What was a big news story when you were growing up that young people today wouldn't have heard of?

[Brettthepei]

the queens mother passing

The 3 day week
Daylight saving experiment

Living it as opposed to reading about it in history books is a very different thing. You could apply this line of thought to everything mentioned here really.

You think people haven't heard of the moon landing?

The Falklands war. My son was at nursery and I can remember he made a junk model of a tank and painted it green, because it was always on the news every day at home. It sat on a shelf for years.

@ItsOnlyMeNow

I assumed op was looking for stories that were big at the time but not really discussed or thought about now.

I'm puzzled by the number of people listing major historical events in response to this.

This! Reading the thread I think my teens would know a lot of these particularly the bigger historical events (maybe not things like the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster) but mad cow disease came up at dinner last night and neither of them had ever heard of it.

"Manchester Arndale IRA bomb
Bradford football stadium fire
All the strikes and power cuts in the 70s
"Peace" between Russia & the West (Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev)
The Suez crisis
Turkey invasion of Cyprus
Falklands War
Piper Alpha oil rig disaster
Divorces of Princess Ann and Princess Margaret
Vietnam war
Watergate
The Yorkshire Ripper
Dr Buck Ruxton murders
Dr Harold Shipman murders"

@Kazzyhoward how long was your childhood? Buck Ruxton was hanged in the 1930s and Harold Shipman 70 years later

Zeebrugge (Herald of Free Enterprise)
Tiannemen Square
Falklands War

I won't say Hillsborough as my kids know all about that. I'm pretty certain they know about the Berlin Wall falling as well.

Was it not suicide then?

mad cow disease and Terri Schiavo

I've had to look up a few of these,the Summerlands disaster was horrific - I'd never heard of it before. Those poor people.

Here's one that I think fits all interpretations of the brief and I've not seen mentioned:

When I was very young I have a dim memory of a school bus crashing and the school children being badly injured and i think some died. It led to seatbelts being made mandatory on mini buses because they weren't at the time and the outcome would have been very different if the children had been clipped in.

I think nosey old cow would be a fair description 😅

I remember as a child my DGM determinedly going out specifically to buy a copy of the Daily Mirror (she didn't otherwise read it) when they published topless photos of Sarah Ferguson.

She was an elderly, heterosexual, 'respectable' type person - but she still wanted to see the pictures, 'just because'. I never understood her fascination at all.

I remember being told not to stay out late as the Yorkshire ripper will get you. We were in Salford!

Beverley Allitt.

Lesley Whittle, that poor girl. I was 10. I’ve never forgotten how scared it made me feel.

The Manchester United plane crash, when they lost so many of their amazing young football players.

Fred and Rose West. I was talking to a student I had working alongside me who was in to real-time crime. She'd never heard of them!

We went to see a comedian over a decade ago. She was great, as expected (Lucy Porter); but her support act was another (then - and now still - unknown) comedian. He made some appallingly crass 'jokes' about Fred & Rose West and looked very surprised to receive a stony silence, shortly followed by booing and walking out, from the audience.

He wasn't especially young, but we were in Cheltenham at the time, and he apparently hadn't thought that that topic for 'humour' might not go down very well in Gloucestershire, of all places.

In Ireland in 1985 someone claimed they’d seen a roadside statue of the Virgin Mary moving about. Then some kind of delirium took over and people up and down the country decided that they too had witnessed a shuffling Mary or a jigging Jesus.

Thousands of people rocked up at these sites to stare intently at a statue in the hope they’d see it move its right hand a centimetre.

It was such a big news story at the time and one of my earliest memories of TV news.

Ireland was such a different country back then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_statues

New Age Travellers/ Peace Convoy/ The Battle of the Beanfield

although to clarify, the news was reporting the phenomenon of all these people believing that they'd seen statues moving they weren't reporting that statues had actually moved.

I remember seeing the wreckage - I was 6 yrs old. It's one of my most clear memories from childhood. So awful and could've been avoided apparently.

Ethiopian famine, seeing starving children on the news every night. Then every time you didn’t want to eat something in school you would be told eat it and be grateful you didn’t live there 😔

The earliest big news story that I can remember is the assassination of JFK, but I think most young people today would know about that. Then Aberfan, lots of plane hijackings, attempted kidnapping of Princess Anne from her car in the Mall, IRA bombs, the assassination of Mountbatten.

Why are the poor victims of the 1972 Surrey aircrash not named, does anyone know?

I've been googling and can't find them listed at all. Just one victim named, an Irish man called Guy Jackson.

Is this part of a cover up? I see official documentation is being suppressed beyond the usual timeline.

@007DoubleOSeven

Passenger List
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5422f156e5274a1317000377/4-1973_G-ARPI_Append.pdf