Life and Times - Scotland and the World in the early 1900s
22 January 1901: Queen Victoria dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while staying at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
11 July 1902: Arthur Balfour becomes Prime Minister.
29 September 1902: The death of William Topaz McGonagall, widely celebrated as the worst poet ever to have written in the English language.
27 December 1904: The first perfromance takes place in London of J.M. Barrie's classic play Peter Pan.
1904-1913: Some 600,000 Scots, 13% of the population, emigrate for North America, the Commonwealth and elsewhere in the UK, taking with them a disproportionate share of Scotland's skills and education. Between 1921-1931 a further 400,000 Scots leave the country.
1907: The British Aluminium Company begins production of aluminium at Kinlochleven.
24 May 1908: The death of Old Tom Morris, the father of modern golf.
17 April 1909: Rival Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic fans riot following the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden Park.
3 April 1910: The death of Catherine Helen Spence the leading Australian author, teacher, journalist, and campaigner for women's rights.
21 September 1910: Captain Bertram Dickson flies the world's first ever military sortie in an aeroplane, observing military manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain.
2 October 1910: Captain Bertram Dickson is seriously injured in the world's first ever mid-air collision, which takes place over Milan.
1911: The population of Scotland reaches 4,761,000.
13 December 1911: Businessman Thomas Blake Glover, one of the founding fathers of modern Japan, dies in Tokyo.
20 July 1912: Andrew Lang, the prolific Scottish historian, translator, journalist, poet, writer, teacher, biographer and anthropologist dies.
4 August 1914: Britain declares war on Germany.
24 December 1914: The death of John Muir, noted naturalist, explorer, writer, and geologist.
1915: Naval bases are established at Scapa Flow in Orkney and Invergordon north of Inverness.
22 May 1915: 227 people are killed and 246 more are injured in a rail crash at Quintinshill, near Gretna Green.
26 September 1915 : The death of Keir Hardie, first leader of the Labour Party.
30 December 1915: The Royal Navy cruiser HMS Natal explodes in the Cromarty Firth with the loss of 405 lives.
26 November 1917 : The death of pioneering surgeon and suffragette, Elsie Inglis.
11 November 1918: The First World War comes to an end. During the war 140,000 Scots are killed.
1 January 1919: The troop ship Iolaire sinks in the entrance to Stornoway harbour, killing over 200 islanders returning from World War One.
31 January 1919: There are riots in Glasgow against rent levels and in favour of a shorter working week. The government responds by moving the army into the city.
21 June 1919: The captured German fleet is scuttled in Scapa Flow, Orkney.
6 July 1919: The airship R34, built in Glasgow, lands in the USA after a non-stop flight from East Fortune, near North Berwick.
11 August 1919: Andrew Carnegie, industrialist and philanthropist, dies.
1919: The death of Sir Hugh Munro, politician and founding member and President of the Scottish Mountaineering
23 October 1921: The death in Dublin of John Boyd Dunlop, populariser of the pneumatic tyre.
22 January 1924: Ramsay MacDonald becomes Britain's first Labour Prime Minister, the first Prime Minister from a working-class background, and one of very few without a university education.
1924: Westminster debates a Home Rule Bill for Scotland, but it is not voted on.
7 May 1925: Lord Leverhulme dies, leaving uncompleted his development work on the isles of Harris and Lewis.
26 January 1926 : John Logie Baird gives the first public demonstration of the television transmission of the picture of a human face to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his lab at 22 Frith Street, Soho.
28 January 1928 : The death of Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, British commander in the First World War.
28 September 1928: Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin.
1928: The National Party for Scotland is founded.
1928: All women over 21 are given the vote: married women over 30 were given it in 1918.
10 December 1928 : The death of Charles Rennie Mackintosh the hugely influential architect and design icon.
5 June 1929: Ramsay MacDonald becomes Prime Minister for the second time.
1930: Unemployment in Scotland reaches 25% during the depression years.
7 July 1930: Death of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
29 August 1930: The remote Island of St Kilda, lying in the Atlantic to the west of the Western Isles, is evacuated.
1933: The first regular air service in Scotland is established, from Inverness to Wick and Orkney.
April 1934: The Scottish National Party is founded.
26 September 1934: The liner "Queen Mary" is launched at the John Brown shipyard on the River Clyde, before going on to break transatlantic speed records following her maiden voyage to New York on 27 May 1936.
7 February 1935 : Lewis Grassic Gibbon, the author of the classic Scottish novel, Sunset Song dies, aged just 34.
12 February 1935 : Robert Watson-Watt, the inventor of effective radar, successfully demonstrates aircraft detection using radio signals at Daventry.
17 April 1937: 149,547 fans attend the Scotland vs England football match at Hampden Park, Glasgow: a world record football crowd at the time and an enduring European record.
9 November 1937: The death of Ramsay MacDonald, three times Prime Minister of Great Britain.
May-December 1938: The Empire Exhibition takes place in Glasgow's Bellahouston Park. A team of architects led by Thomas S. Tait oversee the building of the largest collection of modern architecture in the United Kingdom in the first half of the 20th century. Over 12 million people visit the exhibition.
27 September 1938: The liner "Queen Elizabeth", the largest passenger ship so far built, is launched at John Brown's on the Clyde.
3 September 1939: The Second World War is declared.
4 September 1939: The Scottish Office establishes its Headquarters in Edinburgh at St Andrews House.
13 October 1939: HMS Royal Oak is sunk by a German submarine in Scapa Flow.
16 October 1939: The first German aircraft to be shot down over Britain in WWII is attacked by fighters over the River Forth.
11 February 1940: John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, author and Governor General of Canada, dies.
5 February 1941: The SS "Politician", loaded with 264,000 bottles of whisky, runs aground on Eriskay in the Western Isles. Much of the cargo is salvaged by residents.
8 February 1941: Tom Johnston is appointed Secretary of State for Scotland.
13-15 March 1941: The shipyards of Clydeside are bombed by the Luftwaffe and 1,000 are killed.
10 May 1941: Deputy German Führer, Rudolph Hess parachutes into Scotland, apparently intending to meet the 14th Duke of Hamilton.
1942: Colonel David Stirling's 1st SAS Regiment undertake a series of raids behind enemy lines in North Africa, destroying over 250 enemy aircraft on the ground.
9 June 1942: The first 10,000 US troops to arrive in Europe disembark from the Queen Mary on the River Clyde.
April 1945: The Scottish National Party wins its first parliamentary seat at the Motherwell and Wishaw by-election. It loses it again at the general election six weeks later.
8 May 1945: V-E, or Victory in Europe day marks the end of the war in Europe.
15 June 1945: The Queen Mary leaves the River Clyde, taking 15,000 US troops home.
14 June 1946: John Logie Baird, one of the fathers of television, dies at his home in Bexhill-on-Sea.
1947: The first Edinburgh Festival is held.
October 1949: The National Covenant for Home Rule is launched by John MacCormick.
