| 26th January 1956 | The 1956 Winter Olympics open in Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy. |
| 22nd February 1956 | Elvis Presley enters the U.S. music charts for the first time, with “Heartbreak Hotel“. |
| 23rd February 1956 | Norma Jean Mortenson legally changes her name to Marilyn Monroe. |
| 19th April 1956 | British diver Lionel Crabb dives into the Portsmouth harbour to investigate a visiting Soviet cruiser and vanishes. |
| 24th May 1956 | The first Eurovision Song Contest is broadcast from Lugano in Switzerland. The winning song is “Refrain”, sung by Lys Assia. |
| 3rd June 1956 | British Rail renames 'Third Class' passenger facilities as 'Second Class'. Second Class facilities had previously been abolished in 1875. |
| 10th June 1956 | Equestrian events open in Stockholm at the 1956 Summer Olympics. All other events are held in November in Melbourne, Australia.
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| 28th June 1956 | MP Sydney Silverman's bill for the abolition of the death penalty passes in the House of Commons. |
| 29th June 1956 | Actress Marilyn Monroe marries playwright Arthur Miller. |
| 10th July 1956 | The House of Lords defeats the abolition of the death penalty. |
| 31st July 1956 | Jim Laker sets an extraordinary record at Old Trafford in the fourth Test match of the 1956 Ashes series. Laker becomes the first cricketer to take all ten wickets in a single innings and he takes a record total of nineteen wickets in the match. Laker’s final figures are an incredible nineteen for ninety. No other player has taken more than seventeen wickets in a match. |
| 13th September 1956 | The Hard Disk Drive is invented by an IBM team led by Reynold B. Johnson. |
| 15th October 1956 | The Royal Air Force retires its last Lancaster bomber. |
| 31st October 1956 | The United Kingdom and France begin to bomb Egypt in an attempt to force the re-opening of the Suez Canal. |
| 22nd November 1956 | The 1956 Summer Olympics begin in Melbourne, Australia. |
| 5th December 1956 | Rose Heilbron becomes Britain's first female judge. |
| 23rd December 1956 | British and French troops leave the Suez Canal region. |