13/11/2009

Chinese American author who has died aged 94

Nien Cheng was a Chinese historian who wrote an acclaimed memoir of her imprisonment and torture during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. “Life and Death in Shanghai” described how she used her mental powers to fight off her interrogators. When Chairman Mao launched his purge of the professional classes in the sixties, Ms Cheng, the wealthy widow of an oil company executive, was arrested by the Red Guard and falsely accused of being a spy. She spent six years in solitary confinement but refused to make any confessions. After her release she lived in poverty before escaping to Canada and ultimately becoming a US citizen in 1988.

Last Word hears Cheng in her own words in a 1995 BBC interview with John Tusa

Nien Cheng was born 28 Jan 1915 and died 2 November 2009

Authority on dialects who has died aged 83

Stanley Ellis was an expert in dialect and could trace where people came from, even to within a few streets. Stanley devoted his life recording different dialects from around the UK, contributing to a collection which was donated to the BBC archive. He was also a pioneer of the forensic analysis of voice recording and was much in demand as a forensic speech scientist by the police. It was Stanley who declared that a tape released by the police in 1979, purporting to be the voice of the Yorkshire Ripper, was a hoax.

Matthew Bannister talks to Professor Peter French, who was trained by Stanley in linguistics, and to BBC Radio producer Simon Elmes.

Stanley Ellis was born 18 February 1926 and died 31 October 2009

Campaigner who has died aged 73

When Winifred Tumim’s second and third daughters were born profoundly deaf, it completely changed her life. She began to learn everything she could about the education and support available to hearing impaired people in the UK and she became convinced that services needed to improve. She took a PhD in linguistics and became chair of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf. Her willingness to challenge authority gave her a reputation as a formidable public campaigner for changes in the law and management of charities. Lady Tumim was married to Sir Stephen Tumim, a circuit judge who became a controversial chief inspector of prisons under successive Conservative Home Secretaries in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties.

Matthew Bannister speaks to her eldest daughter Matilda and to Jim Edwards, former colleague at the Royal National Institute for the Deaf

Winifred Tumim was born 3 June 1936 and died 5 November 2009