Born on this Day 5th March
1133 King Henry II of England
1713 Edward Cornwallis
1908 Sir Rex Harrison
1927 Jack Cassidy
1958 Andy Gibb
1912 The Hon David Astor
1936 Dean Stockwell
1948 Elaine Page
1974 Matt Lucas

Died On This Day
1778 Thomas Arne
1790 Flora MacDonald
1953 Sergei Prokofiev
1953 Joseph Stalin
1984 Tito Gobbi

Music

1954 Legendary jazz man Duke Ellington entered the singles charts with ‘Skin Deep’.

1974 Slade topped the album chart with their third successive No.1 ‘Old New Borrowed and Blue’.

1982 AC/DC were warned that they would be arrested if they fired their cannons on stage in Hartford, USA.

Sport

1992 England beat Australia by eight wickets and South Africa beat the West Indies by 64 runs in the Cricket World Cup.

1992 South African born footballer Roy Wegerle completed a £1m transfer from Queen’s Park Rangers to Blackburn Rangers.

People & Showbiz

1990 Television presenter Esther Rantzen launched a national telephone service to help counsel bullies and their victims.

1992 Sir Clive Sinclair unveiled his latest invention, the electric bicycle.

1992 Porn queens Ilona Staller, Virna Bonino and Luisa Pistarino launched a campaign in Rome to be elected MPs, as candidates for Italy’s Party of Love.

General Events

1868 The first stapler was patented by C.H.Gould of Birmingham.

1936 The first Spitfire was flown by Capt J. Summers, from Eastleigh Airport in Southampton.

1946 In reference to the Russian threat to the west, Winston Churchill coined the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’.

1956 The telephone weather forecasting service was inaugurated in Britain.

1989 100,000 people marched through London demonstrating in favour of increased NHS funding.

1990 The president of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill denied allegations made in the ‘Daily Mirror’ that he had used Libyan money to pay loans on his house and that of Peter Heathfield, the general secretary of the union.

1992 Figures published by the Transport Department showed that an average of 3 in 5 motorists were breaking motorway speed limits.

1992 It was reported that a hospital with straw beds to accommodate hedgehogs was to be opened at Authorpe in Lincolnshire.