54 Wednesday April 13 2022 | the times
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When John Peake was chosen for the
men’s Olympic field hockey final at
Wembley stadium, he did not expect
the pitch to be full of holes.
“I won’t forget that,” he said. “They
had been doing the shot put on it. I re-
member the centre-half passed me the
ball and I missed it. He was very fed up
with me, but I blame the shot-putters.”
This was 1948, just three years after
the Second World War, when Britain
was one of the few countries willing to
host the Games. It was intended as a
morale-booster, but money was tight
and the organisers took a few shortcuts.
Hence the holes.
Rationing was still in force, but Brit-
ain’s Olympic athletes were allowed
extra food. “My one plus was having
eggs for breakfast,” said Peake.
Aged 23, 6ft tall, slim and self-
effacing, he was the youngest member
of a strictly amateur Great Britain team
that included three schoolmasters and
a doctor; a right-winger, he played in
every round. A draw against Switzer-
land was followed by victories over the
US and Afghanistan. After overcoming
Pakistan in the semifinal, Great Britain
met India, gold medallists in 1928, 1932
and 1936. India won again, 4-0.
“I remember thinking how noisy it
was,” Peake said. “Normally we played
in front of only a few people, but for the
final there were 25,000. India scored
very early, and I think that took some of
the power out of us. They were much
more adroit than us, tapping the ball to
and fro and into the net.”
The losers collected the traditional
silver medals. Peake was the last surviv-
ing medallist of the 1948 Games; he
kept it safely stored in a drawer and
looked at it only a handful of times in
the rest of his life.
That was the end of his international
career, because of a slipped disc and the
demands of his new career in business.
Although his company, Baker Per-
kins, had an active hockey team, he
never turned out for them.
“I don’t think I played after I was 28,”
Peake said. “The games were on a
Thursday and my employers didn’t take
much of a view of that.”
His silver medal was rarely men-
tioned in the family. His daughter
Catharine recalled not knowing her
father had been an Olympian until she
was nine years old, and even then only
because her grandmother mentioned
it in passing.
However, memories of his glory days
were revived when he carried the 2012
Olympic torch for 800 metres through
Peterborough, his home town, on its
journey to London. “I was amazed at
the numbers who turned up to watch,”
he said.
John Morris Peake was born in
Cambridge in 1924, the son of Ruby
(née Morris) and Albert Peake. Albert
became the Cambridgeshire county
surveyor responsible for roads and
bridges, while Ruby worked in a bank
during the Second World War. They
had a daughter, Mary, four years older
than John.
From 1929 the family lived comfort-
ably in Trumpington, on the southern
outskirts of Cambridge, with a live-in
maid and a lady’s companion.John credited his prep school, St
Faith’s in Cambridge, with his love of
sport. In 1938 he went to Repton, where
he excelled at science, maths and
physics and played all available games.
He read mechanical sciences at Clare
College, Cambridge, where he met his
future wife, Elizabeth. “We both played
hockey, tennis and squash for the uni-
versity,” he said. “It wasn’t long before
we were told to get on with it and get
married.”
Aside from hockey, Peake’s main
sports were squash and tennis. He was
a reserve for the England squash team,
and in tennis he won two qualifying
rounds at Wimbledon, losing by only aset in the third and final round before
the competition proper.
As engineering was a reserved occu-
pation in the Second World War, he was
not called up until he had graduated in- Then he joined the Royal Corps of
Naval Constructors.
Although that involved 18 months in
Devonport, six months at sea and two
years at the Royal Naval College,
Greenwich, Peake had plenty of time
for sport. He won the navy tennis and
squash championships and played
hockey for Mid Surrey, which led to the
Olympics.
He bought himself out of the navy in
1950 and joined PA Consulting. A year
later he moved to Baker Perkins, a
Quaker-founded firm that made
machines to produce bread, biscuits,
cakes, confectionery, chemicals and
printers. It was based in Peterborough,
conveniently close to his family home.
He married Elizabeth in 1953 and
they had two children. Catharine is a
chartered accountant and Christopher
is a computer consultant. Elizabeth
died in 2018.
Peake was fast-tracked onto the
Baker Perkins board of management
services and then sent to America to
study the latest business techniques
there. He became a director in 1956 and
ran operations in Australia and then
the US. He was made managing direct-
or in 1980, the first from outside the
founding families, and four years later
he was appointed chairman.
In 1987 he agreed to a takeover by
APV, which made machinery for milk,
beer and vegetable oil. However, al-
though the two companies had been
discussing a deal since the 1930s, the
agreement was nearly scuppered at the
last minute by Robert Maxwell.
The publisher threatened to make a
rival bid for Baker Perkins for the sake
of its printing machinery division, but
Peake persuaded the shareholders to
ignore Maxwell, and the original deal
went ahead.
The enlarged company was bought
in 1997 by Siebe, another engineering
firm, and is now part of SPX Corpora-
tion in North Carolina.
Peake, who had been appointed CBE
for services to industry in 1986, left the
business and took a succession of posts
with the CBI, the Design Council and
government education and training
bodies.
In 1988 he became chairman of Nene
Park Trust, a Peterborough wildlife and
recreation area. After five years he left
to head the Greater Peterborough Part-
nership, which attracted businesses
and investment to the area.
Peake belonged to the East India
Club, the MCC and the Hawks’ Club for
Cambridge blues. Latterly he stuck to
watching snooker on television. “It’s all
a big deal now, isn’t it? People get a lot
of money from sport and become very
famous,” he remarked last year, aged- “When I was at the Olympics, my
perks were a tube of hair cream and a
pair of Y-fronts.”
John Peake CBE, Olympic silver medallist
and businessman, was born on August
26, 1924. He died on March 30, 2022,
aged 97think of one song when you write
another,” McCartney revealed in The
Beatles Anthology.
“I’d planned an ‘answering song’
where a couple of us would sing, ‘She
loves you’, and the other ones would an-
swer ‘Yeah, yeah.’ We decided that was
a crummy idea, but at least we then had
the idea for a song called She Loves You.
So we sat in the hotel bedroom for a few
hours and wrote it, John and I sitting on
twin beds with guitars.”
Beatles scholars have debated at
length which of Rydell’s records was
Lennon and McCartney’s model, and it
seems possible that it was, in fact, two
songs. The celebrated “yeah, yeah,
yeahs” of She Loves You undoubtedly
came from Rydell’s 1960 hit Swingin’School, with its opening line: “Yeah,
yeah, yeah, I go a swingin’ school/
Where the chicks are kicks and the cats
are cool.”
The idea of writing an “answering
song” may have been prompted by
Rydell’s Forget Him, written by Tony
Hatch, on which he sang, “Forget him if
he doesn’t love you... Cause he can’t
give you love which isn’t there.”
After his chart career had subsided,
Rydell took to Las Vegas and the supper
clubs. “I was not really a rock’n’roll
singer,” he admitted in 2016, when he
published a memoir, Bobby Rydell: Teen
Idol on the Rocks. “That’s what you had
to do to make it. I’m an American
Songbook guy.”
He is survived by his second wife, Email: [email protected]Bobby Rydell
Wholesome teenage heart-throb and star of Bye Bye Birdie whose pop songs influenced Paul McCartney and John Lennon
Somewhere in the brief lull in pop’s
churning excitement between Elvis
Presley and the arrival of the Beatles
came Bobby Rydell.
Like a host of similarly clean and
wholesome all-American teenage
heart-throbs who rose to fame in the
late 1950s and early 1960s, Rydell was
what came to be known as a “white
bread boy”. The term denoted a deliber-
ately homogenised blandness cultivat-
ed by the conservative end of the Amer-
ican record industry as it sought to
tame rock’n’roll and reclaim it from the
hip-wiggling sexuality of Presley and
the blackness of Chuck Berry and Little
Richard.
In addition to Rydell, the safe and
unthreatening ranks of the white bread
boys included Bobby Vee, Bobby
Vinton, Fabian, Frankie Avalon and Pat
Boone, looking and sounding almost
interchangeable in their boy-next-door
uniformity.
Their hold on the charts was strong,
but their reign was brief, and they were
soon sidelined when the Beatles ush-
ered in the “beat boom” and changed
the face of popular music for ever.
Nevertheless, between 1959 and 1963
Rydell scored a dozen Top 20 US hits
with songs such as Kissin’ Time, We Got
Love, Swingin’ School, Volare and the
somewhat inappropriately titled Wild
One, which gave him his biggest UK hit
in 1960. In total it was estimated that he
sold 25 million records.
He unwittingly played a small part in
his own downfall when John Lennon
and Paul McCartney were partly in-
spired by Rydell to write She Loves You,
the song that perhaps more than any
other can be said to have finished the
white bread boys as a presence in the
charts.
“There was a Bobby Rydell song out
at the time and, as often happens, you
Linda Hoffman, whom he married in
2009, and by his son, Robert Ridarelli,
and daughter, Jennifer Dulin, from his
first marriage, to his childhood
sweetheart Camille Quattrone, who
died in 2003.
In a knowing reference, the 1970s
stage and screen musical Grease was set
in 1959 at the fictional Rydell High
School, and the real street on which he
was born in Philadelphia was renamed
Bobby Rydell Boulevard.
Rydell was born Robert Louis
Ridarelli in 1942, the son of Jennie (née
Sapienza) and Al Ridarelli. As a very
young child he mimicked the singers he
saw on TV, and by the time he was seven
his father, a factory foreman, was
hawking him round the clubs of Phila-
delphia, asking, “Is it OK for my son to
get up, sing a couple of
songs and do some im-
personations?”
It was a novelty that
usually elicited the
answer yes, and by the
time he was eight his
precocity had led to
an appearance in a
talent contest on the
nationally syndicat-
ed series TV Teen
Club. He won the
contest, and the
show’s presenter,
Paul Whiteman,
promptly recruited him as a regu-
lar cast member and gave him his An-
glicised name.
In his teens he played drums and sang
with the band Rocco and the Saints, in
which Avalon, who came from two
streets away, played trumpet. After
several false starts as a solo act he was
signed in 1959 by Cameo-Parkway
Records, run by Bernie Lowe, who had
been the pianist accompanying him onTV Teen Club. The label had a con-
venient arrangement with the TV show
American Bandstand and its presenter,
Dick Clark, and its artists were con-
stantly featured on the programme.
The exposure led to Rydell’s first hit
with Kissin’ Time in 1959.
The following year Clark and his
show were at the centre of a payola
scandal: a congressional hearing learnt
that the presenter had a financial inter-
est in 33 music-related businesses and
owned copyrights to numerous songs
that had been “gifted” to him by record
companies.
Rydell was not personally implicated
in the payola fallout — any favours that
may have been offered or called in took
place over his head — but he was the
first to acknowledge that his regular
appearances on the show boosted
his career, and Clark
remained a lifelong
friend.
He also enjoyed a
brief film career, most
notably with Bye Bye
Birdie (1963), in which
he appeared alongside
Ann-Margret and
Dick Van Dyke.
He continued per-
forming on the nostal-
gia circuit well into his
seventies, often on a tri-
ple bill with Avalon and
Fabian, the white bread
of their youth now lightly toasted, as
the Golden Boys.Bobby Rydell, pop singer, was born on
April 26, 1942. He died of complications
from pneumonia on April 5, 2022,
aged 79Rydell with
Ann-Margret
in the 1963
musical comedy
Bye Bye BirdieMOVIESTORE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKJohn Peake
Hockey player who won silver in the 1948 Olympics and as a businessman rescued a deal from the clutches of Robert Maxwell
ANDY HOOPERPeake in 1948. He was the youngest
member of the Great Britain team