Famous British people for the Life in the UK test

Early Britain

Boudicca

Queen of the Iceni in eastern England, who fought against the Romans. Her statue stands on Westminster Bridge in London.

St Augustine

Led a mission from Rome to the south of Britain and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

St Columba

A missionary from Ireland who spread Christianity in the north of Britain. He founded a monastery on the island of Iona.

Political leaders

Sir Robert Walpole

Generally seen as the first Prime Minister. He led the government from 1721 to 1742.

Bonnie Prince Charlie

Led the Jacobites, who wanted to bring back the Stuart kings. His army was defeated at Culloden in 1746.

Winston Churchill

Prime Minister from May 1940 and Britain's leader in the Second World War. He lost the 1945 election but returned in 1951, and in 2002 he was voted the greatest Briton of all time.

Clement Attlee

Labour Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951. His government created the NHS, nationalised major industries and built the welfare state.

Aneurin (Nye) Bevan

Minister for Health who led the founding of the NHS in 1948.

Margaret Thatcher

The first woman Prime Minister, from 1979 to 1990. Her government privatised industries, and the Falklands were recovered in 1982.

Sailors, soldiers and explorers

Sir Francis Drake

Sailed around the world in his ship, the Golden Hind, and was one of the commanders when the Spanish Armada was defeated in 1588.

Captain James Cook

Mapped the coast of Australia in the 18th century. The first colonies there followed.

Admiral Nelson

Defeated the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 but was killed in the battle. His ship, HMS Victory, can be visited in Portsmouth.

The Duke of Wellington

Defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and later became Prime Minister.

Campaigners and reformers

William Wilberforce

An Evangelical Christian and MP who played a leading part in ending the slave trade.

Florence Nightingale

Nursed soldiers in the Crimean War and set up a nurse training school at St Thomas' Hospital. She is widely seen as the founder of modern nursing.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Suffragette leader, born in Manchester in 1858. In 1903 she helped to found the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).

Scientists and thinkers

Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley

Early members of the Royal Society, the oldest surviving scientific society in the world.

Adam Smith, David Hume and James Watt

Scottish figures of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, known for economics (Smith), philosophy (Hume) and steam power (Watt).

John Maynard Keynes

An economist whose new theories were very influential in the years between the two world wars.

Ernest Rutherford

A New Zealand-born scientist. He led the team in Manchester and Cambridge that was the first to 'split the atom'.

Alexander Fleming

A Scottish-born doctor who discovered penicillin in 1928. Howard Florey and Ernst Chain later developed it into a drug people could use.

Francis Crick

A Briton who shared the Nobel Prize after the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953.

Alan Turing

A mathematician who devised the Turing machine in the 1930s, a foundation of computer science.

Inventors and engineers

Richard Arkwright

Started out as a barber and wig-maker. In the Industrial Revolution he developed efficient and profitable cotton factories.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel

A Victorian engineer who built the Great Western Railway, as well as bridges, tunnels and ships. He designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.

John Logie Baird

A Scottish inventor who developed television in the 1920s.

Sir Robert Watson-Watt

A Scot who developed radar. The first successful test was in 1935.

Sir Frank Whittle

An RAF engineer officer who developed the jet engine in the 1930s.

Sir Christopher Cockerell

Invented the hovercraft in the 1950s.

Sir Peter Mansfield

Co-invented the MRI scanner.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Invented the World Wide Web. Information was first sent over it on 25 December 1990.

Sir Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe

Pioneered IVF. The world's first 'test-tube baby' was born in Oldham in 1978.

Sir Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell

Led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

Writers and poets

Geoffrey Chaucer

Wrote The Canterbury Tales, about pilgrims telling stories on the way to Canterbury. William Caxton, England's first printer, printed it.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Playwright and actor born in Stratford-upon-Avon. His plays include Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.

Robert Burns (1759–96)

Scottish poet known as 'The Bard'. Auld Lang Syne, sung at New Year, is based on a song he reworked.

Jane Austen

Novelist who wrote Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.

Charles Dickens

Novelist who wrote Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol.

Rudyard Kipling

Born in India in 1865. He wrote The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories, and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.

Dylan Thomas

Welsh poet, born in Swansea, who wrote the radio play Under Milk Wood and the poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.

Roald Dahl

Born in Wales to Norwegian parents. His children's books include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and George's Marvellous Medicine.

Artists, architects and composers

Our arts and culture guide covers many more names. These are some of the best known.

Sir Christopher Wren

Architect who designed the new St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

J M W Turner

A landscape painter who raised the status of landscape art. The Turner Prize for contemporary art is named after him.

Sir Edward Elgar

Composer of the Pomp and Circumstance Marches. The first of these, 'Land of Hope and Glory', is sung on the Last Night of the Proms.

Sir Edwin Lutyens

Architect who planned New Delhi and designed the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Sports people

Our sport guide has the full list.

Sir Roger Bannister

The first person to run a mile in under four minutes, in 1954.

Bobby Moore

Captain of the England team that won the football World Cup in 1966.

Sir Steve Redgrave

A rower who won gold medals at five Olympic Games in a row.

Mo Farah

A distance runner born in Somalia. In 2012 he became the first Briton to win Olympic gold over 10,000 metres.

Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson

A Paralympic wheelchair athlete who won 16 medals, 11 of them gold, over five Games.

How to remember them

• Learn one fact per person: what they did, made or won.
• Watch out for pairs that are easy to mix up, such as Nelson (Trafalgar) and Wellington (Waterloo), or Whittle (jet engine) and Cockerell (hovercraft).
• Some questions ask where a person was born, such as Mo Farah (Somalia) or Ernest Rutherford (New Zealand).