The News of 1953.

January:

• Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot has its stage premiere (in its original French) as En attendant Godot at the Théâtre de Babylone in Paris
• United States President Harry S Truman announces the United States has developed a hydrogen bomb
• In Montréal, Marguerite Pitre is the thirteenth and last woman hanged in Canada
• Estonian émigrés found a government-in-exile in Oslo
• State newspaper Pravda publishes an article alleging that many of the most prestigious physicians in the Soviet Union, mostly Jews, are part of a plot to poison the country’s senior political and military leaders
• Marshal Josip Broz Tito is chosen President of Yugoslavia
• The CIA sponsored Robertson Panel first meets to discuss the UFO phenomenon
• Dwight D Eisenhower is sworn in as the 34th President of the United States
• 71.1% of all television sets in the United States tune into I Love Lucy, a record yet to be broken
• Arthur Miller’s historical drama, The Crucible, opens on Broadway
• Rebels in Kenya kill the Ruck family as part of the Mau Mau Uprising
• Derek Bentley is executed at Wandsworth Prison, London for his part in the murder of PC Sidney Miles
• Car ferry MV Princess Victoria sailing from Stranraer, Scotland, to Larne, Northern Ireland, sinks in the Irish Sea killing 133 people including Northern Ireland Deputy Prime Minister Major Maynard Sinclair and Ulster Unionist MP for North Down, Sir Walter Smiles
• The North Sea flood of 1953 kills 1,836 people in southwestern Netherlands, 307 in the UK and several hundred at sea

February:

• Hundreds of native creoles are massacred in São Tomé by the colonial administration and Portuguese landowners in the Batepá massacre
• Walt Disney’s Peter Pan premieres
• President Eisenhower refuses a clemency appeal to convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
• The Soviet Union breaks diplomatic relations with Israel after a bomb explosion at the Soviet embassy in response to the “Doctors” plot
• The Nordic Council is inaugurated
• Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known transgender woman, returns to New York after successful sex reassignment surgery in Denmark
• The Pakistan Academy of Sciences is established
• Georgia approves the first literature censorship board in the US
• James Watson and Francis Crick of Cambridge University announces their discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule
• Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia sign the Balkan Pact

March:

• Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke which paralyses the right side of his body and renders him unconscious until his death several days later
• Georgy Malenkov succeeds Stalin as Premier and First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• The Thieves World, which has been transformed into the Russian mafia, are freed from prison by the Malenkov regime, ending the Bitch Wars
• Nikita Khrushchev is selected General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
• The first nuclear test of Operation Upshot-Knothole is conducted in Nevada
• The Yenice-Gönen earthquake affects western Turkey causing at least 1,070 deaths and $3.6 million in damage
• Mau Mau rebels kill up to 150 Kikuyu natives in the Lari Massacre
• Jonas Salk announces his polio vaccine
• 21-year-old centre forward, Tommy Taylor, becomes Britain’s most expensive footballer in a £29,999 transfer from Barnsley to Manchester United
• Leader of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito, becomes the first Communist leader to visit the UK
• Queen Mary, consort of the late King George V, dies in her sleep at Marlborough House

April:

• Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden is elected UN Secretary General
• Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to 7 years in prison for the alleged organisation of the Mau Mau Uprising
• Ian Fleming publishes Casino Royale, his first James Bond novel
• BBC Television introduces Watch with Mother
• Prime Minister Winston Churchill received a knighthood from the Queen

May:

• Hussein is crowned King of Jordan
• Aldous Huxley first tries mescaline, inspiring his book The Doors of Perception
• In the Australian Senate election, the Liberal/Country Coalition Government, led by Prime Minister Robert Menzies, holds their Senate majority
• An F5 tornado hits downtown Waco, Texas killing 114
• At Rogers Dry Lake, Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to exceed Mach 1
• At the Nevada Test Site, the US conducts its only nuclear artillery test: Upshot-Knothole Grable
• Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first men to reach the summit of Mount Everest
• Blackpool FC win their first major trophy after beating Bolton Wanderers 4-3 in the final of the FA Cup, thanks to an instrumental performance by 38-year-old winger Stanley Matthews

June:

• Currency reform causes riots in Czechoslovakia
• Elizabeth II is crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon, at Westminster Abbey
• In the Italian general election, the Christian Democracy party wins a plurality in both legislative houses
• A single storm-system spawns 46 tornados of various sizes across 10 states from Colorado to Massachusetts over 3 days, killing 246
• CIA Technical Services Staff head Sidney Gottlieb approves of the use of LSD in an MKUltra subproject
• Hungarian Prime Minister Mátyás Rákosi is replaced by Imre Nagy
• Egypt declares itself a republic
• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed at Sing Sing Prison for conspiracy to commit espionage
• The Baton Rouge bus boycott begins in the Southern United States
• Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffers a stroke at a dinner for Italian PM Alcide De Gasperi, apparently due to fatigue
• John Christie is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife Ethel; a total of eight bodies have been found at Christie’s home including the wife and daughter of Timothy Evans, who had been hanged in 1950 for their murder
• The first roll-on/roll-off ferry crossing of the English Channel between Dover and Boulogne

July:

• Soviet official newspaper Pravda announces that Lavrentiy Beria has been deposed as head of the NKVD
• Fidel Castro leads a disastrous assault on the Moncada Barracks, preliminary to the Cuban Revolution
• The Korean War ends with the Korean Armistice Agreement

August:

• Prisoners of war are repatriated to the United States after the Korean War in Operation Big Switch
• Soviet Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov announces the Soviet Union has a hydrogen bomb
• A 7.2 magnitude earthquake devastates Cephalonia and most other Ionian Islands in Greece’s worst natural disaster in centuries
• “Joe 4”, the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon, is detonated at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakh SSR
• Four million workers go on strike in France over austerity measures
• The democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, is overthrown by Iranian military with support from the US and UK in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi
• The French government ousts King Mohammad V of Morocco, and exiles him to Corsica
• The England cricket team under Len Hutton defeat Australia to win The Ashes for the first time in nineteen years

September:

• The discovery of REM sleep is first published by researchers Eugene Aserinksy and Nathaniel Kleitman
• The UN rejects the Soviet Union’s suggestion to accept the People’s Republic of China as a member
• Nikita Khrushchev becomes the head of the Soviet Central Committee
• The Pact of Madrid is signed by Francoist Spain and the US, ending a period of virtual isolation for Spain
• The first German prisoners of war return from the Soviet Union to West Germany
• Sugar rationing ends in the UK
• Sir Hubert Parry’s 1916 setting of “Jerusalem” first appears as a permanent feature of the Last Night of the Proms

October:

• The UNIVAC is 1103 is built, becoming the first commercial computer to use random-access memory
• Earl Warren is appointed Chief Justice of the United States by President Eisenhower
• UNICEF is made a permanent specialised agency of the UN
• In the West German federal election, Konrad Adenauer is re-elected as chancellor
• Laos becomes independent from France
• President Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document of the United States National Security Council NSC 162/2, which states that the country’s arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat

November:

• David Ben-Gurion resigns as Prime Minister of Israel
• Cambodia becomes independent from France
• The Laotian Civil War begins between the Kingdom of Laos and the Pathet Lao, while resuming the First Indochina War against the French Army in a two-front war
• Saudi King Abdul Aziz Al-Saud dies
• The Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket, piloted by Scott Crossfield, becomes the first manned aircraft to reach Mach 2
• Authorities at the National History Museum announce that the skull of Piltdown Man, an allegedly early human discovered in 1912, is a hoax
• Hungary defeat England 6-3 at Wembley in a game dubbed “The Match of the Century”, ending England’s 90-year unbeaten home run against sides outside the British Isles
• Edward Mutesa II, kabaka (king) of Buganda, is deposed and exiled to London by Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen, Governor of Uganda
• The first British developed and built nuclear weapon, Blue Danube, is delivered to the Bomber Command stockpile at RAF Wittering
• The Samaritans telephone counselling service for the suicidal is started by Rev. Chad Varah
• Current affairs series Panorama first airs on BBC Television

December:

• Hugh Hefner publishes the first issue of Playboy magazine in the US, featuring a centrefold nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe
• Vice President Richard Nixon’s visit to Iran sparks several days of riots; three students are shot dead by police in Tehran
• President Eisenhower delivers his “Atoms for Peace” address to the UN General Assembly
• The US Federal Communications Committee approves colour television
• The Soviet Union officially announces that Lavrentiy Beria has been executed
• The Amami Islands are returned to Japan after 8 years of US military occupation
• Ramon Magsaysay becomes the 7th President of the Philippines

Other:

• Heavy rain, landslides and flooding in western and southwestern Japan kills an estimated 2,566 people between June and August
• 25% of British households now own a television set, many families buy one this year to watch the Coronation of Elizabeth II
• According to the Official Charts Company, “I Believe” by Frankie Laine is the biggest-selling single of 1953
• Henry Koster’s Biblical epic, The Robe, is the highest grossing film of the year worldwide