| 7th January 1979 | Vietnam and supporting Cambodian insurgents announce the fall of Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and the collapse of the Pol Pot regime. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge retreat west to an area along the Thai border. |
| 18th February 1979 | The Sahara Desert experiences snow for thirty minutes. |
| 22nd February 1979 | Saint Lucia becomes independent of the United Kingdom. |
| 30th March 1979 | Airey Neave, a World War II veteran and Conservative Northern Ireland spokesman, is killed by an Irish National Liberation Army bomb in the House of Commons car park. |
| 4th May 1979 | The Conservatives win the general election and Margaret Thatcher becomes the new Prime Minister. |
| 8th May 1979 | Ten shoppers die in Manchester city centre due to a fire in a Woolworth’s store. |
| 30th May 1979 | Nottingham Forest wins the European Cup, beating Malmo 1-0 in the Munich-based final. |
| 2nd June 1979 | Pope John Paul II visits his native Poland, becoming the first Pope to visit a Communist country. |
| 11th June 1979 | John Wayne, American actor (b. 1907) dies from stomach cancer. |
| 16th July 1979 | Iraqi President Hasan al-Bakr resigns and Vice President Saddam Hussein replaces him. |
| 9th August 1979 | The first British nudist beach is established in Brighton. |
| 27th August 1979 | Lord Mountbatten and three other people are assassinated by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He was a British admiral, statesman and an uncle of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. On the same day, the Warrenpoint ambush occurs: Provisional Irish Republican Army members attack a British convoy at Narrow Water, County Down, killing eighteen British soldiers. |
| 1st September 1979 | The U.S. ‘Pioneer 11’ becomes the first spacecraft to visit Saturn, when it passes the planet at a distance of 21,000 km. |
| 4th November 1979 | 3,000 Iranian radicals, mostly students, invade the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and take ninety hostages; fifty-three of whom are American. The radicals demand that the United States send the former Shah of Iran back to stand trial. |
| 23rd November 1979 | In Dublin, Provisional Irish Republican Army member Thomas McMahon is sentenced to life in prison for the assassination of Lord Mountbatten. |
| 4th December 1979 | The Hastie fire in Kingston upon Hull leads to the deaths of three boys. The hunt begins for Bruce George Peter Lee, the United Kingdom's most prolific killer. |
| 9th December 1979 | The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified. Smallpox is therefore the first human disease to be driven to extinction. |
| 24th December 1979 | The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. |