Deaths
- 3 January – Princess Alice, daughter of Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany; and the longest living grandchild of Queen Victoria (born 1883)
- 6 January – A. J. Cronin, Scottish novelist (born 1896)
- 11 February – Franz Sondheimer, German-born British-Israeli chemist.(born 1926)
- 6 March – George Geary, English cricketer (born 1893)
- 11 March – Maurice Oldfield, intelligence chief (born 1915)
- 16 April- Marquess oc Cambridge (born 1895)
- 5 May – Bobby Sands, IRA member and MP (born 1954)
- 9 May – Ralph Allen, footballer (born 1906)
- 17 June – Sir Richard O'Connor, British General in WWII (born 1889)
- 8 September – Bill Shankly, Scottish football manager (born 1913)
- 22 November – Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, German-born British physician and biochemist and Nobel laureate (born 1900)
Read more about this topic: 1981 In The United Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the word deaths:
“As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.”
—Alison Hawthorne Deming (b. 1946)
“Death is too much for men to bear, whereas women, who are practiced in bearing the deaths of men before their own and who are also practiced in bearing life, take death almost in stride. They go to meet death—that is, they attempt suicide—twice as often as men, though men are more “successful” because they use surer weapons, like guns.”
—Roger Rosenblatt (b. 1940)
“I sang of death but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)