Born. To Alan Bates, 36, handsome star of Georgy Girl, The Fixer and Women in Love, currently playing Hamlet at the Nottingham Playhouse, and Victoria Bates, 28: twin sons, their first children; in Nottingham.

Divorced. Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., 53, educator and Pulitzer-prizewinning historian (The Age of Jackson, 1945, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1965) who served J.F.K. as a special assistant; by Marian Cannon Schlesinger, on grounds of cruel and abusive treatment; after 30 years of marriage, four children; in Cambridge, Mass. Alimony: $4,700 a month.

Died. Helene E. Madison, 57, famed U.S. swimming champion of the late 1920s and early 1930s, who raced off with three gold medals in the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles and at one point held seventeen world records and every single U.S. title; of cancer; in Seattle.

Died. Yusof bin Ishak, 60, Singapore journalist who served as his city-state's first President after it gained independence from Britain in 1963 and from the 14-state Federation of Malaysia two years later; of a heart attack; in Singapore. Founder of the newspaper Utitsan Melayu, which was in the vanguard of the struggle for independence, Yusof was rewarded with the largely ceremonial presidency, serving alongside Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Died. Sir Chandrasekhara V. Raman, 82, Indian physicist who won the 1930 Nobel Prize for his work on the diffusion of light; in Bangalore, India. Professor at the University of Calcutta, Raman discovered in the late 1920s that when a beam of monochromatic light shines through a transparent substance like quartz or water, the wave length, and thus the color, of some of the scattered rays is changed. The Raman effect, as it was called, became useful in determining fine molecular structure.

Died. Benjamin O. Davis Sr., 93, the first black general in the U.S. armed forces; of leukemia; in North Chicago, Ill. A Howard University dropout, Davis began his career in 1898 as a temporary first lieutenant in charge of a volunteer company in the Spanish-American War. He was a lieutenant colonel by 1920, but it was not until the 1940 presidential campaign that F.D.R. elevated the 63-year-old soldier to the rank of brigadier general. After serving as Eisenhower's special adviser on the problems of black soldiers in the European theater, Davis retired in 1948, the year the army abolished most racial barriers.

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