Without R2014b datetime, you can use regexprep to rearrange the bits of the string you want before calling datenum. It's many orders of magnitude faster than a loop, cellfun, or strsplit.
s2 = regexprep(s, '(\w+) (\w+) (\d+) ([0-9:]+) (\w+) (\d+)', '$3-$2-$6 $4');
tout = datenum(s2, 'dd-mmm-yyyy HH:MM:SS');
On my machine, to process 100k dates, the above two lines takes 2.1 seconds , most of it taken by the datenum operation. The regexp line is only 0.3 seconds.
There remains the problem of the time zone adjustment (which I believe should have come after the conversion to datenum in your example). Your convert_to_UTC is not part of matlab. Hopefully it can operate on cell arrays as well. Thus to extract the timezone:
tzones = regexp(s, '\w+(?= \d+$)', 'match', 'once');
tout = convert_to_UTC(tout, tzones); %Will this work?
