David Beresford

David Ross St John Beresford (1 July 1947 – 22 April 2016) was a South African journalist who was a long-time correspondent for The Guardian newspaper. Posted to Belfast at the height of the Troubles, he was the author of Ten Men Dead, a book about the 1981 Irish hunger strike in Maze prison in Northern Ireland, which has been called one of the best books ever written about the Troubles. breaking the news of some of the most significant events and scandals in the 1980s and '90s.

Beresford also covered the events of the 1990 Gulf War and Rwandan genocide. Diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1991, Beresford continued to work as long as he could. He also documented his struggle with the disease, which claimed his life in 2016. When David was 14 years old, his elder brother Norman died. He found an escape from his grief by going to libraries and reading.

In a 1999 interview, in which he responded to former South African President F. W. de Klerk's reference to the "Richard-Richard" nickname, Goldstone claimed that it was all a figment of the journalist’s imagination, concocted for a satiric piece and then later included in The Guardian:

It's quite amusing, the 'Richard Richard' story was an invention of the chap from The Mail & Guardian, David Beresford. He concocted that as a sort of humorous thing in one of his satirical columns. As far as I'm aware that’s where it began and ended and it had a funny sequel because soon after it was printed he called me about something to do with the commission and I returned his call and he wasn’t there and I left a message to say, "Please tell him that Richard Richard called." He so enjoyed that he referred to it in an article which appeared in The Guardian.

However, an examination of Beresford's original 9 July 1994 article in The Guardian reveals that Beresford’s original reference to the nickname was not a satiric piece.

Health and death

In 1991, Beresford was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, but continued to work as long as he could. In 2001, he underwent neurological surgery to add a pacemaker (known as deep brain stimulation or DBS), to treat his Parkinson's, a procedure he wrote about. He died in Johannesburg in 2016.