1972 – Five children died and thirteen others were injured when a wooden roller coaster train came off its tracks at the Battersea Park funfair in London. After the accident, the ‘Big Dipper ‘ was closed and dismantled. With the lack of a main attraction, the fair’s popularity quickly declined and the funfair closed in 1974.

1972 – The Official IRA announced a ceasefire, but the Provisional IRA said it would continue fighting until the British left Northern Ireland.

1972 – The Angry Brigade, a small British anarchist group, went on trial over a series of 25 bombings throughout the United Kingdom.

1986 – England cricketer Ian Botham was banned from international matches for two months for possession of drugs.

1989 – British singer Cliff Richard released his 100th single record, entitled ‘The Best of Me’.

2003 – The death of Mickie Most, record producer, with a string of hit singles with acts such as The Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, Kim Wilde and Suzi Quatro, often issued on his own RAK Records label.

2013 – Mark Bridger was found guilty of abducting and murdering five-year-old April Jones, in a sexually motivated attack. The schoolgirl went missing on 1st October 2012 near her Machynlleth home, sparking the biggest search in UK police history. Her remains were never found, but fragments of bone consistent with a juvenile human skull were found among ashes in the woodburner at Bridger’s home, along with April’s blood near to a number of knives, including one which has been badly burned. From the time of his arrest, Bridger, the 37th person to be given a whole-life tariff, stuck steadfastly to his story that he could not remember where he had put April’s remains. At the time of April’s disappearance, ribbons were tied to the railings around the town’s clock tower, on shop doors and pinned to trees.

2019 – EE switched on the UK’s first high speed 5G mobile network service, with those in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester being the first to get the faster services. Prices for 5G – which required new handsets – started at £54 per month for 10 gigabytes of data. Huawei 5G phones were excluded from the launch, thanks to a recent US ban on American companies dealing with the Chinese owned Huawei.