increased to one year as part of the government's anti rabies measures.
• 13 March - The Bridgwater by-election becomes the first election in which 18-year-olds can vote. Tom King wins the election for the Conservative Party.^[9]
• 17 March - Martin Peters, who scored for England in their 1966 World Cup final win, becomes the nation's first £200,000 footballer in his transfer from West Ham United to Tottenham Hotspur.^[10]
• 23 March - Eighteen victims of thalidomide are awarded a total of nearly £370,000 in compensation.
• 1 April - Everton win the Football League First Division title.^[11]
• 10 April - Paul McCartney announces his departure from The Beatles.
• 11 April - Chelsea and Leeds United draw 2-2 in the FA Cup final at Wembley Stadium, forcing a replay.
• 16 April - Dr Ian Paisley enters the Parliament of Northern Ireland after winning the Bannside By-election.^[12]
• 18 April - British Leyland announces that the Morris Minor, its longest running model which has been in production since 1948, will be discontinued at the start of next year and be replaced with a new larger car available as a four-door saloon and three-door fastback coupe, and possibly a five-door estate by 1975.
• 29 April - David Webb scores the winning goal at Chelsea defeat Leeds United 2-1 in the FA Cup final replay at Old Trafford, gaining them the trophy for the very first time. Last year's winners Manchester City clinch the European Cup Winners' Cup with a 2-1 win over Gornik Zabrze of Poland in Vienna, Austria.^[13]
• 19 May - The government makes a £20million loan available to help save the financially troubled luxury car and aircraft manufacturer Rolls Royce.
• 22 May - A tour by the South African cricket team is called off after several African and Asian countries threaten to boycott the Commonwealth Games.^[14]
• 24 May - The Britannia Bridge, carrying the railway across the Menai Strait, is badly damaged by fire.^[2]
• 28 May - Bobby Moore, captain of the England national football team, is arrested and released on bail in Bogota, Colombia, on suspicion of stealing a bracelet in the Bogotá Bracelet incident.
• 1 June - Harold Wilson is hit in the face with an egg thrown by a Young Conservative demonstrator.^[15]
• 2 June - Cleddau Bridge, in Pembrokeshire, collapses during erection, killing four, leading to introduction of new standards for box girder bridges.^[16][17]
• 4 June - Tonga becomes independent of the UK.^[2]
• 13 June - Actor Laurence Olivier is made a life peer in the Queen's Birthday Honours list. He is the first actor to be made a lord.^[18]
• 14 June - England's defence of the FIFA World Cup ends when they lost 3-2 to West Germany in the Mexico quarter final.
• 17 June
  • The bodies of two children are found buried in shallow graves in woodland at Waltham Abbey, Essex. They are believed to be those of Susan Blatchford (11) and Gary Hanlon (12), who were last seen alive near their homes in North London on 31 March this year.^[19]
  • British Leyland creates a niche in the four-wheel drive market by launching its luxury Range Rover, which is to be marketed as a more upmarket alternative to the utilarian Land Rover that has been in production since 1948.^[20]
• 18 June - General Election, the first in which 18-year-olds can vote.
• 19 June - The General Election proves to have been won by Edward Heath's Conservative Party by a majority of 30 seats,^[21] a major surprise as most of the opinion polls had shown that Harold Wilson's Labour were likely to stay in power.^[22] Among the new members of parliament are Neil Kinnock and John Smith for Labour, and Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker, Norman Fowler and Geoffrey Howe for the Tories.^[23]
• 21 June - British golfer Tony Jacklin wins the U.S. Open.^[2]
• 22 June - The Methodist Church allows women to become full ministers for the first time.
• 26 June - Riots break out in Derry over the arrest of Mid-Ulster MP Bernadette Devlin.^[24]
• 29 June - Caroline Thorpe, 32-year-old wife of Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe and the mother of his two-year-old son Rupert, dies in a car crash.
• 3 July - Three civilians are killed and 10 troops are injured when British Army soldiers battle with IRA troops in Belfast.
• 4 July - 112 people are found dead among the wreckage of a British Airways Manchester to Barcelona aeroplane that went missing yesterday. The wreckage was found in the mountains of Northern Spain, and there are no survivors.^[25]
• 8 July - Roy Jenkins becomes deputy leader of the Labour Party.
• 12 July - Jack Nicklaus wins the Open Golf Championship at St Andrews, defeating fellow American Doug Sanders in an eighteen-hole play-off.
• 15 July - Dockers vote to strike leading to the docks strike of 1970.^[26]
• 16 July - A state of emergency declared to deal with the dockers' strike.^[26]
• 16–25 July - British Commonwealth Games held in Edinburgh.
• 17 July - Lord Pearson proposes settlement of docks strike.^[26]
• 30 July - Docks strike settled.^[26]
• 31 July - Last issue of grog in the Royal Navy.^[27]
• 9 August - Police battle with black rioters in Notting Hill, London.
• 20 August - England national football team captain Bobby Moore is cleared of stealing a bracelet while on World Cup duty in Colombia.^[28]
• 21 August - Moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party established in Northern Ireland.^[29]
• 26–31 August - Third Isle of Wight Festival attracts over 500,000 pop music fans, with appearances by Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Doors and Joan Baez.^[30]
• 27 August - The Royal Shakespeare Company's revolutionary production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Peter Brook, opens at Stratford.^[31]
• 9 September - BOAC Flight 775 hijacked by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after taking off from Bahrain—the first time a British plane is hijacked.^[2]
• 18 September - American rock star Jimi Hendrix, 27, dies in London from a suspected drug-induced heart attack.^[32]
• 19 September - The first Glastonbury Festival held.^[2]
• 3 October - Tony Densham, driving the "Commuter" dragster, sets a British land speed record at Elvington, Yorkshire, averaging 207.6 mph over the flying kilometre course.^[33]
• 5 October - BBC Radio 4 first broadcasts consumer affairs magazine programme You and Yours; it will still be running forty years later.
• 15 October - The government creates the Department of Trade and Industry and the Department of the Environment.
• 19 October - British Petroleum discovers a large oil field in the North Sea.^[34]
• 23 October - The MK3 Ford Cortina goes on sale.^[35]
• 25 October - Canonization of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales by Pope Paul VI.
• 17 November - The first Page Three girl appears in The Sun.^[2]
• 20 November - Ten shilling note ceases to be legal tender.^[36]
• 27 November - The Gay Liberation Front organises its first march in London.^[37]
• 10 December - Bernard Katz wins the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Ulf von Euler and Julius Axelrod "for their discoveries concerning the humoral transmittors in the nerve terminals and the mechanism for their storage, release and inactivation".^[38]
• 26 December - Athlete Lillian Board, 22, dies in Munich, West Germany, after a three-month battle against cancer.
• 31 December - The Beatles split up after 10 years.^[39]

Undated

• Last forced child migration to Australia.^[40]
• David Storey's Home premieres at the Royal Court Theatre.
• Album musical Jesus Christ Superstar, by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, released.
• Nijinsky becomes the first horse for 35 years to win the English Triple Crown by finishing first in the Epsom Derby, 2,000 Guineas and St Leger.
• Mathematician Alan Baker wins a Fields Medal.^[41]

Publications

• Agatha Christie's novel Passenger to Frankfurt.
• Lawrence Durrell's novel Nunquam, second in The Revolt of Aphrodite pair.
• J. G. Farrell's novel Troubles.
• Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch.
• Ted Hughes' poetry collection Crow.
• Bernice Rubens' novel The Elected Member.
• Mary Wilson's Selected Poems.^[42]
• The complete New English Bible (the New Testament having been published in 1961).
• The Ecologist magazine founded by Edward Goldsmith (July).^[43]

Births

• 1 January—Brooke Looney
• 7 January Andrew Burnham, politician
• 19 January—Tim Foster, rower
• 20 January—Mitch Benn, comedian and songwriter
• 31 January—Minnie Driver, actress
• 10 February—Rob Shearman, television and radio scriptwriter
• 14 February—Simon Pegg, comedian, writer and actor
• 25 February—Ian Walker, English sailboat racer
• 1 March—Tina Cullen, field hockey player
• 2 March—James Purnell, politician
• 27 April—Kylie Travis, actress and model
• 6 May—Chris Adams, cricketer
• 20 May—Louis Theroux, TV personality, author
• 21 May—Jason Lee, field hockey player and coach
• 22 May—Naomi Campbell, model and actress
• 27 May—Joseph Fiennes, actor
• 19 June—MJ Hibbett, singer-songwriter
• 20 June—Russell Garcia, field hockey player
• 22 June—Christine Cook, field hockey player
• 25 June—Lucy Benjamin, actress
• 2 July—Steve Morrow, footballer
• 6 July—Martin Smith, singer and songwriter
• 7 July—Wayne McCullough, boxer
• 10 July
  • Jason Orange, singer
  • John Simm, actor
• 11 July—Saj Karim, politician
• 29 July—Andi Peters, TV presenter and producer
• 30 July—Christopher Nolan, writer and director
• 31 July—Ben Chaplin, actor
• 13 August—Alan Shearer, footballer
• 27 August—Peter Ebdon, snooker player
• 18 September—Darren Gough, cricketer
• 29 September—Emily Lloyd, actress
• 4 October
  • Richard Hancox, footballer
  • Jason Cousins, footballer
• 10 October—Sir Matthew Pinsent, Olympic winning rower
• 11 October—Andy Marriott, footballer
• 7 November—Neil Hannon, musician (The Divine Comedy)
• 12 November—Harvey Stephens, child-actor
• 13 November—Verity Snook-Larby, race walker
• 22 November—Stel Pavlou, novelist and screenwriter
• 23 November—Zoë Ball, television and radio presenter
• 29 December—Aled Jones, singer and television presenter

Deaths

• 23 January - Ifan ab Owen Edwards, founder of the Urdd (born 1895)
• 26 January - Albert Evans-Jones (Cynan), poet (born 1895)
• 29 January - Basil Liddell Hart, military historian (born 1895)
• 2 February - Bertrand Russell, logician and philosopher, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (born 1872)
• 14 February - Herbert Strudwick, cricketer (born 1880)
• 28 February - Arthur Henry Knighton-Hammond, painter (born 1875)
• 20 April - Thomas Iorwerth Ellis, academic (born 1899)
• 7 May - Jack Jones, novelist (born 1884)
• 7 June - E. M. Forster, writer (born 1879)
• 15 June - Robert Morrison MacIver, Scottish-born sociologist (born 1882)
• 7 July - Allen Lane, publisher (born 1902)
• 20 July - Iain Macleod, politician (born 1913)
• 29 July - John Barbirolli, conductor (born 1899)
• 5 September - Jesse Pennington, footballer (born 1883)
• 8 November - Alasdair Mackenzie, Liberal MP (born 1903)
• 26 December - Lillian Board, Olympic athlete (born 1948)

References

See also