1913 in the United Kingdom

Incumbents

• Monarch – George V
• Prime Minister – H. H. Asquith
• 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 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.
• ? August – fifty sperm whales strand on the coast of Cornwall.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

• 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 UK.

  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
• 17 January – Shaun Wylie, mathematician and World War II codebreaker
• 18 January – George Unwin, World War II fighter ace
• 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
• 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
• 21 March – George Abecassis, race car driver
• 22 March – Cyril Hart, forestry expert
• 29 March
• * Jack Jones, trade union leader
• * R. S. Thomas, Welsh poet
• 3 April – Peter Coke, actor
• 19 April – Michael Wharton, humorist "Peter Simple"
• 8 May – Sid James, South African-born comic actor
• 12 May – Hugh Latimer, actor
• 25 May – Richard Dimbleby, journalist and broadcaster
• 26 May – Peter Cushing, actor
• 1 June – Bill Deedes, journalist and politician
• 2 June – Barbara Pym, novelist
• 14 June – Stanley Black, musician
• 25 June – Cyril Fletcher, comedian
• 2 July – Marcus Sieff, Baron Sieff of Brimpton, businessman
• 3 July – William Deakin, World War II soldier and historian
• 18 July – Nat Temple, band leader
• 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 – Rosemary Murray, chemist
• 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
• 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
• 29 September – Trevor Howard, actor
• 2 October – Vivian Ridler, printer and typographer
• 19 October – Robert Yewdall Jennings, judge
• 22 October – Tamara Desni, actress
• 23 October – David Tabor, physicist
• 26 October – Hugh Scanlon, trade union leader
• 5 November
• * Guy Green, film-maker
• * Vivien Leigh, actress
• 8 November – Frederick Gore, artist
• 11 November – Ivy Benson, bandleader
• 12 November – Kenneth Steer, archaeologist
• 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
• 26 December – Elizabeth David, née Gwynne, cookery writer

  Deaths

• 23 January – Frederick Holman, Olympic gold medal swimmer
• 12 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 – William Henry Preece, electrical engineer and inventor
• 7 November – Alfred Russel Wallace, evolutionary biologist
• 26 November – Frances Julia Wedgwood, feminist novelist, biographer and critic