1975

17-year-old Lesley Whittle heiress to £82,000 in her father's will, was snatched from her bed at the family home in Highley, Shropshire. Her mother was asleep in the house at the time.

Police were called in after Lesley's brother, Ronald, received a ransom demand for £50,000. He followed the kidnapper's instructions to take the money to a telephone box, but he was late making the rendezvous and no-one came to meet him.

The Whittle family ran one of the biggest private coach companies in the country.

At 19:36 CST, an earthquake of Ms 7.5 and intensity (MMI) IX hit the city of Haicheng, Liaoning, China. Much of the city was evacuated before the earthquake, so few died from building collapse; however, many died from fire and hypothermia in the subsequent days.

A strike by police started on February 3 was followed by unrest in Lima, Peru, allegedly instigated by the CIA and APRA, and violently suppressed by the Peruvian Armed Forces by February 5.

Cosmonauts began powering down the Salyut 4 station on February 7 and returned to Earth in the Soyuz capsule two days later. They safely landed near Tselinograd in a snowstorm with winds of 72 km/h and wore gravity suits to ease the effects of re-adaptation.

The British Conservative Party chose Margaret Thatcher as its new leader. She was the first woman to head a British political party after a landslide victory over the other four - male - candidates.

Mrs Thatcher - who served as Secretary of State for Science and Education in Ted Heath's Government - exclaimed "It's like a dream."

The MP for Finchley, north London, since 1959 rejected suggestions of great celebrations.

British mineworkers' leaders have agreed to accept a pay offer from the coal board of up to 35%.

A settlement was reached when the coal board added an extra pound to wage rates after two-and-a-half days' intensive negotiations at the industry's London headquarters.

The deal, brokered by National Coal Board chair Sir Derek Ezra, was worth £140m and meant increases of up to 35% for the UK's 246,000 miners.

A fire occurred at the One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, New York City.

The initial fire was started, and spread from the 11th floor from between the 9th and 14th floors, but was quickly extinguished by firefighters.

Scotland Yard said the man who shot dead a police officer in London had been staying in a flat used as a "bomb factory" by the Provisional IRA.

PC Stephen Tibble, aged 22, had been in the force for just six months when he was shot three times at point blank range by a gunman on the run from detectives in Baron's Court, West London.

The basement of a large Victorian house was found to contain enough bomb-making equipment to make half a dozen high explosive bombs as well as a box of ammunition and an automatic pistol.

A London Underground train crashed at Moorgate, killing the driver and at least 29 passengers and injuring more than 70 in the worst-ever Tube disaster.

The train from Drayton Park to Moorgate was packed with commuters going to work when it overshot the platform and ploughed into a dead-end tunnel.

It failed to stop and carried on past the platform, into the tunnel and smashed through a sand barrier and into a brick wall at 30mph.

Silent film legend Charlie Chaplin became Sir Charles after a ceremony at Buckingham Palace. The ceremony took place just miles from the south London district where he spent much of his childhood.

Sir Charles, who received his knighthood from a wheelchair, was accompanied by his fourth wife, Oona, and the two youngest of his nine children.

The body of Lesley Whittle, the 17-year-old heiress was found at the bottom of a drain shaft 52 days after being kidnapped from her Shropshire home.

Police made the discovery after a three-day intensive search of Bathpool Park at Kidsgrove in Staffordshire, where Lesley's brother Ronald Whittle had tried to meet the kidnapper some seven weeks earlier.

King Faisal of Saudi Arabia died after a gun attack in Riyadh despite the efforts of doctors to save him.

He was fatally wounded when his nephew Prince Faisal Ibu Musaed allegedly fired three bullets at him with a pistol at point blank range during a royal audience.

Riyadh was closed down completely for three days of mourning.

Members of an extreme right-wing UK party, flanked by 2,000 police officers, marched through north London in protest against integration with Europe.

Beating drums and chanting "we're going to get the reds", National Front members marched through Islington waving placards.

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), is a disarmament treaty that effectively bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use.

US Champion Bobby Fischer was to play Russian Anatoly Karpov in Manila, commencing June 1, 1975. Fischer refused to play the then-standard "Best of 24 games" match and, after FIDE was unable to work out a compromise, forfeited his title instead. Karpov was named World Champion by default.

Operation Babylift was the name given to the mass evacuation of children from South Vietnam to the United States and other Western countries (including Australia, France, West Germany, and Canada) at the end of the Vietnam War.

A Lockheed C-5A Galaxy participating in the first mission of Operation Babylift crashed on approach during an emergency landing at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam. The cause was ascribed to loss of flight control due to explosive decompression and structural failure.

There were 138 fatalities, and 176 injuries.

A Boeing 747 chartered by the Daily Mail newspaper carrying 99 Vietnamese orphans landed at Heathrow airport. The newspaper's editor, David English, was inspired by the American Operation Babylift on April 3.

The children, many of them only a few months old, were accompanied by British doctors and nurses on the 18-hour flight from Saigon. At least 30 of the infants were suffering from pneumonia and six had to be taken to hospital after arriving at Heathrow.

The US admitted defeat in Cambodia and removed its remaining embassy personnel from the capital, Phnom Penh.

"Operation Eagle Pull" airlifted 276 people, including 159 Cambodians who had worked with the Americans, with a fleet of 30 helicopters.

Foreign journalists who had been covering the civil war between the communist Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian government were also airlifted out of the country.

At least 17 people were killed and 30 wounded in an ambush by right-wing Lebanese forces on a bus carrying Palestinians in Beirut.

It appeared the Lebanese Phalangist gunmen attacked the bus as it drove through a Christian suburb of Beirut.

The trouble began earlier when Palestinian guerrillas, driving jeeps through the district of Ayn-al-Rummanah, reportedly opened fire on the congregation outside a Maronite Christian church.

A woman attacked was believed to be the sixth victim of a serial rapist operating in Cambridge.

The man wearing a leather hood with eye-slits forced his way into the 22-year-old woman's bed-sit in the city. She awoke to find him holding a knife to her throat.

He then raped her and left her naked, bound and gagged. She managed to raise the alarm four hours later.

The Fall of Phnom Penh was the capture of Phnom Penh, capital of the Khmer Republic (in present-day Cambodia), by the Khmer Rouge, effectively ending the Cambodian Civil War.

The President of South Vietnam resigned accusing the United States of betrayal.

In a TV and radio address, outgoing President Nguyen Van Thieu said his forces had failed to stop the advance of the Vietcong,  suggesting that US Secretary of State Dr Henry Kissinger had tricked him into signing the Paris peace agreement two years ago, promising military aid which then failed to materialise.

A tense stand-off at the West German embassy in Stockholm ended in violence, with the death of at least three people.

Five Baader-Meinhof guerrillas had been holding 11 people hostage, including the German ambassador to Sweden, for almost 12 hours.

Shortly before midnight, a cache of dynamite detonated, setting the building on fire.

A one-day conference held by the Labour Party to debate Britain's membership of Europe voted by almost 2-1 to leave the European Economic Community.

The result underlined deep splits within the party over the issue, which was going to a national referendum on 5 June.

The war in Vietnam ended as the government in Saigon announced its unconditional surrender to North Vietnamese forces.

The President, Duong Van Minh, who had been in office for just three days, made the announcement in a radio broadcast to the nation. He asked his forces to lay down their arms and called on the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong to halt all hostilities.

Betamax was introduced in Japan.

A group of 80 reporters and cameramen - including nine Britons - were allowed to fly out of Saigon to Vientiane in Laos. They were the first Westerners to leave the capital of South Vietnam since it fell to communist forces on 29 April.

A coach carrying elderly passengers crashed at the bottom of a steep hill at Dibble's Bridge, near Hebden in North Yorkshire. Thirty-three people on board were killed, including the driver, and thirteen others injured.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is a 23-member international organization devoted to space exploration with its headquarters in Paris.

A non-binding referendum that took place under the provisions of the Referendum Act 1975 to ask whether the country should continue to remain a member of, or leave, the European Communities (EC) also known at the time as the Common Market — which it had joined January 1, 1973 under the Conservative government of Edward Heath. The Labour Party's manifesto for the October 1974 general election had promised that the people would decide through the ballot box whether to remain in the EC.

British voters backed the UK's continued membership of the European Economic Community by a large majority in the country's first nationwide referendum.

Just over 67% of voters supported the Labour government's campaign to stay in the EEC, or Common Market, despite several cabinet ministers having come out in favour of British withdrawal.

The result was later hailed by Prime Minister Harold Wilson as a "historic decision".

The first live transmission from the House of Commons was broadcast by BBC Radio and commercial stations.

Commentary was provided by BBC political editor David Holmes and Edmund Boyle, from Independent Radio News, who shared a cramped, sound-proofed box inside the chamber.

Secretary of State for Industry Tony Benn was the first minister to be questioned in Parliament live on air, starting a debate which some listeners said was difficult to follow on radio.

Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was barred from holding office for six years after she was found guilty of electoral corruption.

But Mrs Gandhi rejected calls to resign and announced plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Mrs Gandhi was found guilty of dishonest election practices, excessive election expenditure, and of using government machinery and officials for party purposes.

The judge rejected more serious charges of bribery against her.

Lord Lucan murdered the 29-year-old nanny of his three young children, an inquest jury decided.

The earl had not been seen since the night Sandra Rivett died on November 7, 1974.

Scotland Yard detectives said they were "making active inquiries" abroad in an attempt to trace the disgraced peer - nicknamed "Lucky" because of past successes at the gambling table.