01 - Pope Paul VI appeals for peace in Vietnam.
01 - In Central African Republic, Colonel Jean-Bedel Bokassa
seizes power.
05 - Pentridge Prison escapees Ronald Ryan and Peter Walker are
captured in Concord, Sydney. The two have been on the run for 17
days since shooting dead a warder and walking out of Pentridge
with a Salvation Army chaplain as hostage.
08 - 8,000 GIs launch war's biggest attack against the "Iron
Triangle", a Viet Cong stronghold near Saigon.
11 - India's Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri dies. Mrs Indira
Gandhi comes to power.
13 - Robert C Weaver is the first black member of the US cabinet.
14 - Robert Helpmann is named Australian of the Year.
15 - Nigerian Army led by General Ironsi seizes control of the
country.
17 - After a US air collision, a hydrogen bomb is lost over Spain.
19 - Nehru's daughter Indira Gandhi is new Indian PM.
20 - Australian PM Robert Menzies retires after 16 years in
office. Harold Holt succeeds him.
21 - George Harrison of The Beatles marries
model Patricia (Patty) Anne
Boyd in Surrey, England. The two met on the set of the film
A Hard Day’s Night.
24 - 117 die when an Air India Boeing 707 crashes into Mont Blanc
in France.
26 - Dame Annabelle Rankin is the first woman to serve as a
government minister in Australia. She will be Minister for Housing
in the new Holt Ministry.
The missing Beaumont
children
Jan 28 - Three children from the Adelaide Beaumont
family, Jane (9), Arnna (7) and Grant (4) vanished from Glenelg
beach (South Australia) after taking a bus from their Somerton home 2km away. Their
mother Nancy kissed them goodbye at 10am and told them to be home
by 2pm. That was the last time she saw them.
When the children got off the bus at Glenelg they were seen by
a postman, laughing and holding hands. Later, according to
witnesses, they were playing on the beach with a tall, thin-face
'surfie-type' man in his 30s. The children used a £1 note to buy
their lunch and ordered for four - Nancy had only given them seven
shillings and sixpence.
When the children failed to return home their father Jack and
mother Nancy contacted police. One of Australia's biggest manhunts
was launched, and the country was quickly in the grip of fear for
the safety of children everywhere.
 Police and the media were swamped with reports from people who
had seen the children with the 'surfie' man, but nothing led to
the missing Beaumonts or flushed out their supposed abductor.
A
groundswell of public and political demand for a breakthrough even
led to Scotland Yard and the FBI becoming involved.
To this day the case remains unsolved and the children unfound.
Many believe they were murdered and yet there is a possibility
they are still alive. There have never been any bodies and there
is no evidence that they were murdered.
28 - Film actress Hedy Lamarr is arrested for shoplifting in the
US.
Mutilation
slaying leaves city in shock
January 29 - A 57-year-old cleaner is brutally slain
as she works alone in the Piccadilly Arcade in Wollongong, NSW
(Australia).
The mutilation of Wilhemina Kruger instils
fear in women throughout the city of Wollongong.
Mrs Kruger, who had been employed at the arcade for three
years, had been working for 2 hours when her killer struck shortly
after 4:00 AM.
Despite a desperate struggle with her attacker, Mrs Kruger was
dragged down three flights of stairs to the lower parking area.
She was repeatedly stabbed in the face and body, and was
strangled. Her broken false teeth, shoes and keys and a trail of
blood led down from the upper floor, testimony to her savage
death.
After the murder, police scoured North Beach for a bundle of
blood-stained clothing after information that a man had been seen
acting suspiciously in the area. They interviewed scores of people
including taxi drivers, railway employees and council and hospital
employees.
They investigated psychiatric patients and searched desperately
for four people seen separately near the arcade at the time of the
attack. A State Government reward of $10,000 was continually
renewed but the killer was never found.
Some detectives working on the case believed they knew the
identity of the killer. They believed the man, who was serving a
life sentence for another crime, may also have been responsible
for the Wanda Beach murders of two girls in the same month.
But the lack of evidence meant they were unable to link him
with the death and Wilhemina Kruger's murder remains unsolved.
29 - Auckland International Airport is opened in New Zealand
01 - Star of the silent screen, Buster Keaton dies (b. 1895).
01 - China protests to Britain about US warships in Hong Kong.
01 - Hotel trading hours in Victoria, Australia, are extended from
6PM to 10PM.
02 - Prince Charles starts his term in the bush at Australia's
Geelong Grammar Timbertop school, near Mansfield in Victoria's
high country.
03 - The unmanned Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 makes the first soft
landing on the Moon.
04 - 133 are killed when an airliner crashes in Tokyo Bay, Japan.
04 - The reward for the missing Australian Beaumont children is
increased to £1,050.
06 - 1980s British pop fabrication, Rick Astley, is born.
07 - President Johnson meets South Vietnamese leaders in Honolulu.
10 - The first draft card burner is convicted in the USA.
10 - In the UK, Watneys increase their beer prices by a penny a
pint, which now costs 1/8d.
13 - In Australia, Gough Whitlam uses the TV program Seven Days to
attack the Federal Labor Executive, calling them "12 witless
men", and risks expulsion from the Australian Labor Party.
14 - Goodbye £ - G'day dollars and cents. Australia changes over
to decimal currency.
14 - An H-bomb lost when a US B-52 bomber crashed last month in
Spain has been found completely intact.
21 - President de Gaulle of France calls for NATO to be dismantled.
21 - US resumes bombing raids on North Vietnam.
22 - Milton Obote, PM of Uganda, seizes power and two days later
suspends the constitution.
23 - Italian Premier Aldo Moro forms a new Cabinet.
24 - In Ghana, President Kwame Nkrumah's government is overthrown
by the army while he is on an official visit to China.
28 - Danish architect Joern Utzon quits the construction of the
Sydney Opera House he designed, following a series of
confrontations with the NSW government.
01- The Venera 3 Soviet spacecraft crash lands on
Venus. It is the the first spacecraft to reach the surface of
another planet.
03 - Deputy leader of the Australian Labor party, Gough Whitlam,
survives a bid by the left-wing controlled Federal Executive of
the party to have him expelled from the ALP.
05 - 130 die when a British Boeing 707 crashes into Mount Fuji in
Tokyo, Japan.
08 - Australia announces that it will triple its forces in Vietnam.
10 - France requests removal of NATO bases from all French
territory.
10 - Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands marries an aristocratic
German diplomat, Claus von Amsberg, in Amsterdam.
11 - President Sukarno of Indonesia is stripped of office and army
commander General Suharto takes power.
15 - Black teenagers riot in Watts, Los
Angeles; two men killed
and at least 25 injured.
16 - Gemini 8 carries out the first docking operation in space.
23 - The first official meeting for 400 years of the heads of the
Roman Catholic and Anglican churches takes place in the Vatican.
The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury embrace and exchange a
"kiss of peace".
25 - Flinders University, Adelaide (Australia) is officially
opened.
27 - The World Cup (which had been stolen a few days earlier) is
found in a South London garden by a dog named 'Pickles'.
30 - In Melbourne, Australia, Ronald Ryan is found guilty of the
murder of a warder and sentenced to death.
31 - Labour landslide in British election.
07 - The US hydrogen bomb lost over Spain in January is
recovered off the Palomares.
08 - Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Communist Party leader is now the
top Soviet leader.
09 - Actress Sophia Loren marries Italian producer Carlo Ponti in
France, although Ponti is still married in Italy.
10 - English author Evelyn Waugh dies aged 62, at Combe Florey,
Somerset.
12 - B-52 bombers used for the first time on North Vietnamese
targets.
12 - Jan Berry (of surf vocal duo Jan &
Dean) is seriously
injured in car crash on Whittier Boulevard, Los Angeles.
15 - 80's Page 3 model and "singer", Samantha
Fox, is
born.
SWINGING LONDON: THE PILL, POT AND FREEDOM
April 15
- This, if we are to believe Time magazine, has been the
year of "Swinging London". The cover story of the
magazine has announced this week, "In this century, every
decade has its city ... and for the Sixties, that city is
London".
There is no doubt that London is doing its best to live up to its
billing. The keywords are "uninhibited", "now"
and above all, "young". Certainly there can never have
been a better place to be in your teens and twenties. Ever since
the Beatles made it clear that youth culture was here to stay, and
the Labour Government opted to promote the mood, London has been
taken over by successful young people. Artists, models,
photographers, rock stars, fashion designers - all are dedicated
to serving, and dictating the hip young style.
Social revolution with its miniskirt and contraceptive pill isn't
for everyone. What America calls the "baby boom"
generation has come out to play, but its mystified elders are
clinging desperately to fast eroding traditions. For the young
those "standards" are merely "uncool";
morality, totem of the old, is the dirty word now.
18 - The Sound of Music wins the Academy Award for Best Film.
24 - The first of the 4,500-man Australian Army task force, most
of them conscripts or National Servicemen, leaves for Vietnam
from
Richmond RAAF base in Sydney.
27 - A bid to unseat the Australian opposition leader Arthur
Calwell by his deputy, Gough Whitlam, fails at a caucus meeting in
Canberra.
30 - Hoverlloyd begins the first regular English Channel
hovercraft service, between Calais (France) and Ramsgate (England).
03 - US admits firing on targets in Cambodia for the first time.
MOORS MURDERERS ARE SENTENCED TO LIFE
May
6 - It was a late night telephone call to the police by a
terrified witness that led to the conviction of the moors
murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, tonight. Brady, aged 28,
was sentenced to three concurrent terms of life imprisonment for
the murders of Edward Evans, aged 17, and two children, Lesley Ann
Downey, aged ten, and John Kilbride, aged 12.
Hindley received two concurrent life sentences for the murders
of Evans and Lesley Ann. Police are continuing to search for the
bodies of at least two other missing children on the Pennine
moors.
During the trial, the all-male jury heard harrowing tape
recordings of Lesley Ann's ordeal and viewed nude pictures taken
of the child by the couple before her murder. These had been found
in suitcases traced through a left luggage ticket found in Myra
Hindley's Communion prayer book.
Police were alerted by a call from Hindley's brother-in-law,
David Smith, who had witnessed the killing of Evans with an axe.
Police searched Brady's house and found Evans' body in a blanket.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley - Mastermind of
murder and his willing helper
11 - Police in Barcelona, Spain, beat up 100 priests protesting
against police brutality.
14 - Everton beats Sheffield Wednesday 3-2 in the FA Cup Final.
15 - 10,000 anti-war demonstrators picket the White House while
the pledges of 63,000 voters to vote only for anti-war candidates
are displayed at the Washington Monument.
16 - Janet Jackson is born.
21 - Cassius Clay beats Henry Cooper in the sixth round to retain
the world heavyweight championship in London.
22 - Jackie Stewart wins the Monaco Grand Prix.
25 - Private Errol Wayne Noack, 21, is the first Australian
conscript to be killed in Vietnam.
02 - First Australian troops arrive home on leave from Vietnam.
02 - Surveyor 1, launched May 30, makes the first US soft landing
on the Moon's surface. The spacecraft sends back more than 11,000
televised pictures before its batteries go dead.
03 - US spacecraft Gemini 9 is launched with two astronauts
onboard
06 - James Meredith, the first Negro to brave the colour bar at
the university of Mississippi in 1962, is shot in the back as he
enters Mississippi on a civil rights march. He is taken to
hospital in Memphis and survives..
UNMANNED SPACESHIP LANDS ON MOON
June 6 - Gemini 9 splashed down safely today after failing to
dock with an independently launched satellite. However, the
disappointment was offset by the triumphant success of the
unmanned Surveyor spacecraft, which had soft-landed on the moon
three days before.
Surveyor and its Soviet predecessor which made a landing four
months ago, have removed one of the great uncertainties about the
moon: the nature of its surface. "The area where Surveyor
landed" said one of the project scientists "would
support the weight of a walking man".
06 - The British comedy TV series Till Death Us Do Part screens
for the first time on the BBC.
07 - Dr Martin Luther King leads a
civil rights march through
Mississippi, starting from the point on US Highway 51 where
Meredith was gunned down yesterday.
08 - The British Conservative party request a copy of the script
of Till Death Us Do Part which called
Edward Heath a "grammar
school twit".
11 - Mary Quant and Peter Sellers receive OBE's.
14 - A US pilot admits shooting down two South Vietnamese planes
while high on drugs.
20 - James White gets 18 years for his part in the Great Train
Robbery.
21 - Leader of the Australian Federal Opposition, Arthur Calwell
is shot at and injured as he leaves an anti-Vietnam conscription
meeting in Mosman Town Hall in Sydney.
25 - James Meredith rejoins civil rights
marchers near Jackson,
Mississippi.
26 - A major civil rights
rally is held in Jackson, Mississippi.
29 - US bombers hit Hanoi for the first
time. Previously American policy has been
to stay clear of the North Vietnamese capital while hammering
military targets in the country. The bombers hit five large fuel
storage areas.
29 - Barclays Bank introduce Barclaycard - the first credit card
in Britain.
01 - France withdraws from NATO.
01 - Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt promises the USA that
Australia will go "all the way with LBJ" in Vietnam.
02 - France explodes a nuclear bomb on Mururoa Atoll in the South
Pacific despite strong protest from Britain, America and Australia.
02 - Spain's Manuel Santana beats Dennis Ralston (USA) in the
men's singles final at Wimbledon. Billie-Jean King beats Maria
Bueno for the women's title.
12 - In Australia, the Sydney Water Board bans its female staff
from wearing miniskirts to work.
19 - Frank Sinatra marries Mia Farrow in Las Vegas.
23 - US actor Montgomery Clift dies (b. 1920).
29 - Bob Dylan suffers neck injuries in a serious motorcycle
accident near his home in Woodstock, New York.
"THEY THINK IT'S ALL OVER . . . IT IS NOW!"
July 30
- England, the fathers of the game, have played host
to the world of football and celebrated the occasion by winning
the World Cup for the first time.
In a fluctuating final at
Wembley Stadium the red-shirted England team, managed with laconic
intensity by Alf Ramsey and captained by West Ham's Bobby Moore,
beat a superbly organised West German team 4 - 2 in extra time.
The Germans took an early lead in the final, but Geoff Hurst
equalised and then his West Ham colleague Martin Peters put
England ahead, only to see Germany snatch a scrambled goal on the
stroke of full time.
Extra time was frenetic, until Hurst slammed
a shot against the underside of the crossbar; the ball bounced
down over the goal line (or, as all Germany believes, on to it)
and the goal was awarded. In the dying seconds Hurst completed his
hat trick to put the issue beyond doubt.
Of the 16 nations that reached the final stages, the biggest
surprise was the demise of the holders, Brazil, who lost Pelé
through injury and two matches to Hungary and Portugal to bow out.
RACE RIOTS FLARE UP IN AMERICA
July
31 - America is scarred with racial
unrest. The streets
of Chicago and New York have seen deaths and injuries as black
gangs and police have clashed. Over 4,000 National Guardsmen were
called into Chicago to stop a persistent sniper campaign against
the police. Two blacks were killed and six policemen injured.
The situation in Brooklyn, New York City, has become so ugly
that 1,000 more policemen have been sent in. Black, white and
Puerto Rican gangs have been fighting for a week, resulting in at
least two deaths.
01 - Charles Whitman, 25, shoots 12 dead at Texas University in
Austin, USA, before being killed by a policeman.
01 - The Who fans riot at the National Jazz and Blues Festival at
Windsor, UK.
01 - Colonel Yakubu Gowon seizes power in another Nigerian coup.
02 - Prince Charles departs for home from Australia, saying his
stay at Timbertop school was "marvellous and a worthwhile
experience".
03 - US Comedian Lenny Bruce dies of a drug overdose (b. 1926).
04 - In Australia, a draft call of 46,200 is announced for October
- The highest ever so far.
04 - The Kray twins are taken in for questioning by police
conducting a murder investigation in London.
05 - Commonwealth Games open in Jamaica. For the first time, the
word "Empire" is dropped from the old title of Empire
and Commonwealth Games.
06 - Demonstrations against the Vietnam
War are held across
Australia.
11 - Indonesia and Malaysia end three years of undeclared war.
13 - Chairman Mao proclaims a Chinese cultural revolution at a
mass rally in Peking.
16 - Orbiter I spacecraft is in orbit around the Moon.
18 - 17 Australian soldiers are killed in a savage battle at Long
Tan, where two platoons of the 6th Battalion are encircled by the
Viet Cong.
26 - 20 US soldiers die in Vietnam
when US planes napalm Americans
by mistake.
27 - British yachtsman Francis Chichester sets off from Plymouth
on a solo around-the-world voyage.
29 - The Beatles play their final live concert at Candlestick
Park, San Francisco.
30 - Peter Raymond Kocan, 19, is sentenced to life imprisonment in
Sydney, Australia, for his attempt on Arthur Calwell's life on
June 21.
31 - 92 die when a British airliner crashes in Yugoslavia.
06 - South African Prime Minister Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, the
father of apartheid, is knifed to death by a parliamentary
messenger in Cape Town.
08 - The Severn Bridge is opened in Britain.
13 - Balthazar Johannes Vorster is sworn in as new South African
Prime Minister.
15 - Britain's first Polaris submarine, HMS Resolution, is
launched.
17 - St George defeat Balmain 23-4 in the Australian Rugby League
Grand Final, to make a staggering 11 consecutive premiership wins
for Saints in 11 years.
19 - Singer Joan Baez leads black children to an all-white school
in Mississippi.
22 - All 29 onboard an Ansett ANA Viscount die when it crashes
near Winton in Queensland, Australia.
24 - St Kilda 10.14 (73) beat Collingwood 10.13 (73) by one point
to take their very first VFL Grand Final.
28 - US planes accidentally bomb a friendly South Vietnamese
village killing 28.
01 - Albert Speer, one of Hitler's henchmen, leaves Spandau
Prison after serving 20 years for war crimes.
05 - Spain closes the land frontier with Gibraltar, except for
pedestrians.
07 - Johnny Kidd (born Frederick Heath), lead singer of Johnny
Kidd & The Pirates, is killed in a car crash near Manchester
(UK), aged 27.
08 - The hallucinogenic drug LSD is outlawed in the US.
09 - John Lennon meets
Yoko Ono for the first time.
11 - Jensen presents its latest model cars - the FF and the
Interceptor.
18 - The Queen grants a posthumous free pardon to Timothy John
Evans, the 25-year-old lorry driver who was hanged in 1950 for
murdering his wife and daughter in the house occupied by
mass-murderer John Reginald Christie.
18 - Canadian-born US cosmetics expert Elizabeth Arden (b. 1884)
dies.
20 - US President Johnson arrives in Australia.
21 - Welsh coal tip slips and engulfs a school, burying 116
children and 28 adults alive at the mining village of Aberfan in
South Wales shortly after morning assembly.
21 - Demonstrators throw paint bombs at LBJ during his visit to
Melbourne, Australia.
21 - Five miners are killed in a coal mine collapse in Wyee, NSW,
Australia.
22 - George Blake sentenced to 42 years for spying for Russia. He
breaks out of Wormwood Scrubs jail in London and vanishes.
25 - Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand and South Korea
pledge aid and political self-determination to South Vietnam at
the Manila Conference.
29 - The British Army drops its colour bar.
30 - The Black Panther party is formed by Huey Newton and
Bobby Seale in Oakland, California.
31 - King Ad-Rock (Adam Horowitz) of The Beastie Boys is born.
01 - Galilee wins the Melbourne Cup in Australia.
08 - Republican candidate Ronald Reagan is elected Governor of
California.
09 - Art masterpieces worth $120M are destroyed in severe floods
in Florence, Italy. At least 600 paintings and over 1,000 old
manuscripts and books have been severely damaged. Some
masterpieces such as a 13th century Crucifixion scene have been
totally ruined.
10 - Melbourne brothers John and David Langley are fined $680 each
for throwing paint bombs at Lyndon B
Johnson's car on October 21
during his Australian visit.
13 - Israeli forces attack the Hebron area of Jordan.
15 - James Lovell and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin splashdown after five
days orbiting the Earth in Gemini 12, the last Gemini mission.
16 - President Johnson has surgery to remove a throat polyp and to
repair a small hernia.
20 - Escaped British spy George Blake is reported to have turned
up in East Berlin.
22 - General Franco introduces a new constitution in Spain.
23 - BP says it has struck the best gas-producing areas yet in the
North Sea.
23 - Australian Prime Minister Holt is mobbed by
anti-Vietnam
demonstrators during his election campaign in Sydney.
25 - FBI chief J Edgar Hoover says all evidence suggests Oswald
acted alone in killing Kennedy.
25 - Texas Governor John Connally, wounded in JFK's
assassination,
reiterates his Warren Commission testimony for Life magazine.
Connally swears that he was hit by a second bullet, and not the
same one that had killed President
Kennedy.
Connally had been hit
roughly 1.3 seconds after JFK - As Oswald's rifle could not be
fired faster than once every 2.3 seconds, Connally's bullet would
have come from the gun of a second assassin. Life calls for the
case to be re-opened.
25 - Qantas pilots go on strike over salaries.
26 - First television satellite link-up between Britain and
Australia takes place.
27 - Soviet Communist Party denounces the Chinese leadership.
28 - Australian Holt government sweeps back into power in a
massive win over Labor.
30 - NASA releases close-up photos of the Moon taken by Orbiter 2.
30 - Barbados becomes an independent state.
01 - Kurt-Georg Kiesinger is sworn in as West German Chancellor
(Prime Minister), succeeding Ludwig Erhard. Kiesinger heads the
first coalition government between the two main West German
parties, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats.
02 - 4,530 Qantas employees are laid off because of the pilot's
strike.
08 - 280 feared dead when a Greek ferry sinks in a storm.
10 - A helicopter on charter to the Australian ABC TV station
crashes at Circular Quay, Sydney, killing three people.
LONE SAILOR FRANK CHICHESTER BREEZES INTO SYDNEY
December
12 - The lone British yachtsman, Francis Chichester,
battled his way into Sydney Harbour today, exhausted after his
14,000 mile non-stop voyage from England. The famous adventurer
attributed his success to a driving ambition to fulfil what he saw
as his predestined nature.
"If you don't live life to the full, you will be
frustrated and unhappy. Even though you loathe fear, as I do, you
must go on". Chichester sailed into Sydney Harbour with what
he described as the most wonderful feeling of relief. His main
complaint was that his yacht, Gipsy Moth IV, was completely the
wrong boat.
12 - In Australia, the Victorian State Executive Council says
Ronald Ryan will hang on January 9 next year
WALT DISNEY DIES AGED 65
December 15 - You may not immediately recognise the names of
Michele Topolino, Miguel Ratonicito and Miki Kuchi as anyone you
know. They are what people in Spain, Italy and Japan call Mickey
Mouse, demonstrating the universal appeal of Walt Disney who died
today aged 65.
Disney supplied the idea and the voice for Mickey, followed by
the orchestrated mayhem of Donald Duck, Goofy and Pluto. Snow
White
and the Seven Dwarfs was the first full-length feature in 1937.
After that the studio became an industry.
Disney died in Burbank, California.
20 - Australian Prime Minister Holt says 1,500 more troops are
going to Vietnam, making a total of 6,000.
21 - Strike by Qantas pilots ends.
22 - Southern Rhodesia quits the Commonwealth.
23 - Influential pop music TV show Ready, Steady, Go broadcast its
final show in UK.
23 - The Australian Supreme Court rejects Ronald Ryan's appeal for
a stay of execution.
BRITISH ROCK RULES THE POP WORLD
Dec 31
- For rock fans, 1966 has provided a mix that, more
than ever, shows the ever-widening gap between traditional mass
appeal and the trendier young. And while such "family
favourites" as Ken Dodd and
The Bachelors continue to fill
the charts, it is among the shelves of LPs that youthful interest
can often be found. None more so than Aftermath from The Rolling
Stones - an album that epitomises this year of "Swinging
London".
Not that the rockers don't hit the charts as well. The year
started with The Beatles' Day Tripper at
Number One and Paperback
Writer and Eleanor Rigby both went to the top. Other youth culture
successes included hits for The Who,
The Kinks and The Small
Faces, while those in the know tip the weirdly named Pink Floyd
and The Soft Machine.
"In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom.
It swings; it is the scene"
Time Magazine, "London: The Swinging City", April
15, 1966
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