What happened to Frank Riley?

One of the most annoying aspects of going through old photographs is when lack of captioning and a blurry shot give a tantalising glimpse of an interesting story.

In the early 1980s, I visited Perth, Western Australia. In a church, whose name I now can´t remember, there was a brass memorial on the wall. A slide found recently is blurred but the inscription is roughly as follows:

Frank Basil Riley
Born 20 September 1893 at Preston England.
Rhodes Scholar to New College Oxford from High School Perth.
B.A. Oxon 1919 M.A. 1920.
Served 1914-18 in 3rd Bat. Wilts Regt and in captivity in Germany.
In the Education Department, Iraq, and in the service of the Times(?) 1919-1927. Fell victim of an unknown fate at Checkchou(?), China, 23 July, 1927.
Always his friends remember him…(illegible).

The year 1927 in China was a tumultuous one with uprising and revolts widespread as the Communists and Nationalists fought for power. In February an uprising in Shanghai was brutally suppressed with heavy Communist losses. Nationalist troops attacked and looted the British and other embassies in Nanjing on March 24. The British responded with a barrage from its ships in the river, said to be to protect the foreign community. On August 1, the Communists attacked and soon took Nanchang – the date later being marked as the birthday of the Red Army. Somewhere in all this Frank Riley was killed.

If he was, in fact, a correspondent of The Times, perhaps the newspaper carried an obituary? Can anyone check that?

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©Phillip Bruce 2009.