1953

June

 * 1-2 - Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster in London, an event which the Wire attempted to exploit by absorbing the identities of everyone watching the event on live television. The Tenth Doctor stopped and trapped her. (TV: The Idiot's Lantern) No one in the Welsh village of Llanfer Ceiriog had a television, so the townsfolk travelled by bus to Doctor Snape's house in Gwydyr to watch it on his set. (PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark)

December

 * 18 - The airplane Sky Gypsy vanished. It actually time travelled to 2007. (TV: Out of Time)
 * 25 - Queen Elizabeth II made her second annual Christmas speech. While his granddaughter Susan Campbell and great-grandson Alex Campbell were celebrating Christmas in the TARDIS with him and Lucie Miller, the Eighth Doctor wanted to watch this particular Christmas speech using the Time-Space Visualiser, as 1953 was a "great year." (AUDIO: Relative Dimensions)

Unknown dates

 * Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, based on the witch trials at Salem Village, was written. The First Doctor, his granddaughter Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright saw a production of the play in Bristol on 9 November 1954. (PROSE: The Witch Hunters)
 * Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart began his military career. (TV: Mawdryn Undead)
 * The BBC science fiction television series Nightshade, starring Edmund Trevithick as the title character, was first broadcast. It ran for five years and was rebroadcast on BBC2 in December 1968. (PROSE: Nightshade, PROSE: The Left-Handed Hummingbird)
 * A spacecraft carrying Rivesh Mantilax on a mission to rescue his wife, Seruba Velak, was shot down over Area 51 in the United States. He was rescued by a group of Native Americans led by Night Eagle and kept hidden from American authorities for the next five years. (TV: Dreamland)
 * The Mau Mau Uprising against the rule of the British Empire took place in British Kenya. (AUDIO: A Thousand Tiny Wings)
 * It was discovered that the Piltdown Man was not the missing link in human evolution but a human cranium and a filed down ape jaw. (AUDIO: The Suffering)

Alternative timeline

 * In an alternative timeline in which Nazi Germany won World War II and eventually conquered Africa as a result of the Seventh Doctor and Ace accidentally leaving laser technology in Colditz Castle in October 1944, the Mau Mau Uprising against Nazi rule took place in Kenya. The Luftwaffe was sent in immediately. On the orders of the Führer Adolf Hitler, they proceeded to carpet-bomb the tribal areas and wipe out most of the native population. Within three years, a virulent plague had broken out in Kenya which killed many German soldiers. In 1957, Hitler placed Elizabeth Klein in command of a team of medical doctors and scientists who attempted to discover the cause of the plague. However, they were unable to do so. (AUDIO: A Thousand Tiny Wings)

January

 * 10 - Maya Woolfe, who played a receptionist in TV: Arc of Infinity, was born.
 * 11 - John Sessions (Mozart in AUDIO: My Own Private Wolfgang) was born.
 * 15 - Gareth Hale (Len in TV: Survival) was born.

February

 * 12 - Nabil Shaban (Sil in TV: Vengeance on Varos et al.) was born.
 * 17 - Norman Pace was born.

May

 * 21 - Trevor Cooper was born.

June

 * 1 - Tim Bentinck (Giles Moreau and Jenkins in AUDIO: Destination: Nerva and Roger Buchman in AUDIO: Wirrn Isle) was born.
 * 22 - Ian Levine was born.

July

 * 18 - The Quatermass Experiment, written by Nigel Kneale, the first of the Quatermass television plays, debuted on BBC Television. Many of the ideas and situations in the serial were later used in Doctor Who. Quatermass himself arguably existed in the Doctor Who universe.
 * 30 - Phil Davis (Lucius Petrus Dextrus in TV: The Fires of Pompeii) was born.

August

 * 9 - Roberta Tovey was born.
 * 17 - Stephen Flynn (Grigory in TV: Revelation of the Daleks) was born.
 * 29 - Doña Croll (Matron Casp in TV: New Earth) was born.

September

 * 10 - Stuart Milligan (Richard Nixon in TV: The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon) was born.

October

 * 4 - Christopher Fairbank was born.

November

 * 21 - Jon Older (a Doctor Who 1st Assistant Director) was born.

December

 * 5 - Christopher Guard (Bellboy in TV: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) was born.