Isle of Wight Festival the world, with estimates of over 600,000, surpassing the attendance at Woodstock. Included in the line-up of over fifty performers were Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, The Doors, The Who, Lighthouse, Ten Years After, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Joni Mitchell, The Moody Blues, Melanie, Donovan, Gilberto Gil, Free, Chicago, Richie Havens, John Sebastian, Leonard Cohen, Jethro Tull, Taste and Tiny Tim. The unexpectedly high attendance levels led, in 1971, to Parliament adding a section to the Isle of Wight County Council Act 1971 preventing overnight open-air gatherings of more than 5,000 people on the island without a special licence from the
Isle of Wight Railway be loss-making were to be closed, in hand with a major reduction in unremunerative wagonload goods traffic and many other changes. All of the lines on the Isle of Wight were planned to be closed, but vigorous local protest secured the retention of the Ryde to Shanklin section of the former Isle of Wight Railway, despite controversy that the TUCC inquiry stated that closing the Ryde to Ventnor line would cause severe hardship but British Rail then suddenly proposed curtailing the line at Shanklin, which was accepted by the Minister of Transport, Barbara Castle The southern extremity, from Shanklin to