Remember A Day | Virginity tests, Chateau Piddle wine and refugee ‘profiteering’: headlines from 40 years ago
- A journey back through time to look at significant news and events reported by the South China Morning Post from this week in history
Demonstrators protesting against virginity tests on Asian women entering Britain, and a British man being allowed to sell his home-made wine as Chateau Piddle made the news four decades ago this week.
February 11, 1979
● Two Hong Kong women in their 40s got a new lease of life following successful kidney transplants at Princess Margaret Hospital. The transplants, done on the same day using the kidneys of a traffic accident victim, were the first of their kind at the hospital, which had opened a year earlier.
February 12, 1979
● More than 150 demonstrators marched on immigration control offices at London Heathrow airport, protesting against virginity tests carried out on Asian women entering Britain. The tests were aimed at checking the bona fides of unmarried women arriving in the country to join their fiancés. The government stopped the procedures after public outcry in Britain and India.
● Three men stole jewels worth HK$3 million while chatting to and distracting a salesman at an international jewellery fair in Munich. Police said one of them vanished with a suitcase full of jewels while his two accomplices engaged the German salesman in conversation.