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

Edward Elgar completes his last great work, the Cello Concerto in E minor

Lillian Gish stars as a Cockney girl in D.W. Griffith's inter-racial film romance Broken Blossoms, set in London's slums

Nancy Astor, as MP for Plymouth, becomes the first woman to take her seat in Britain's House of Commons

In The Economic Consequences of the Peace Maynard Keynes publishes a strong attack on the reparations demanded from Germany

John Singer Sargent completes Gassed, a powerful image of one of the particular horrors of the recent war

German sailors scuttle every one of the fifty warships held by the British in Scapa Flow

Thomas Young's replacement of Pope's Villa is bought by the Sisters of Mercy and becomes St Catherine's School.

Marie Rambert, a Polish dancer with the Ballets Russes, opens a ballet school in London

Bristol-born actor Cary Grant moves to the USA with a troupe of touring tumblers

The Japanese potter Shoji Hamada accompanies Bernard Leach on his return to England

The Meccano company launches the first of its Hornby model trains

Sapper's patriotic hero makes his first appearance, taking on the villainous Carl Peterson in Bull-dog Drummond

D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, a continuation of the family story in The Rainbow, is published first in the USA

The Government of Ireland Act provides for separate devolved parliaments in southern Ireland and the six counties of Ulster

The Marconi studio in the English town of Chelmsford broadcasts Dame Nellie Melba live to Europe and to ships on the Atlantic

The brutal behaviour of the British police reinforcements, the Black and Tans, aggravates the violence in Ireland

Gustav Holst's Hymn of Jesus has its premiere in London, conducted by the composer

The Belgian detective Hercule Poirot features in Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The body of an Unknown Warrior, selected at random from British war graves, is buried at the entrance to Westminster Abbey

Marie Stopes and her husband set up in London a Mothers' Clinic for Birth Control, the first of its kind in Britain

The republican party Sinn Fein is unopposed in southern Ireland's first general election, and so wins every available seat in the Dail

The Sinn Fein members of southern Ireland's new parliament assemble on their own, under the name Dáil Eireann (Assembly of Ireland)

Envoys sent to London by de Valera agree independence for southern Ireland as the Irish Free State, with Dominion status

The Anglo-Irish Treaty, agreed in London, ends the war between the British army and the IRA