Born on this day 12th February
1809 Abraham Lincoln
1905 Harry Bellaver
1915 Forrest Tucker
1923 Franco Zefferelli
1934 Annette Crosbie
1943 Christine Hancock
1969 Steve Backley
1974 Naseem Hamed
1980 Christina Ricci

Died on this day
1982 Victor Jory
1983 Eubie Blake
2000 Charles Schulz

Music

1972 Al Green reached No.1 in the US with his classic track ‘Lets Stay Together’.

1973 Elton John topped the album charts for the first time with ‘Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only The Piano Player’.

1976 Slim Whitman was at the top of the album charts with ‘His Very Best Of’ album, giving him his first chart topping album after a career spanning more than 20 years.

1977 Julie Covington reached the No.1 position with ‘Don’t Cry For Me Argentina’.

1980 Kate Bush was presented with a Music Week award for Top Female Album Artist at the Dorchester Hotel.

Sport

1983 Olympic decathlete Daley Thompson was forced to withdraw from a pentathlon competition in Toronto after injuring his back during the long jump.

1988 Nottingham Forest manager Brian Clough announced that he would not be resigning, despite the club’s refusal to let him manage the Welsh national team on a part-time basis.

People & Showbiz

1990 The editor of the Radio 4 soap opera ‘The Archers’ Ruth Patterson, revealed that the character Nigel Pargetter, played by Nigel Carrington was to be written out of the series.

1994 A spokeswoman for Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis announced that she was suffering from non-Hodgkins lymphoma and was undergoing chemotherapy. Onassis’ condition was discovered when she was being treated for flu-like symptoms.

General Events

1954 The British Standing Authority Committee on cancer claimed that there was a definite link between the disease and cigarette smoking.

1984 Archaeologists had unearthed a 4500 year old egg at a Neolithic site near Zhenghou in the Henan province of central China.

1987 Edwina Curry caused controversy when she said that ‘good Christians won’t get AIDS’.

1992 The World Health Organisation claimed that more than a million people had been infected world-wide with the AIDS virus in just 8 months, with a total of 10-12 million people afflicted with the HIV infection.