1952
year
1952 (MCMLII) was a leap year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 1952nd year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 952nd year of the 2nd millennium, the 52nd year of the 20th century, and the 3rd year of the 1950s decade.
Events
January–February
January 10 - A Douglas C-47 Dakota operated by Aer Lingus crashes in Wales while flying from Northolt Royal Air Force Station to Dublin. All twenty-three occupants are killed.
January 26 – Black Saturday in Egypt: Rioters burn Cairo's central business district, targeting British and upper-class Egyptian businesses.
February 6
Princess Elizabeth, Duchess of Edinburgh, becomes monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the British Dominions: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan and Ceylon. The princess, who is on a visit to Kenya when she hears of the death of her father, King George VI, aged 56, takes the regnal name Elizabeth II.
In the United States, a mechanical heart is used for the first time in a human patient.
February 7 – New York City announces its first crosswalk devices to be installed.
February 14–25 – The Winter Olympics are held in Oslo, Norway.
February 15 – The State Funeral of King George VI of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the British Dominions and the last Emperor of India, takes place. George VI's coffin is brought in procession through London to Paddington Station where a royal train brings the King to Windsor, where his funeral and burial take place at St.
“1952” enters the record as year. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what year can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1952” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, year provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5272. The Library of Congress control number is sh2012004063. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
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Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “1952” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.