1891 in the United Kingdom

1891 in the United Kingdom:

Other years

1889 | 1890 | 1891 | 1892 | 1893

Individual countries of the United Kingdom

England | Ireland | Scotland | Wales

Sport

1891 English cricket season Football: England | Scotland

Events from the year 1891 in the United Kingdom.

Incumbents

• Monarch – Victoria
• Prime Minister – Robert Cecil, Marquess of Salisbury (Conservative)

Events

• 14 February – In the FA Cup quarter final in English Association football, a goal is deliberately stopped by handball on the goal line. An indirect free kick is awarded, since the penalty kick, proposed the previous year by William McCrum, has not yet been implemented. This event probably changes public opinion on the penalty kick, seen previously as 'an Irishman's motion'.
• 1 to 28 February – The driest month in the EWP series with an average of only 3.6 millimetres (0.14 in).^[1]
• 9–12 March – The Great Blizzard of 1891 in the south and west of England leads to extensive snow drifts and powerful storms off the south coast, with 14 ships sunk and approximately 220 deaths attributed to the weather conditions.^[2][3]
• 17 March – The British steamship SS Utopia sinks in the inner harbour of Gibraltar after collision with the battleship HMS Anson, killing 564.^[4]
• 18 March – Official opening of the London-Paris telephone system.^[5]
• 1 April – The London–Paris telephone system is opened to the general public.^[5]
• 5 April – Census in the United Kingdom: 15.6 million people live in cities of 20,000 or more in England and Wales and cities of 20,000 or more account for 54% of the total English population.
• 25 June – Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes appears in The Strand Magazine for the first time.^[5]

Undated

• Abolition of fees for primary schooling.^[6]
• Baptist Union of Great Britain established by merger of the General and Particular Baptists.^[7]
• Deptford Power Station (designed by Sebastian Z. de Ferranti for the London Electric Supply Corporation) is commissioned, pioneering the use of high voltage (10 kV) alternating current, generating 800 kW for public supply.
• Rachel Beer takes over editorship of The Observer, the first woman to edit a national newspaper.^[8]

Publications

• J. M. Barrie's novel The Little Minister.^[9]
• George Gissing's novel New Grub Street.
• Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
• William Morris' novel News from Nowhere (book publication).
• Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (book version) and Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories.
• Henry James' short story The Pupil published in Longman's Magazine.
• Strand Magazine (January).

Births

• 9 February – Ronald Colman, English actor (died 1958)
• 11 February – J.W. Hearne, English cricketer (died 1965)
• 7 May – Harry McShane, Scottish socialist (died 1988)
• 20 June – John A. Costello, third Taoiseach of Ireland, second to use that title (died 1976)
• 30 June – Stanley Spencer, painter (died 1959)
• 30 August – Henry Tandey, most highly decorated British private soldier of World War I (died 1977)
• 8 October – Ellen Wilkinson, English socialist (died 1947)
• 20 October – James Chadwick, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1974)

Deaths

• 30 January – Charles Bradlaugh, political activist, founder and first president of the National Secular Society. Member of Parliament for Northampton. (born 1833)
• 15 March – Sir Joseph Bazalgette, English civil engineer (born 1819)
• 6 October
  • William Henry Smith, politician and founder of W H Smith (born 1825)
  • Charles Stewart Parnell, Irish nationalist leader (born 1846)
• 15 October – Gilbert Arthur à Beckett, English writer (born 1837)

References

1. Hadley Center Ranked EWP.
2. Woodward, Antony; Penn, Robert (2007). The Wrong Kind of Snow. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 978-0-340-93787-7.
3. Carter, Clive (1971). The Blizzard of '91. Newton Abbot: David & Charles. ISBN 0-7153-5137-0.
4. 562 passengers and crew from Utopia and two rescue sailors from HMS Immortalité – "The Dead of the Utopia". The New York Times. 20 March 1891. Retrieved 28 October 2010.
5. Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
6. Palmer, Alan; Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 318–319. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
7. "Baptist History". Baptist Union of Great Britain. 2008. Archived from the original on 3 October 2010. Retrieved 2010-09-15.
8. Negev, Eilat; Koren, Yehuda (2011). The First Lady of Fleet Street: A Biography of Rachel Beer. London: JR Books. ISBN 978-1-906779-19-1.
9. Leavis, Q. D. (1965). Fiction and the Reading Public (2nd ed.). London: Chatto & Windus.

See also