"If You Were the Only Girl in the World" features in the London musical The Bing Boys are Here

Hubert Parry sets profoundly evocative verses by William Blake and gives his composition the title Jerusalem

Gustav Holst completes his orchestral suite c, not performed in its entirety until 1920

Robert Graves publishes his first book of poems, Over the Brazier

The author H.H. Munro ('Saki') is killed by a sniper's bullet on a battlefield in France

Lloyd George splits his own Liberal party when he forms a coalition government with the Conservatives

Conscription is introduced in Britain for men aged between 18 and 40

A German U-boat sinks the Channel steamer Sussex, with the loss of many civilian lives

The German and British fleets clash off Jutland, in a hard-fought but inconclusive encounter

Herbert Asquith resigns in the face of a political coup against him, and is replaced as UK prime minister by Lloyd George

Wartime scarcity causes sugar rationing to be imposed in Britain, to be followed soon by meat and butter and related products

Jeeves and Bertie Wooster make their first appearance in P.G. Wodehouse's The Man with Two Left Feet

John Ireland's Second Violin Concerto meets with immediate approval

Foreign Secretary A.J. Balfour declares Britain's conditional support for a homeland in Palestine for the Jews

Anti-German feeling causes the British royal family to adopt the name Windsor instead of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha

German U-boats sink 430 Allied and neutral merchant ships in this month alone

The Allies frustrate the German U-boats by introducing the convoy system

The British viceroy in Dublin imprisons 73 Sinn Fein leaders, including Eamon de Valera, on allegations of a German plot

British women are at last given the right to vote, but only if aged 30 or over

Lytton Strachey fails to show conventional respect to four famous Victorians in his influential volume of short biographes entitled Eminent Victorians

Rebecca West publishes her first novel, The Return of the Soldier

Marie Stopes, a committed advocate of birth control, publishes Married Love, a frank discussion of sexual relations

The Sinn Fein members elected to Westminster establish their own parliament in Dublin, the Dáil Eireann (Assembly of Ireland), soon declared illegal by Britain

The armed supporters of Sinn Fein become the IRA, or Irish Republican Army, in Ireland's war of independence

Michael Collins springs de Valera from Lincoln gaol, with the help of a duplicate key