Richard Hook Richens (1919–1984) was a botanist and an early researcher in Computational Linguistics.

Botany

R. H. Richens was the Director of the Commonwealth Bureau of Plant Breeding and Genetics (part of the Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux) at

Cambridge University The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III of England, Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world' ...

, and became best known for his studies of

elm Elms are deciduous and semi-deciduous trees comprising the flowering plant genus ''Ulmus'' in the plant family Ulmaceae. They are distributed over most of the Northern Hemisphere, inhabiting the temperate and tropical-montane regions of North ...

(Ulmus). His most famous publication was the seminal ''Elm'', published in 1983, in which he sank many elms formerly treated as species as mere varieties or subspecies of ''

Ulmus minor ''Ulmus minor'' Mill., the field elm, is by far the most polymorphic of the European species, although its taxonomy remains a matter of contention. Its natural range is predominantly south European, extending to Asia Minor and Iran; its northern ...

'', notably the

English Elm The field elm (''Ulmus minor'') cultivar 'Atinia' , commonly known as the English elm, formerly common elm and horse may, Republished 1978 by EP Publishing, Wakefield. and more lately the Atinian elm was, before the spread of Dutch elm disea ...

''U. procera'', which he renamed ''U. minor'' var. ''vulgaris''. Richens' all-England collection of specimen elm leaves, along with comparative samples from the Continent, assembled at the Cambridge Department of Applied Biology, is now held at the Cambridge University Herbarium in the

Sainsbury Laboratory The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) is a research institute located at the Norwich Research Park (NRP) in Norwich, Norfolk, England, that carries out fundamental biological research and technology development on aspects of plant disease, plant dis ...

. Dr. Richens served for many years on th
International Commission for the Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants
where he enjoyed challenging the vested interests of French rose growers who wanted to name new rose varieties after film stars etc. At the time when Britain joined the Common Market, he was involved in meetings to thrash out the details of the modifications required to the Common Agricultural Policy.

Wartime Activities

R. H. Richens was an undergraduate at Selwyn College, Cambridge at the start of World War II. He had always had an interest in church music and sang in Kings’ College Choir for a year. In 1940, along with his future wife Ruth, he formally joined the Roman Catholic Church. When he was called up after graduating, Richens became a conscientious objector, assigned, along with fellow biologists V. J. Chapman, R. A. Lewin and G. E. Fogg to a survey of the seaweeds on Britain’s coats, with a view to their possible use for making parachutes or feeding the nation. The work was dangerous as they had to take a small boat to navigate waters which were mined. His humorous account of their adventures was published posthumously as ''Strictly Marginal''.

Impact of DNA fingerprinting

Richens' approach has been much criticized since his death, and some of his taxonomy challenged or discarded. Dr Max Coleman of the

Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh (RBGE) is a scientific centre for the study of plants, their diversity and conservation, as well as a popular tourist attraction. Founded in 1670 as a physic garden to grow medicinal plants, today it occupies ...

writes, however (2009): "The advent of DNA fingerprinting has shed considerable light on the question. A number of studies have now shown that the distinctive forms that Melville elevated to species and Richens lumped together as field elm are single clones, all genetically identical, that have been propagated by vegetative means such as cuttings or root suckers. This means that enigmatic British elms such as Plot Elm and

have turned out to be single clones of field elm. Although Richens did not have the evidence to prove it, he got the story right by recognising a series of clones and grouping them together as a variable species."

Early Worker in Computational Linguistics

Although a professional botanist, Richens also had a personal interest in

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

, carrying out important early work on the subject in collaboration with

Margaret Masterman Margaret Masterman (4 May 1910 – 1 April 1986) was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language R ...

and

Michael Halliday Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday (often M. A. K. Halliday; 13 April 1925 – 15 April 2018) was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics (SFL) model of language. His grammatical descri ...

, and later at the

Cambridge Language Research Unit Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...

.Sparck-Jones, "R.H. Richens" in Hutchins (ed.) ''Early Years in Machine Translation: Memoirs and biographies of pioneers'', John Benjamins, 2000, p.263 He invented the first

semantic network A semantic network, or frame network is a knowledge base that represents semantic relations between concepts in a network. This is often used as a form of knowledge representation. It is a directed or undirected graph consisting of vertices, ...

for computers in 1956 as an "

interlingua Interlingua (; ISO 639 language codes ia, ina) is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951 by the American International Auxiliary Language Association (IALA). It ranks among the most widely used IALs and is t ...

" for

of natural languages.

Church Music

After the war R. H. Richens lived in Cambridge for the rest of his life. He was an accomplished pianist and organist and was choirmaster first at th
Cambridge University Catholic chaplaincy
at Fisher House and from 1961 at Our Lady and the English Martyrs Parish Church. As choirmaster, he would search the University Library for obscure Catholic church music, which he would transcribe or re-arrange for his choir. After the introduction of the vernacular Catholic liturgy following the Second Vatican Council, Dr. Richens perceived a threat to the survival of Latin music in the church. He joined the

Latin Mass Society The Latin Mass Society of England and Wales is a Catholic society dedicated to making the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, also known as the Tridentine Mass, more widely available in England and Wales. The group organised a petition for th ...

, of which he became a committee member. In 1970 the Vatican introduced a new rite, the Ordo Missae aka

Mass of Paul VI The Mass of Paul VI, also known as the Ordinary Form or Novus Ordo, is the most commonly used liturgy in the Catholic Church. It is a form of the Latin Church's Roman Rite and was promulgated by Pope Paul VI in 1969, published by him in the 19 ...

, which substantially changed the Catholic liturgy, irrespective of language. There was a split in the Latin Mass Society between those who wished to preserve the

Tridentine Mass The Tridentine Mass, also known as the Traditional Latin Mass or Traditional Rite, is the liturgy of Mass in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church that appears in typical editions of the Roman Missal published from 1570 to 1962. Celebrated almo ...

, which had endured with little change since 1570, and those, like Dr. Richens, who accepted the Ordo Missae and wished to preserve the use of Latin within it. The committee held a poll which was won decisively by the Tridentinists, whereupon, Dr. Richens resigned from the committee and from the society and founded the

Association for Latin Liturgy The Association for Latin Liturgy is a British lay Catholic organisation which promotes greater use of Latin in the Mass. It was founded in 1969 by Dick Richens who was formerly a member of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales. Unlike th ...

to promote the use of Latin within the new rite. He wrote frequently to the Catholic press, lobbied bishops and worked tirelessly for this cause.

Publications

*(1946). ''The New Genetics of the Soviet Union''. (co-author with P. S. Hudson). *(1955). Studies on Ulmus 1. The range of variation of East Anglian elms. ''Watsonia'' 3: 138–153. *(1956). Elms. ''New Biology'' 20: 7–29. *(1958). Studies on Ulmus II. The village elms of southern Cambridgeshire. ''Forestry'' 31: 132–146. *(1959). Studies on Ulmus III. The village elms of Hertfordshire. ''Forestry'' 32: 138–154. *(1960). Cambridgeshire elms. ''Nature in Cambridgeshire'' 3: 18–22. *(1961)a. Studies on Ulmus IV. The village elms of Huntingdonshire and a new method for exploring taxonomic discontinuity. ''Forestry'' 34: 47–64. *(1961)b. Studies on Ulmus V. The village elms of Bedfordshire. ''Forestry'' 34: 185–206. *(1965). Studies on Ulmus VI. Fenland elms. ''Forestry'' 38: 225–235. *(1967). Studies on Ulmus VII. Essex elms. ''Forestry'' 40: 185–206. *(1968). The correct designation of the European Field Elm. ''Feddes Repertorium Speciorum Novarum Regni Vegetabilis'' 79: 1–2. *(1976). Variation, cytogenics and breeding of the European Field Elms. ''Annales Forestales Analiza Sumartsvo (Zagreb)'' 7: 107–141. *(1977). New designations in Ulmus minor Mill. ''Taxon'' 26: 583–584. *(1978). Multivariate analysis of the elms of northern France and England: pooled analysis of the elm populations of northern France and England. ''Silvae Genetica'' 27: 85–95. (co-author Jeffers, J.N.R.). *(1980). On fine distinctions in Ulmus L. ''Taxon'' 29: 305–312. *(1981). Elms (Genus Ulmus). In: Hora, B. (ed.) ''The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Trees of the World''. Oxford: OUP, 150–152. *(1983). ''Elm''.

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Pre ...

. *(1984). Ulmus × hollandica Miller var. insularum Richens var. nov. ''Watsonia'' 15: 105–108. *(1985). The elms of Wales. ''Forestry'' 58: 9–25. *(1995) ''Strictly Marginal.'' (co-author with Fogg, G. E. (illustrator) and Lewin, R. A.). British Phycological Society.