1913 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

Monarch - George V

Prime Minister - H. H. Asquith (Liberal)

Events

1 January - The British Board of Film Censors receives the authority 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 (in a speech in Cardiff this evening) 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 U.K. 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 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 RMS Aquitania, 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 Chelsea Flower Show 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, 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.

 ? August - 50 sperm whales strand on the coast of Cornwall.

7 August - American-born aviation pioneer Samuel Franklin Cody is killed with his passenger (English cricketer William Evans) when his Cody Floatplane breaks up in a flight from Farnborough, Hampshire.

13 August - Invention of stainless steel by Harry Brearley in Sheffield (concurrent with the invention of stainless steel in the United States by Elwood Haynes).

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 ("Bloody Sunday") - Dublin Lock-out: The Dublin Metropolitan Police kill one demonstrator and injure 400 in dispersing a demonstration in Sackville Street (Dublin).

6 September - Arsenal F.C., previously based in Plumstead, South London, move into their new stadium at Highbury, North London.

14 October - 439 miners die in the Senghenydd Colliery Disaster, Britain's worst pit disaster.

16 October - HMS Queen Elizabeth 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

Caroline Spurgeon named Hildred Carlile professor of English literature, University of London, the second woman professor in England.

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 U.K.

Publications

E. C. Bentley’s novel Trent's Last Case.

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 (died 2004)

18 January - George Unwin, fighter ace, WWII (died 2006)

30 January - Percy Thrower, gardener and broadcaster (died 1988)

6 February - Mary Leakey, anthropologist (died 1996)

10 February - Douglas Slocombe, cinematographer (died 2016)

13 February - George Barker, poet (died 1991)

15 February - William Scott, Ulster Scots painter (died 1989)

1 March - R. S. R. Fitter, writer (died 2005)

21 March - George Abecassis, race car driver (died 1991)

29 March - R. S. Thomas, poet (died 2000)

25 May - Richard Dimbleby, journalist and broadcaster (died 1965)

26 May - Peter Cushing, actor (died 1994)

2 June - Barbara Pym, novelist (died 1980)

25 June - Cyril Fletcher, comedian (died 2005)

2 July - Marcus Sieff, Baron Sieff of Brimpton, businessman (died 2001)

23 July - Michael Foot, leader of Labour Party 1980-1983 (died 2010)

11 August - Angus Wilson, novelist and short story writer (died 1991)

14 August - Fred Davis, snooker and billiards player (died 1998)

30 August - Richard Stone, economist, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1991)

31 August - Bernard Lovell, physicist and radioastronomer (died 2012)

2 September - Bill Shankly, football manager (died 1981)

29 September - Trevor Howard, actor (died 1988)

26 October - Hugh Scanlon, trade union leader (died 2004)

5 November - Vivien Leigh, actress (died 1967)

21 November - John and Roy Boulting, film directors and producers (died 1985 and 2001 respectively)

22 November - Benjamin Britten, composer (died 1976)

10 December - Harry Locke, character actor (died 1987)

Deaths

12 February - Edward Stanley Gibbons, philatelist, founder of Stanley Gibbons Ltd (born 1840)

25 March - Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley, field marshal (born 1833 in Ireland; died in France)

28 May - John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, prehistorian and naturalist (born 1834)

30 May - John Oldrid Scott, architect (born 1841)

2 June - Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate (born 1835)

8 June - Emily Davison, suffragette (born 1872)

28 September - Sir Alfred East, painter (born 1844)

25 October - Frederick Rolfe, writer and artist (born 1860)

6 November - William Henry Preece, electrical engineer and inventor (born 1834)

7 November - Alfred Russel Wallace, evolutionary biologist (born 1823 in Monmouthshire)

26 November - Frances Julia Wedgwood, feminist novelist, biographer and critic (born 1833)