Events from the year 1913 in the United Kingdom.
Incumbents
Monarch – George V
Prime Minister – H. H. Asquith (Liberal) Parliament – 30th
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 (UVF) 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 (RFC) 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. ? August – fifty 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 its invention 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. 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.