1913 in the United Kingdom

Events from the year 1913 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

Monarch – George V
Prime Minister – H. H. Asquith

Events

1 January – the British Board of Film Censors begins to classify and censor films.
13 January – Edward Carson founds the Ulster Volunteer Force by unifying several existing loyalist militias to resist home rule in Ireland.
15 January – unemployment and maternity benefits introduced.
30 January – the House of Lords rejects the Third Irish Home Rule Bill for the second time, by 326 to 69.
10 February – news reaches London of the failure of Capt. Scott's 1912 polar expedition.
15 February – Barry Jackson opens the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.
19 February – suffragette arson attack on a house being built for David Lloyd George near Walton Heath Golf Club. Emmeline Pankhurst claims to have incited this and other incidents.
26 February – the Royal Flying Corps establishes the first operational military airfield for fixed-wing aircraft in the UK at Montrose in Scotland.
c.1 March – British steamship Calvados disappears in the Marmara Sea with 200 on board.
28 March – the Morris Oxford 2-seater car goes on sale.
2 April – suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst is sentenced to three years of penal servitude.
11 April – the Nevill Ground's cricket pavilion in Royal Tunbridge Wells is destroyed in a suffragette arson attack.
21 April – the Cunard ocean liner, built by John Brown & Company, is launched on the River Clyde.
9 May–11 July – major industrial strike in the Black Country of England.
20 May – the first ever Chelsea Flower Show is held in London.
4 June – Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of the King's horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. She is trampled and dies four days later on 8 June, never having regained consciousness.
26 June – first female magistrate appointed, Miss Emily Dawson, in London.
7 July – the Irish Home Rule Bill is once again carried in the House of Commons, despite attempts by Bonar Law to obstruct it.
26 July – 50,000 women take part in a pilgrimage in Hyde Park, London organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.
7 August – American-born aviation pioneer Samuel Franklin Cody is killed with his passenger when his Cody Floatplane breaks up in a flight from Farnborough, Hampshire.
13 August – invention of stainless steel by Harry Brearley in Sheffield.
15 August – Mental Deficiency Act 1913 passed, establishing a Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency to oversee the implementation by local Mental Deficiency Committees of provisions for the care and management people classed as "Idiots", "Imbeciles", "Feeble-minded persons" and "Moral Imbeciles", who are to be committed to institutions, including a new category of "mental deficiency colony".
26 August – Dublin lock-out: members of James Larkin's Irish Transport and General Workers' Union employed by the Dublin United Tramways Company begin strike action in defiance of the dismissal of trade union members by the chairman, businessman William Martin Murphy.
31 August – Dublin lock-out: the Dublin Metropolitan Police kill one demonstrator and injure 400 in dispersing a demonstration in Sackville Street (Dublin).
August – fifty sperm whales strand on the coast of Cornwall.
September – Army Manoeuvres of 1913: a fighting retreat from a position near Daventry and the use of spotter aircraft are practised.
6 September – Arsenal F.C., previously based in Plumstead, South London, move into their new stadium at Highbury, North London.
18 September – Avro 504 military aircraft first flies; more than 10,000 will be built.
c. 1 October – Caroline Spurgeon named Hildred Carlile professor of English literature, University of London, the second woman professor in England.
14 October – 439 miners die in the Senghenydd Colliery Disaster, Britain's worst pit disaster.
16 October – launched at Portsmouth Dockyard as the Royal Navy's first oil-fired battleship.
20 December – serious fire at Portsmouth Dockyard destroys the semaphore tower.

Undated

Sir Aston Webb remodels Buckingham Palace's main East Front, in London.
Carter's Crisps of London introduce commercial manufacture of potato crisps to the UK.

Publications

E. C. Bentley's novel Trent's Last Case.
Ethel Carnie's working class novel Miss Nobody.
Walter de la Mare's Peacock Pie: a book of rhymes.
Arthur Holmes' book The Age of the Earth, describing the estimation of the age of the Earth to 1.6 billion years using radiometric dating.
D. H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers.
Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, 3rd volume of Principia Mathematica, one of the most important and seminal works in mathematical logic and philosophy.

Births

2 January – Anna Lee, actress
13 January – Lotte Berk, dancer and dance teacher
16 January – Tom Burns, sociologist
17 January – Shaun Wylie, mathematician and World War II codebreaker
18 January – George Unwin, World War II fighter ace
27 January – Jack Lee, film director
30 January – Percy Thrower, gardener and broadcaster
4 February – Richard Seaman, motor racing driver
6 February – Mary Leakey, anthropologist
10 February – Douglas Slocombe, cinematographer
13 February – George Barker, poet
15 February – William Scott, Ulster Scots painter
17 February – Frederick Higginson, fighter pilot
28 February – Wally Ridley, record producer and songwriter
1 March – R. S. R. Fitter, writer
9 March – John Fancy, aviator
15 March
*George Bennions, fighter pilot
*Jack Fairman, racing driver
21 March – George Abecassis, racing driver
22 March – Cyril Hart, forestry expert
29 March
* Jack Jones, trade union leader
* R. S. Thomas, Welsh poet
31 March – Walter Winterbottom, footballer
3 April – Peter Coke, actor
5 April – Anne Scott-James, journalist
11 April – Chrystabel Leighton-Porter, model
16 April
* Charles McLaren, 3rd Baron Aberconway, industrialist and horticulturalist
* Les Tremayne, actor
19 April – Michael Wharton, humorist "Peter Simple"
24 April – Lady Marguerite Tangye, debutante and actress
1 May – Florence Bell, scientist
4 May – Charles Rob, surgeon
8 May – Sid James, South African-born comic actor
12 May – Hugh Latimer, actor
18 May – Jane Birdwood, politician
24 May – James Flint, Royal Air Force officer, businessman
25 May – Richard Dimbleby, journalist and broadcaster
26 May – Peter Cushing, actor
27 May – Linden Travers, actress
29 May – Douglas Black, physician
31 May – Graham Webster, archaeologist
1 June
* Patrick Dalzel-Job, naval commando
* Bill Deedes, journalist and politician
2 June – Barbara Pym, novelist
14 June – Stanley Black, musician
15 June
* Trevor Huddleston, Anglican bishop and anti-apartheid activist
* John Sinclair Morrison, classicist
23 June – Mollie Harris, actress and author
25 June – Cyril Fletcher, comedian
28 June – George Lloyd, composer
2 July – Marcus Sieff, Baron Sieff of Brimpton, businessman
3 July – William Deakin, World War II soldier and historian
10 July – Elizabeth Inglis, actress
18 July – Nat Temple, band leader
21 July – Catherine Storr, children's writer
23 July – Michael Foot, Labour Party leader 1980–1983
25 July – John Cairncross, Scottish-born public servant, spy for the Soviet Union, academic and writer
28 July
* Hedley Kett, British naval officer
* Rosemary Murray, chemist
30 July – Marjorie Williamson, educator
3 August – Paul Bryan, politician
11 August – Angus Wilson, novelist and short story writer
14 August – Fred Davis, snooker and billiards player
16 August – Monty Berman, cinematographer
21 August – Arnold Goodman, Baron Goodman, lawyer and political adviser
30 August – Richard Stone, economist, Nobel Prize laureate
31 August – Bernard Lovell, physicist and radio-astronomer
2 September – Bill Shankly, football manager
4 September – Victor Kiernan, Marxist historian
7 September – Martin Charteris, Baron Charteris of Amisfield, army officer and courtier
8 September – Mary Hardwick, tennis player
23 September – Andy Barr, Irish communist and trade unionist
29 September – Trevor Howard, actor
2 October – Vivian Ridler, printer and typographer
7 October – Derek Lang, general
19 October – Robert Yewdall Jennings, judge
22 October – Tamara Desni, actress
23 October – David Tabor, physicist
26 October
* Harry Kartz, businessman
* Hugh Scanlon, trade union leader
27 October – Leonard Rosoman, artist
28 October – Douglas Seale, English actor
5 November
* Guy Green, film-maker
* Vivien Leigh, actress
8 November – Frederick Gore, artist
11 November – Ivy Benson, bandleader
12 November – Kenneth Steer, archaeologist
13 November – Hermione, Countess of Ranfurly, novelist
14 November – Eve Gardiner, beautician and remedial make-up artist
21 November – John and Roy Boulting, film directors and producers
22 November – Benjamin Britten, composer
26 November – Sybil Marshall, writer
9 December – Peter Smithers, Conservative politician
10 December – Harry Locke, character actor
12 December – Edward Lowbury, bacteriologist
13 December – Arnold Brown, Salvation Army general
26 December – Elizabeth David, née Gwynne, cookery writer

Deaths

23 January – Frederick Holman, Olympic gold medal swimmer
17 February – Edward Stanley Gibbons, philatelist, founder of Stanley Gibbons Ltd
25 March – Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley, field marshal
28 May – John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, pre-historian and naturalist
30 May – John Oldrid Scott, architect
2 June – Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate
8 June – Emily Davison, suffragette
28 September – Sir Alfred East, painter
25 October – Frederick Rolfe, writer and artist
6 November – Sir William Henry Preece, electrical engineer and inventor
7 November – Alfred Russel Wallace, evolutionary biologist
26 November – Frances Julia Wedgwood, feminist novelist, biographer and critic