‘Richie only spoke when it was time to speak’: Daphne Benaud on cricket’s greatest love story

It was perhaps the greatest love affair in cricket, defined as much by the game as by a shared passion for the power of language. “Richie spoke when he thought it was time to speak,” reflects his widow, Daphne Benaud, herself a firm believer in the idea of less being more.

“Some commentators could find that unnerving. They thought that something should be said in the first over. But Richie was quite happy to let it build until there was something to say.”

Richie Benaud’s measured minimalism provided a treasured soundtrack to any Ashes series, establishing him as the soothing, laconic voice of summer in both hemispheres.

As beloved in England as at home in Australia, he chose his words with a crisp precision to complement an inimitably dry wit. Rod Marsh wrestling a male streaker to the ground at Edgbaston? “That’s the first catch he has made today.” Glenn McGrath, as hapless a batsman as he was lethal a bowler, being dismissed for two? “Just 98 runs short of his century.”

In Daphne, he found somebody who honoured the conventions of English as scrupulously as he did. Richie was known for the odd waspish correction of dubious grammar: when Michael Slater, the Australia opener beside him in the Channel 4 booth, described a ball as having been “snuck to the boundary”, Benaud replied, after a familiar pause: “Michael, there are a number of words in the English language, but snuck isn’t one of them.”

Daphne acquired a similarly perfectionist streak. After all, she had worked for years as secretary to EW “Jim” Swanton, The (London) Telegraph’s redoubtable former cricket correspondent and a man for whom rules were rules.

“At Old Trafford, Jim would want to be met at the bottom of the press box steps at two minutes past 12 with a large gin and tonic, ice and lemon, and a pork pie,” she remembers. “If I had ever been one minute late, I would have been sacked on the spot.”

We meet at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney, where Daphne, true to Swanton’s edicts, arrives on the dot. While she has lived in Australia since 1967, the year she and Richie married, her cut-glass accent still owes far more to Malvern Girls’ College, her alma mater in Worcestershire, than to Coogee, the laid-back beachside suburb she calls home.

It has been 10 years since Richie died, at the age of 84, but the affection in which he continues to be held is boundless.

To visit the Sydney Cricket Ground is to pass a bronze statue of Benaud at the very spot where he used to park his car, and to be reminded of how, every second day of the New Year’s Test, “the Richies” – some of them young enough to be his grandsons – would offer their tribute in grey wigs, oversized microphones and trademark off-white jackets.

“It’s lovely that people still remember,” Daphne says. “I had somebody come up to me at the end of a dinner and say, ‘My mother’s ashes were scattered very near to where Richie’s are’. I said, ‘Well, the next time I go to Castlebrook, I’ll go and say hi to your mum’.

“I even wrote the name down. It’s extraordinary what people come out with, and you appreciate them. It’s not that they plucked up the courage exactly, but that they didn’t let the moment go past.”

A sign of Benaud’s venerable status is that when he died, Tony Abbott, Australia’s then prime minister, suggested a state funeral. Daphne politely declined, conscious of Richie’s wishes for a “very quiet” and “very private” send-off. Far from a lavish cathedral production, she opted for a small service close to where his parents were laid to rest and a wake at The Australian Golf Club, a couple of miles west of their ocean-front flat. “Symbiotic” is how their relationship has often been described. Whether it was golf, cricket, ballet, theatre or musicals, they gave the impression of being almost conjoined.

Even today, in her late 80s, Daphne keeps up the habit of attending every musical she can. “That’s my thing now. I’ve just seen Cats for about the 34th time. Les Miserables I’ve gone to on umpteen occasions. And The Book of Mormon. Oh, and the Michael Jackson one, too.” To spend time in her company is to discover delightfully unexpected details, not least an insatiable appetite for Formula 1. “I’m a massive revhead. At the moment I’m very fond of George Russell. He must have something within him that explodes at times, because otherwise he’s just too nice.”

As for cricketers, she found as a young woman that her eye was drawn naturally towards the Australians, whom she admired for the dashing aesthetic of their play. Having queued for a spot on the boundary rope for the 1953 Ashes Test at Headingley, she cared little for the enervating spectacle of Trevor Bailey taking four-and-a-half hours to score 38, much preferring the more swashbuckling batting instincts of Neil Harvey.

“I supported the Australians,” she says. “I thought they played cricket as I liked.” There was a certain celestial alignment to this scene. For out in the middle, perfecting the subtleties of leg-spin on his first tour of England, was a certain Richie Benaud.

For all that Benaud endures in the popular imagination for his commentary, there can be no overstating his calibre as an all-rounder. Not merely the first player in Test cricket to reach 200 wickets and 2000 runs, he also morphed into a formidable captain, memorably defining the art of leadership as “90 per cent luck and 10 per cent skill – but for heaven’s sake, don’t try it without that little 10 per cent”. A key element of his appeal was his unlikely status as a style icon, with his custom of bowling in shirts unbuttoned halfway to the waist setting more than a few hearts aflutter. “My mother’s secret crush,” as one admirer put it.

It was in 1961, on Daphne’s first day working for Swanton, that she and Richie met. “We were all having dinner at the Raven Hotel in Droitwich, during Australia’s match in Worcester, and he and Harvey were eating at another table,” she says. “They came over to pay homage to Jim, and I was introduced. And so naturally, I watched him all through the Ashes.”

The complication was that Richie was already married – to Marcia, a shorthand typist from Sydney, with the union appearing ill-fated when he was struck on the mouth fielding just five days before the wedding, forcing him to pose for photographs with a split lip. “The marriage,” Daphne explains, “was on the skids even before I knew him.” Richie, normally guarded about his private life, indicated that constant touring took a toll. “I was divorced for desertion,” he wrote in his memoir.

I sense that much of the 1960s unfolded for Daphne in an exotic blur. An Ashes tour was a far more ornate tapestry in her era, with the 112 days of Test, state and provincial matches in 1965-66 prefaced by a couple of light-hearted one-day games in Singapore and Sri Lanka, still then Ceylon. “Maximum fun,” she says, mischievously. “I wouldn’t have changed anything. I have been asked a lot, ‘What about writing a book?’ And I say no, for the reason that I know too many things that went on on tour, and those people know too many things about me as well.

“I don’t imagine that the players today can have nearly as much fun. I think of the West Indies in the ’60s, seeing everybody lolling around the swimming pool in Jamaica or Guyana. The team and journalists were together, all great mates. Now it’s just about going from one bubble to another. If the players talk to anybody outside the hotel or the airport, it’s probably only to their families.”

‘Gower was a naughty boy’

Although she seeks to be the soul of discretion, she cannot help but divulge a couple of names. She describes Australia’s Ian Chappell, a rough diamond of a captain and the implacable nemesis of Ian Botham, as the “worst driver in the world – I’d never get in a car with him”. There is also an intriguing reference to David Gower, still to many minds the personification of cricketing grace. “Oh, he was one of the naughty boys,” she smiles. “And everybody loves a naughty boy.”

After concerted efforts by Richie to protect Daphne from any lurid scrutiny over his divorce, the couple married in Westminster on July 26, 1967, a date timed to coincide with England’s Test against Pakistan. “There was never any ‘down on one knee’,” she says. “It seemed to be more a case that we had thought of spending our lives together, if that might ever be possible, and then it happened. There wasn’t time for an engagement ring, and so I had to buy my own ring two days before the wedding, because Richie was up at Old Trafford waiting for the rain to stop.”

Even if the build-up was low key, they arrived at Lord’s bearing champagne. It felt, both at that moment and for the next 48 years, as if they were kindred spirits. “In English rose Daphne,” said Annette Sharp, Benaud’s Australian publicist, “Benaud saw a refined, demure and sparkling companion, whose knowledge of the game and the media was not to be underestimated.” The more in demand he became as a broadcaster, the more Daphne’s role grew in his professional life, as she functioned simultaneously as his manager, assistant and a confidante he trusted implicitly.

As such, she saw how Benaud’s signature style, characterised by long silences to let the action breathe and a sense of humour drier than the Nullarbor Plain, developed not by instinct but by dedication to his craft. As far back as the early 1950s, he found the world of journalism seductive. “He was very fortunate, at The Sun in Sydney, to be doing the police rounds with a crime correspondent called Noel Bailey,” Daphne explains. “It was a case where you had to have 40 paragraphs, maybe on a murder that had happened during the night, ready to dictate via telephone. They were short paragraphs, but they all had to land exactly on the right detail.”

On his first visits to England, where he combined the Ashes crucible with a restless urge for reporting work, he had the luxury of leaning on a veritable Mount Rushmore of broadcasting talent. “He was following three top commentators at the BBC: Peter O’Sullevan in racing, Dan Maskell in tennis, Henry Longhurst in golf. On one trip to the races, O’Sullevan told him, ‘I don’t want you to say anything all day. Just take notes and follow me everywhere I go. At the end, ask me anything you want.’ So Richie knew, ahead of time, that he wanted to be involved in television.”

One reason Benaud is so revered today is that he maintained an essential modesty, talking directly to his audience rather than down at them. “Richie, and it was always just Richie, remained on our side of the picket fence,” read one obituary. His verdict in 1981 on Trevor Chappell’s notorious underarm delivery, a bleak affront to Australians’ notion of fair play, served almost as a state of the nation address. “One of the worst things,” he said, “I have ever seen done on a cricket field.”

And yet his gravitas never risked tipping over into hubris. In particular, a deep curiosity for the arts ensured he could set his own sporting distinctions within a wider context. “His first visit to the ballet was in 1953,” Daphne says. “Harvey said to him: ‘You’ve got to be available tonight. We’re going to Covent Garden.’ That sparked his interest. Later on, the mistress of the Royal Ballet would give us these free rehearsal tickets. Once, in a spine-tingling moment, Rudolf Nureyev came in, did a few leaps and bounds, then disappeared. If Richie was working and couldn’t get to a performance on time, they would bring him in through the stage door and put him in the wings so that he could watch. He couldn’t dance to save his life, but he appreciated other people being able to do something well.”

Benaud reached such rarefied air that he and Daphne lived in some style, with one home in Knightsbridge and another in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, on the Cote d’Azur. He especially loved the Riviera retreat, given his father Louis’s French Huguenot lineage. Even if he happened to be there without Daphne, he saw to it that his routine stayed the same. Stuart MacGill, the retired Australian leg-spinner, remembered the life lesson he had imparted to him: “At 6.30 every evening, I pour myself a glass of wine and raise a glass to Mrs Benaud. We are never really apart while we are still doing the things we love.”

‘Lady Bradman was a charmer’

Daphne’s one regret was that she never set foot inside La Fleur du Cap, the majestic sugar-pink villa in Beaulieu once owned by David Niven. “I made it clear to Richie that he should cancel everything if we were ever invited to drinks there.” Not that the couple were exactly short of celebrity soirees to attend. After all, Richie had formed a close friendship with Sir Donald Bradman, whose Test batting average of 99.94 stands as arguably the finest individual feat in all sport. “Lady Bradman was a charmer,” Daphne says. “We would always go to their place for dinner when in Adelaide. The first time I turned up at Adelaide Oval, I thought I would meet sheer hostility. I was Richie’s second wife, and some of the ladies disapproved of that kind of thing. But Jessie, Don’s wife, always made sure I was welcome.”

As she reaches into the past, it is a jolt to remember that Richie has been gone for 10 years. To generations of England fans reared on his “Morning, everyone” introductions on free-to-air television, an Ashes series will never be quite the same again. In Australia, similarly, he was regarded until the very end as the country’s favourite grandfather, synonymous with summer. In a TV advert promoting the national lamb industry, a cast of Antipodean icons from Captain Cook to Ned Kelly were depicted as all heading around to Richie’s place for a barbecue.

At roughly the same time, Benaud, visibly frail, released a bulletin about his health to mark the 2014 Boxing Day Test in Melbourne. He had endured a torrid ordeal, fracturing vertebrae when he crashed his vintage Sunbeam Alpine on a drive back from the golf club, only then to receive a diagnosis of skin cancer. His update, typically, was devoid of self-pity, narrated against a poignant video of him taking his daily constitutional in Coogee alongside Daphne. “We’re back walking every morning, doing our best,” he said. “Shooting the breeze the way we always have. Going along quite nicely, thank you.”

Daphne, having been informed his cancer prognosis was bleak, remembers the traumas of that time a little differently. “One of his specialists used to say to me, ‘We’re not going to be able to do anything’. Still, Richie said that he wanted the treatment. So the doctor and I would look at each other, just knowing that it wasn’t going to work. It’s awfully sad. But you don’t want to override something for people if they say that they’re all right.”

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On one of the rare occasions when he surveyed the full sweep of an immense life, giving a speech to mark his induction into the Australian Cricket Hall of Fame, Benaud was meticulous in his gratitude. He thanked all the teammates he had known, all the captains, and just about everybody else who had savoured the pleasure of playing the game.

But he saved his most significant acknowledgement until last. “Daphne,” he announced. “A splendid lady who is much loved.” Of his thousands of delicately crafted lines, designed always to finish on the correct note, this one might have been the most powerful of all.

Telegraph, London