The Daily Telegraph Wednesday 24 July 2019 *** 29people, his resolve to end the dispute
by violent means hardened.
By far the loudest government voice
in favour of brutal repression, Li won
over his colleagues, including the
leader, Deng Xiaoping, and on May 20
he declared martial law. A fortnight
later the tanks rolled into Tiananmen
Square, and the protests were brought
to a brutal and bloody end.
Though there has never been an
official death toll, some estimate that
several thousand people were killed.
“Without these measures China would
have faced a situation worse than in
the former Soviet Union or Eastern
Europe,” Li would later say.
He was born Li Yuanpeng on
October 20 1928 in the Shanghai
French Concession. His father, Li
Shuoxun, had been an early member
of the Communist Party who was
executed by the Kuomintang and later
hailed as a revolutionary martyr.
When he was 11 Li met Deng
Yingchao; she took him to meet her
husband, Zhou Enlai, who would go
on to become China’s first Premier.
The couple effectively adopted Li, andin 1945 he joined the Communist
Party.
Li was by then studying at what
would become the Beijing Institute of
Technology, and in 1948 he was sent to
study hydroelectric engineering at the
Moscow Power Engineering Institute;
he was also chairman of the Chinese
Students Association in the country.
Zhou had become Premier in 1949,
and when Li went home in 1955 the
communists were in full control. For
the next quarter of a century he served
in various capacities in the country’s
power industry, surviving the
depredations of the Cultural Revolution
thanks partly to his position as head of
the powerful Beijing Electric Power
Administration and partly to his
impeccable contacts in Party circles.
Li’s political star rose rapidly when
Deng Xiaoping came to power and,
heavily backed by a Party elder, Chen
Yun, he joined the Central Committee
in 1982, was made education minister
in 1985, and was elected to the
Politburo and the Party Secretariat.
In 1987 he became a member of the
powerful Standing Committee, and in
November that year, when Zhao
Ziyang was promoted to General
Secretary, Li became Premier, initially
on an acting basis before being elected
formally in March 1988.
When Zhao publicly supported the
Tiananmen protesters, walking among
them and delivering an apologetic
speech through a megaphone, his fate
was sealed, and following the
crackdown Li was instrumental in
bringing his career to an end. Zhao
lived under house arrest for 15 years,
dying in 2005.Although the Tiananmen massacre
was an unmitigated disaster in terms
of China’s world standing, Li survived- partly, it is thought, because
punishing him would have meant
admitting that it had been a mistake.
In the years following, he carried out
an austerity programme designed to
slow inflation and bring the economy
under the strictest state control.
After he suffered a heart attack in
1993 his power began gradually to
wane, until his second term of office
ended in 1998, when he took on the
largely symbolic role of Chairman of
the National People’s Congress (a post
he held until 2003). His decline was
clearly indicated by the election for
the position: even though it was
uncontested Li received only 90 per
cent of the vote.
During the 1990s he developed an
energy monopoly, the State Power
Corporation of China, inserting
relatives into key positions. He
devoted the rest of his career, when he
was not fighting off rumours of
corruption, to his two pet projects, the
Three Gorges dam and the Shenzhou
Manned Space Programme.
The former was lambasted for
causing long-lasting ecological
damage, as well as flooding
architectural and cultural sites, while
the latter also came in for heavy
criticism due to its massive cost.
Li Peng married Zhu Lin, who
survives him, along with their three
children, two of whom went on to
manage power companies.
Li Peng, born October 20 1928, died
July 22 2019Chinese politician known as ‘the Butcher of Tiananmen’ for his role in the brutal crackdown of 1989
Li Peng
Pioneer of NMR spectroscopy who contributed to its adoption in healthcare and other fields
Sir Rex Richards
D
ICK RICHARDS, who
has died aged 95, was
a member of Bill Haley
and his Comets at the height
of their fame; although
he did not play on their
best-known recordings, he
was the onstage drummer
between 1953 and 1955,
when the band was making
rock’n’roll-sized waves
around the world, and he
was behind the skins when
Rock Around the Clock was
first played live.
He was born Richard
Marley Boccelli on February
12 1924 at Yeadon in
Pennsylvania. He attended
West Chester University,
where he excelled at
American Football.
Bill Haley had formed
the Saddlemen in the late
1940s; they played blues-
tinged country and western,
but gravitated towards
rockabilly and the nascent
rock’n’roll, changing their
name to the Comets in
the process. Haley asked
Richards to join the band,
and Rock Around the Clock
was recorded in April 1954,
although Haley used one of
his trusted session men, Billy
Gussak, on drums.
But Richards was playing
when the band gave Rock
Around the Clock its first live
outing, at the Hotel HofBrau
in Wildwood, New Jersey, on
Memorial Day the following
month. “The first crack of
the drums and the kids went
crazy,” he recalled. “They
were up on the floor dancing
around. We knew what to
do, just lay the beat down.
They really got into it.”
Although there was an
ecstatic reception, the
song did not truly take off
until it was used on the
opening credits of the film
Blackboard Jungle in 1955,
and it reached No 1 on both
sides of the Atlantic.It was a similar story for
Richards on the equally
celebrated follow-up, Shake,
Rattle and Roll: he did not
play drums on the record,
but was thought to have
joined in on backing vocals,
and he did play on the
B-side, ABC Boogie.
In late 1955 he left
the Comets, along with
bassist Marshall Lytle and
saxophonist Joey Ambrose,
to start the Jodimars, who
lasted until 1958.
Richards found a second
career as an actor. In the
1960s he appeared in local
theatre productions, and
went on to act on Broadway,
appearing in a comedy, The
Ritz, alongside Rita Moreno
and F Murray Abraham.
He had a recurring role in
the soap The Edge of Night
in 1980, and played a desk
cop in the crime thriller
Shakedown (1988). He had
a small part in the Mob
comedy My Blue Heaven
(1990) with Steve Martin and
Rick Moranis, and he was in
the HBO prison drama Oz in
1998 and 1999.
Bill Haley died in 1981,
but the members of the
Comets who had played
with him reunited in the late
1980s, playing on until 2014.
Richards also latterly toured
with his own band, the
Ready Rockers. Haley was
posthumously inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of
Fame in 1987, but the rest of
the Comets had to wait until
2012 for their elevation.
Dick Richards married,
in 1950, Betty Kurtz. She
died in 1986, and he became
partners with Shirley
Kubaska. He is survived
by two daughters; another
daughter predeceased him.Dick Richards, born
February 12 1924, died July
12 2019Dick Richards
Drummer who shot to fame
with Bill Haley and his Comets
Richards, far right, with Bill Haley, top, and the rest of the CometsL
I PENG, who has died aged
90, served as China’s
Premier between 1987 and
1998; he became known as
“the Butcher of Beijing”, or
“the Butcher of
Tiananmen”, for his role in the
infamous crackdown on dissidents in
1989 in which hundreds of people,
probably thousands, were killed by
state forces.
In his diaries – which were due to be
published in 2004 until the Chinese
government intervened, and were
eventually published in 2010 – Li
attempted to minimise his part in the
massacre, and to shift the blame on to
China’s leader Deng Xiaoping, who, he
claimed, had taken the decision to
impose martial law and send in the
army to clear the square.
Li maintained that he himself had
only supported the crackdown
because he was afraid that the
pro-democracy protests might spill
over into endemic civil disorder and
said he was prepared to die to prevent
that happening.
Violent repression, he claimed, had
been necessary to prevent “a tragedy
like the Cultural Revolution”. But his
post hoc rationalisations failed to
convince.
He had been elected Premier in
1988, following several years of social
unrest, with inflation, overcrowding in
schools, and severe discontent over
internal migration.
There had been much debate within
the Party about the advisability of
economic and political reforms, as
China began to look outwards and
think about taking its place in the
global financial system; Li was firmly
in the traditionalist camp, fearing that
too much change too quickly would
undermine the Party’s authority.
The death from a heart attack in
April 1989 of Hu Yaobang, who had
been effectively purged because of his
liberal bent, led to mass mourning,
and on the eve of his funeral about
100,000 people gathered in
Tiananmen Square. Demonstrations
calling for reform proliferated, and
there were soon protests around the
country.
Part of the demonstrators’ fury was
directed at state officials and their
children, and as Li and his family had
attracted attention in the past over
allegations of corruption in the power
industry, he found himself directly in
the firing line.
He refused to negotiate with the
protesters, and when one of their
leaders, Wu’erkaixi, went on hunger
strike and denounced Li on national
television for ignoring the needs of theLi Peng in 1993, and
right, Chang'an
Avenue, off
Tiananmen Square,
a few hours after
the end of the
military operation
Li had ordered: it
was necessary, he
claimed, to prevent
'a tragedy like the
Cultural Revolution'S
IR REX RICHARDS, who has
died aged 96, was a pioneer of
nuclear magnetic resonance
(NMR) spectroscopy and served
as Warden of Merton College, Oxford,
from 1969 to 1984 and as Vice-
Chancellor of the University of Oxford
from 1977 to 1981.
Richards was one of the first
scientists to appreciate that the newly
discovered phenomenon called
nuclear magnetic resonance, first
described and measured in 1938 by
Isidor Rabi, and further developed in
1946 by Felix Bloch and Edward Mills
Purcell, could have unexpected
applications in chemistry.
In the early 1950s, working at the
Physical Chemistry Laboratory in
Oxford, he set out to build his own
NMR spectrometer from scratch,
ignoring the advice of some fellow
scientists that heavy magnets and
masses of electronics had no place in a
chemistry laboratory.
In an interview he recalled
obtaining what he needed from an old
aircraft hangar full of war surplus
equipment in Abingdon where “you
went with a trolley and just loaded it
up and paid a few pence per pound
weight”. He then spent hours and
hours in the evenings labouring away
with a soldering iron until his efforts
were crowned with success.
He began working on structures of
simple inorganic molecules and,
progressing to more powerful
magnets, was the first to apply NMR
techniques to the determination of
unknown molecular structures.
From 1969 to 1984 Richards was
chairman of a group of researchers
known as the Oxford Enzyme Group,
among other things helping to design,
with Oxford Instruments and Bruker,
the first Fourier Transform
spectrometer of sufficiently high field
to resolve the NMR spectra of proteins
and other complex molecules.
He contributed to the technique’s
adoption in a wide variety of scientific
disciplines and, working with the
biochemist George Radda, was among
the first researchers to investigate the
properties of phosphorus resonances,
whose use in analysing muscle tissue
served as the foundation of clinical
magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
This work led, in 1983, to the
establishment of the first clinical NMR
spectroscopy unit in the world, at the
John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
Ray Freeman, one of his students,
described Richards as an “ideal tutor
for undergraduates, a charismatic
lecturer in physical chemistry, and an
excellent research supervisor” whoadopted a hands-off style of
supervising, allowing his students to
use their own initiative and not be
hidebound by the idea that there is
always a correct, prescribed way to
attack a scientific problem.
He applied a similar philosophy to
his role as Warden of Merton,
explaining in an interview on his
retirement that his aim was “to work
towards an atmosphere of high
standards of research and scholarship
among fellows and graduates and high
academic standards among
undergraduates, and to help create an
air of informality which is important
for good academic work”.
Rex Edward Richards was born at
Colyton in Devon on October 28 1922.
His father, grandfather and great-
grandfather were small builders; his
mother, who had been secretary to the
Bishop of Exeter, was the “business
brains” behind this family enterprise.
Richards was educated at Colyton
Grammar School, from which he won
an exhibition to St John’s College,
Oxford, to read Chemistry despite
having a nosebleed during the crucial
exam and covering the paper in blood.
He went up to Oxford in 1942 and
even as an undergraduate became
engaged in wartime research, with HW
Thompson, using infraredspectroscopy techniques to analyse
everything from German synthetic
rubbers and hexachlorobenzene
insecticides for use in the tropics, to the
chemical structure of the newly-
isolated antibiotic, penicillin. As a
result he became involved in designing
and building infrared spectrographs
using aluminiumised clock glasses,
corks, wax and retort clamps.
Graduating with a First in 1945,
Richards continued to work with
Thompson, using the same techniques
to investigate organic structures such
as silicones, plastics and polymers and
to research the thermodynamic
properties of molecules used in the
chemical industry, obtaining a DPhil
in 1948.
In 1947 he had been elected Fellow
and Tutor in Chemistry at Lincoln
College, and after obtaining his DPhil,
“casting around for something new to
do”, he noticed the announcement of
an “observation of NMR by Purcell and
colleagues at Harvard and by Bloch
and others at Stanford”. After reading
up about the technique, he was
inspired to build his own device.
This work led, in 1955, to his
spending six months at Harvard as a
research fellow under Robert Pound, a
period during which he had many
discussions with Purcell.
Back in Oxford, in 1964 he
succeeded Sir Cyril Hinshelwood as Dr
Lee’s Professor of Chemistry and
moved as a fellow to Exeter College.
Then, in 1969, he was elected Warden
of Merton College.
It was a time when university
budgets were growing, and Richards
would describe his years at Merton as
“ very thrilling”, with the opportunity
to develop initiatives such as “how to
recruit undergraduates from schools
which had not even heard of Merton,
without having to worry too much
about the cost.”
Richards’s years as Vice-Chancellor
of Oxford were similarly active. Green
College was founded, as was the
Nissan Institute, and he was
instrumental in raising the money to
build an annex to the Biochemistry
Department with the aim of bridging
Biochemistry and Physical Chemistry;
it was named the Rex Richards
Building.
During Richards’s time at Lincoln,
the college received a generous
benefaction, with the stipulation that
some of it should be used for the
encouragement of the visual arts. The
Fellows decided to have an art
exhibition in the Ashmolean from time
to time and to invite the artist to
lecture about it in the Playhouse.Richards, who had a great interest in
modern art, suggested that the
obvious first choice was Henry Moore.
Moore stayed at Lincoln for about a
week and Richards got to know him
well as he developed his own interest
in the art world and, with his wife Eva,
built up a small collection of works by
contemporary artists and sculptors.
After his wardenship came to an
end, Richards developed his academic
and artistic interests in a wide range of
activities. As Director of the
Leverhulme Trust, the grant-making
foundation, from 1984 to 1993, he set
about replacing an antiquated office
system with a fully automated system
for which he himself wrote the
programs. As a trustee of the Henry
Moore foundation from 1989 (and
chairman from 1994 to 2001), he also
wrote the system for the foundation to
run its donations programme.
In addition, Richards served as
President of the Royal Society of
Chemistry (1990–92), Chancellor of
Exeter University (1982–98) and
chaired numerous committees
concerned with higher education. He
was also Chairman of the British
Postgraduate Medical Foundation
(1986-93).
His interest in the art world led to
his becoming a member of the
National Gallery Scientific Advisory
Committee (1978-2007, chairman
1991-93) a Trustee of the Tate Gallery
(1982-88 and 1989-93) and of the
National Gallery (1982-88 and 1989–
1993); he was particularly proud to
have played a significant part in the
appointment of Neil MacGregor as
Director of the gallery in 1987.
Richard’s scientific work won him
numerous honours and awards.
Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in
1959, he won its Davy Medal (1976) and
Royal Medal (1986). Other awards
include the Corday-Morgan Medal of
the Chemical Society, the President’s
Medal of the Society of Chemical
Industry and the Medal of Honour of
the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms
Universität, Bonn.
He was knighted in 1977 for services
to NMR spectroscopy.
In 1948 he married Eva Vago, who
had come to Britain as a refugee from
Hungary in 1938. They had met when
she was doing research work on
ultraviolet spectroscopy and she went
on to have a distinguished academic
career in her own right.
She died in 2009 and he is survived
by their two daughters.Sir Rex Richards, born October 28
1922, died July 15 2019Richards aged 37 in
1959: he built his
own NMR
spectrometer from
scratch using war
surplus equipment
for which he paid ‘a
few pence per
pound weight’REUTERS/PETER CHARLESWORTH/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGESJAMES KRIEGSMANN/MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVESObituaries
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