British History Timeline

1066 Oct 14 The Battle of Hastings
The Battle of Hastings (14 October 1066) was the decisive Norman victory in the Norman Conquest of England. It was fought between the Norman army of William the Conqueror, and the English...
1605 Nov 5 Gunpowder Plot - Guy Fawkes Day
The Gunpowder Conspiracy of 1605, as it was then known, (also known as The Powder Treason or The Gunpowder Plot) was a failed assassination attempt by a group of provincial English Cathol...
1608 Sep 10 John Smith Elected Council President of Jamestown
Explorer, writer, and cartographer John Smith assumed the presidency of the Jamestown settlement on September 10, 1608. The charismatic and controversial Smith was initially excluded from...
1781 Oct 19 General Charles Cornwallis Surrenders To General George Washington At Yorktown
On October 19, 1781, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered his army of some 8,000 men to General George Washington at Yorktown, giving up any chance of winning the Revolutionary ...
1805 Oct 21 Battle of Trafalgar
The Battle of Trafalgar was a naval engagement fought by the British Royal Navy against the combined fleets of the French Navy and Spanish Navy, during the War of the Third Coalition (Aug...
1812 Jun 18
to 1815 Mar 23
 War of 1812
The War of 1812, between the United States of America and the British Empire (particularly Great Britain and British North America), was fought from 1812 to 1815. There were several im...
1814 Dec 24 The Treaty of Ghent
The Treaty of Ghent, signed on December 24, 1814, in Ghent, currently in Belgium, was the peace treaty that ended the War of 1812 between the United States of America and the United Kingd...
1874 Nov 30 Winston Churchill Is Born
A descendant of the famous aristocratic Spencer family, Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, like his father, used the surname Churchill in public life. His ancestor George Spencer had chan...
1893 Sep Winston Churchill Attends Royal Military College at Sandhurst
Never a strong scholar, the boy Winston rebelled against learning and refused to study what did not interest him. He was, Peter de Mendelsson (The Age of Churchill) reveals, at the bottom...
1895 Winston Churchill Travels To Cuba
"I hope the United States will not force Spain to give up Cuba— unless you are prepared to accept responsibility for the results of such action. If the States care to take Cuba—though this..." —Winston Churchill
1896 Oct Winston Churchill Is Transferred To Bombay
In early October 1896, he was transferred to Bombay, British India. He was considered one of the best polo players in his regiment and led his team to many prestigious tournament victorie...
1898 Winston Churchill Is Transferred To Egypt
The 21st Lancers were then ordered to cut the Dervish line of retreat into the city. As the Regiment advanced, they came under rifle fire from what appeared to be a few hundred skirmisher...
1899 Churchill Acts As War Correspondent During the Second Boer War
In 1899, Winston Churchill headed to South Africa as a newspaper correspondent for the Morning Post to cover the Boer War between British and Dutch settlers. Unfortunately, he was present...
1899 Winston Churchill Publishes 'The River War'
"..there are many people in England, and perhaps elsewhere, who seem to be unable to contemplate military operations for clear political objects, unless they can cajole themselves into the..." —Winston Churchill
1900 Oct 1 Winston Churchill Is Elected To The House Of Commons
Churchill from the beginning invariably addressed national rather than local issues. Oldham (for which he sat in 1900-06) was an important cotton-spinning centre whose electorate favoured...
1900 Dec Winston Churchill Publishes 'The Story of the Malakand Field Force'
"Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inhere..." —Winston Churchill
1908 Apr 12 Winston Churchill Is Promoted To President Of The Board Of Trade
He [Churchill] was also, like Lloyd George before him, very willing to adopt a high profile in trying to resolve industrial disputes. Soon after taking office he set out to strengthen the...
1908 Sep 12 Winston Churchill Marries Clementine Hozier
Various contemporary memoirs contain references to Clementine's outstanding beauty, to which photographs (either then or later) rarely did justice. Lady Cynthia Asquith was to write of he...
1911 Jan 3 The Siege of Sidney Street
The police were armed with bulldog revolvers, shotguns and rifles fitted with .22 Morris-tube barrels for use on a minature range, but these proved completely inadequate for flushing out ...
1914 Oct 5 Winston Churchill Travels To 'The Siege of Antwerp'
On 2 October the Germans succeeded in penetrating two of the city's forts. Churchill was sent to Antwerp to provide a first-hand report on the situation there. Leaving London that night...
1918 Nov 11
11:00AM
 Armistice Signed at Compiegne Marks the End of World War 1
World War I – known at the time as “The Great War” - officially ended when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919, in the Palace of Versailles outside the town of Versailles...
1919 Aug Winston Churchill Establishes The 'Ten-Year Rule'
With peace seemingly assured, in 1919 it was decided that for planning purposes the armed forces should abide by the ten-year rule and not plan on fighting a major war for ten years. Cuts...
1921 Dec 6 Winston Churchill Signs The Anglo-Irish Treaty
The Anglo-Irish Treaty would replace the Third Home Rule Bill and the Ireland Act and would result in a much more independent South Ireland, or Irish Free State as the new country was cal...
1924 Nov 6 Winston Churchill Is Appointed Chancellor Of the Exchequer
Winston Churchill is justly admired for his lonely advocacy of rearmament in the 1930s, but as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s he was an equally staunch and eloquent critic of ar...
1925 Apr 28 Winston Churchill Returns Britain To The Gold Standard
Despite his readmission to office in 1917, after a spell commanding an infantry battalion on the Western Front, he failed to re-establish the reputation as a future national statesman he ...
1933 Oct Winston Churchill Publishes 'Marlborough: His Life and Times
Marlborough: His Life and Times was a panegyric biography written by Winston Churchill about John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough. Churchill was a descendant of the duke. The book com...
1939 Sep 3 Winston Churchill is Re-Appointed First Lord Of The Admiralty
After the Tories were defeated in 1929, Churchill fell out with Baldwin over the question of giving India further self-government. Churchill became more and more isolated in politics and ...
1941 Dec 26 Winston Churchill Addresses A Joint Meeting Of The United States Congress
The date was December 26, 1941. Outside the U.S. Capitol Building, platoons of soldiers and police stood at high alert. Shortly after noon, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill entere...
1942 Nov 10 Winston Churchill Delivers His 'This Is Not The End' Speech
"The Germans have received back again that measure of fire and steel which they have so often meted out to others. Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it ..." —Winston Churchill
1943 Aug 17 First Quebec Conference is Held
The conference also established a new theatre of war in South East Asia, with Lord Mountbatten as commander, and reached an agreement to dissuade Spain from supplying tungsten to Germany ...
1943 Nov 22 Cairo Conference is Held
In November and December of 1943, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss ...
1944 Jun 6
6:30AM
 The Allied Invasion of Normandy Begins with the D-Day Landings
"Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force. You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are u..." —Dwight D. Eisenhower
1944 Sep 12 Second Quebec Conference Is Held
Churchill, Roosevelt and their advisers met for a second time in Quebec in a conference codenamed Octagon. (The first Quebec conference had been held more than a year earlier, in August 1...
1945 Feb 13 The British Royal Air Force Bombs The City Of Dresden
"It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed... I fe..." —Winston Churchill
1951 Oct 25 Winston Churchill Is Elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for a Second Term
After the General Election of 1951, Churchill again became Prime Minister. His third government—after the wartime national government and the brief caretaker government of 1945—lasted unt...
1952 The Mau Mau Uprising Begins
By 1950, mounting frustration over land distribution and political inequality in Kenya had led to the formation of the Mau Mau movement of civil disobedience and violent resistance to Bri...
1953 Oct 15 Winston Churchill Is Awarded The Nobel Prize In Literature
In 1953, Churchill not only received the Nobel Prize, but also, at the time of the Queen’s coronation, was awarded knighthood in the Order of the Garter. Competition for the Nobel ...
1965 Jan 24 Winston Churchill Dies
The final decade of Churchill's life has been described as a "long sunset." He continued to be feted and honored, and he enjoyed a final visit to the White House in 1959. During this peri...
2010 Apr 11 Metal Detectorist Dave Crisp Discovers a Hoard of Roman Coins Worth Over £300,000
The Frome Hoard is a hoard of 52,503 Roman coins found in April 2010 by metal detectorist Dave Crisp near Frome in Somerset, England. The coins were contained in a ceramic pot 45 cm (18 i...