1887 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1887 in the United Kingdom. This year was the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

Incumbents

Events

12 January – Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, while waiting to discuss his resignation from the office of Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, dies at 10 Downing Street.
20 January – Emigrant ship Kapunda sinks after a collision off the coast of Brazil, killing 303 with only 16 survivors.
18 February – National Colliery disaster at Cwtch in the Rhondda: an underground explosion kills thirty miners.
7 March–18 April – The Times publishes a series of articles on "Parnellism and Crime" quoting letters, subsequently confessed to be forgeries, intended to discredit Charles Stewart Parnell by appearing to show him as implicated in illegal activities, in particular, support for the 1882 Phoenix Park Murders.
28 March – Irish Crimes Act suspends trial by jury in Ireland.
31 March – St. John Ambulance Brigade formed.
3 May – Royal Jubilee Exhibition, Manchester, is opened by Princess Alexandra.
9 May – Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show opens in London.
11 May – First female victim of the Thames Torso Murders found.
28 May – Udston mining disaster in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, Scotland: 73 coal miners die in a firedamp explosion at Udston Colliery.
17 June – Hammersmith Bridge opens in London.
20 June – Jubilee coinage first issued, including the only issue of a double florin.
20–21 June – Queen Victoria and the country celebrate a Golden Jubilee, the 50th year of her reign.
21 June – Jubilee Plot: Clan na Gael supporters land in Britain from the United States to commit terrorist offences.
22 June – Zululand becomes a British colony.
26 July — Blackpool F.C. founded.
5 September – Theatre Royal, Exeter burns down, and 186 people die.
1 October – British Empire takes over Balochistan.
6 October – the Hōvis process for manufacture of breadmaking flour is patented.
6 November – the Association football club Celtic F.C. is formed in Glasgow by Irish Marist Brother Walfrid to help alleviate poverty in the city's East End by raising money for his charity, the Poor Children's Dinner Table.
11 November – construction of the Manchester Ship Canal begins.
13 November – Bloody Sunday: Police in London clash with radical and Irish nationalist protesters.
17 December – English adventurer Thomas Stevens concludes the first circumnavigation by bicycle in Yokohama, having set out on his penny-farthing from San Francisco in 1884.
25 December – Glenfiddich single malt Scotch whisky first distilled.

Undated

The Hospitals Association establishes the first register of nurses in the UK.
Sir John Everett Millais' painting Bubbles is acquired for advertising purposes by Pears soap.

Publications

Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet.
H. Rider Haggard's novels She and Allan Quatermain.
Thomas Hardy's novel The Woodlanders.

Births

10 February – E. V. Rieu, classicist and poet
5 March – Herbert Farjeon, man of the theatre
9 March – Phil Mead, cricketer
1 May – Alan Cunningham, World War II general
5 May – Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury
24 May – Mick Mannock, World War I flying ace
4 June – Ray Strachey, born Rachel Costelloe, feminist campaigner
21 June – Hastings Ismay, army officer
22 June – Julian Huxley, biologist
29 July – William Graham, Scottish politician
3 August – Rupert Brooke, war poet
16 August – Hugh Dalton, politician
22 August – Walter Citrine, trade unionist
31 August – William McMillan, sculptor
7 September – Edith Sitwell, poet
26 September – Edwin Keppel Bennett, writer
26 September – Barnes Wallis, scientist, engineer and inventor
11 October – Henry Montgomery Campbell, Bishop of London
1 November – L. S. Lowry, painter
11 November – Maurice Elvey, born William Folkard, film director
17 November – Bernard Montgomery, World War II commander
23 November – Boris Karloff, born William Pratt, film actor
Isabel Emslie Hutton, Scottish nurse in Serbia during World War I and psychiatrist

Deaths

12 January – Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, politician
22 January – Sir Joseph Whitworth, mechanical engineer
10 February – Mrs Henry Wood, novelist
13 February – Philip Bourke Marston, poet
4 March – Mrs W. H. Foley, actor, singer, director and manager
23 April – John Ceiriog Hughes, Welsh poet
7 May – Samuel Cousins, engraver
8 May – Thomas Stevenson, Scottish lighthouse engineer and meteorologist
21 May – Sir Horace Jones, architect
10 June – Richard Lindon, inventor
8 July – John Wright Oakes, landscape painter
25 July – Henry Mayhew, writer
16 August – Webster Paulson, civil engineer
12 October – Dinah Craik, novelist and poet
5 December – Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons, diplomat
14 December – William Garrow Lettsom, diplomat, mineralogist and spectroscopist
23 December – Adolphus Frederick Alexander Woodford, parson