the times | Saturday June 11 2022 79
Email: [email protected]lifetime exploring. “You think the flute
is a boring type of pipe that goes fluuu at
you,” he explained. “I maintain that it’s
not a boring pipe but an empty vehicle,
like a magician’s hat.”
Bennett was a fixture of British
concert halls. He was principal flute of
the London Symphony Orchestra, gave
concerto performances with the
English Chamber Orchestra and the
Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and
delivered enticing recitals accompa-
nied at the piano by Clifford Benson or
George Malcolm. Like many musicians
he also did session work in recording
studios, turning up on discs with Jimi
Hendrix and Wynton Marsalis.
Much of Bennett’s musical inspira-
tion came from his encounters with
singers including April Cantelo and
Janet Baker, who he first accompanied
in a student production of Christoph
Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo. Some years
later he met her again on a train. “She
taught me how to breathe,” he said.
Thereafter when making a recording
he asked himself: “How can I make the
flute sound like Janet Baker?”
Composers enjoyed writing works
for him. Diana Burrell’s Flute Concerto
required him to switch between three
instruments during the piece; William
Mathias was so keen to hear his concer-
to performed that he also made an
arrangement for piano accompani-
ment; and Richard Rodney Bennett, no
relation, wrote the playful Winter Music
with him in mind.
Something of a raconteur, Bennett
was as charming when talking as when
performing and was never short of a
quick turn of phrase. He compared Sir
Yehudi Menuhin playing the Bach
Triple Concerto to “a centipede with a
pair of balls between each set of legs”.
He explained how making the modern-
ist Luciano Berio sound romantic was
“like putting lipstick on a dead potato”;
and summed up his own career suc-
cinctly, saying: “All my life I’ve been
dogged by good luck.”
William Ingham Brooke Bennett was
born in Bloomsbury, central London, in
1936, the only child of Frank Bennett
and his wife Faith (née Brooke), who
were both architects. Throughout his
life he was known by his initials Wibb,
which he told friends stood for William
Ignatius Bastard Bennett.
An early memory was the family’s
wind-up gramophone, which “was put
away at the beginning of the war when
we moved out to Buckinghamshire”. It
came to light six years later when they
returned to London and settled in
Hammersmith. “I broke a lot of good
records,” he said. “There was a part of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with a
great bite out of it.”
One of the boys at his boarding
school, Beltane, a progressive
establishment in Wimbledon,
had a plastic recorder. “I
thought it was marvellous,
and I had to have one,” he
recalled. “I spent my half-term
pocket money for one and I
whizzed around with it, learn-
ing tunes very quickly.” Yet
when hearing the flute on a
record or the radio he noticed a
wonderful depth of sound and
colour. “That was exciting. I had
to have one of those too — so
much richer and nicer than the
recorder.” After being pestered
relentlessly, his mother finally
gave in and bought one for him.
Bennett also inherited his
parents’ love for art and was
often found with a pen or pencil
in hand. His parents took him to
their friends’ galleries. “I remember
going and seeing exhibitions of Picasso
when I was ten... it wasn’t something
strange to me.”
By the age of 15 he was taking flute
lessons at the Guildhall School of
Music and Drama with Geoffrey Gil-
bert, who also taught James Galway.
His National Service was with the band
of the Scots Guards, which enabled himDAN EDELMANkhfltesc
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Marriages and engagements
Page 80to continue at the Guildhall. He then
studied in Paris with Jean-Pierre
Rampal and took masterclasses in
Switzerland with Marcel Moyse, whose
musical philosophy he adopted: “Never
practise something without trying to
evoke something.”
Back in Britain he worked with the
BBC Northern Orchestra in Manches-
ter, joined Sadler’s Wells Orchestra in
London and eventually moved to the
LSO, though he disliked the conductor
André Previn and drew caricatures of
him looking like a cockroach, hence the
note in Who’s Who that his interests
included “cockroach baiting”.
His first marriage, in 1961, to the cel-
list Rhuna Martin was dissolved and heis survived by their daughters: Vanora, a
writer and former Times journalist, and
Sophie, an Arabic translator at the UN.
In 1981 he married Michie Komiyama, a
fellow flautist, who also survives him
with their son Timothy, a sinologist.
Bennett was increasingly recognised
for his musical skills. In 1964 The Times
was impressed by his recital at Wig-
more Hall, London. “The myth of the
inexpressive flute was dealt a fatal blow
last night,” wrote the critic who
described him as “a musician of author-
ity and insight who handles [the flute]
with a mastery as complete as it is unob-
trusive”.
He taught at the Royal Academy of
Music, published his own musical
arrangements, started the Beep record
label and for 35 years ran an annual
summer school that drew flautists from
around the world. Wibb: A Flute for Life,
a heartfelt tribute by Edward Blake-
man, a Radio 3 executive and fellow
flautist, was published in 2016 and is
illustrated with its subject’s own sketch-
es, which also adorn his CD covers.
Bennett was astonishingly practical.
Even in his eighties he took a tuning key
into the Royal Academy of Music
because “the pianos are all frightfully
out of tune”. He taught his students
there to count in three by saying
“e-le-phant”, for which they thanked
him with a collection of elephant-
themed ties.
Once, when a neighbour turned up
with a penny farthing, he quickly
changed into the costume from a Victo-
rian-themed concert and perched pre-
cariously on the contraption for a
photograph, flute in hand. For some
years he experimented with making
elderflower sparkling wine in the attic,
though the bottles tended to explode
even if his hand-drawn labels were
a delight.
Early in his career Bennett’s quest for
the perfect flute led him to build his
own instrument using a gas poker and a
pair of scissors. It was an interest he
continued to pursue and the William
Bennett Scale, which regulates the
tuning of a flute, is today used by
many manufacturers. Yet his chief
pleasure derived from playing the
instrument. “It’s this fascination with
the sound and all the problems of it,” he
told Blakeman. “Getting the note at the
right pitch and the right colour and the
right attack — and the phrase shapes
and making the flute a voice. It is a
voice, isn’t it?”William Bennett OBE, flautist, was born
on February 7, 1936. He died of motor
neurone disease on May 11, 2022, aged 86He disliked André Previn
and drew caricatures of
him as a cockroach
Ann Davies
Actress seen on TV in shows such as Z-Cars
and on stage with her husband Richard Briers
When Ann Davies was out with her
husband Richard Briers, she frequently
had to put up with people being
disappointed that she wasn’t Felicity
Kendal.
Briers’ on-screen partnership with
Kendal as Tom and Barbara Good,
struggling to be self-sufficient in their
suburban garden in the BBC television
sitcom The Good Life, made them the
nation’s favourite married couple; some
viewers lost the ability to differentiate
between fiction and reality.
If it irritated Davies, she was far too
polite to let it show. She was nobody’s
second fiddle and had not only the
professional reassurance of her own
career as a character actress but also
the personal security of a happy and
stable marriage that lasted for 57 years
until Briers’ death (obituary February
19, 2013).
The irony was that The Good Life ran
for a modest 30 episodes over four
series between 1975 and 1978 and
Davies appeared on stage and screen
with her husband far more often than
Briers did with Kendal. The couple
made a point of working together
whenever possible after they had met at
the outset of their careers at the
Liverpool Playhouse, where
Davies was the company’s
acting stage manager.
Briers joined the
troupe in 1956 and
they were married
eight months
later.
Davies and
Briers appeared
together on stage
in George Ber-
nard Shaw’s Major
Barbara at the Bel-
grade Theatre
(1958), in Kenneth
Branagh’s Renaissance
theatre touring production
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1990-91) and in Simon Day’s black
comedy Spike at the Nuffield Theatre,
Southampton (2001). In the latter, the
couple finally were able to play
man and wife for the first time. To make
it even more of a family affair,
their fictional offspring was played in
the production by their daughter, Lucy
Briers.
Davies also appeared with her
husband on the big screen in the come-
dies Peter’s Friends (1992) and In the
Bleak Midwinter (1995), both directed
by Branagh.
On television the couple starred in
the late 1980s BBC sitcom Ever
Decreasing Circles, created by John
Esmonde and Bob Larbey, the writers of
The Good Life. On this occasion, Briers’
on-screen wife was played by Penelope
Wilton and Davies played his secretary,
but she made no complaints.
At 5ft 2in, with laughing eyes and
elfin features, she was equally at home
in comedy or serious drama and many
of her most memorable performances
came without her husband, whom she
nursed at their home in Chiswick, west
London, in the final years of his life after
he had emphysema diagnosed. She is
survived by their two daughters, Lucy,
and Katie Briers, who also worked in
television as a floor manager.Ann Cuerton Davies was born in
1934 in Hornchurch, Essex (now
Greater London), the eldest child of
Ronald Davies, a solicitor, and Sally
(née Simmonds), who worked as his
secretary.
During the Second World War she
was evacuated and her education dis-
rupted until she settled at the Queen’s
School, Chester. She was a bright and
scholarly pupil; her parents and teach-
ers wanted her to apply to Oxford or
Cambridge, but at 18 her love for the
theatre led to her “running away to the
circus”, as she put it. She later made up
for it by taking a degree with the Open
University.
In reality her “circus” was the splen-
did environs of Liverpool’s Victorian
music hall, which had been turned into
a repertory theatre shortly before the
First World War and was where Noël
Coward and Gertrude Lawrence had
worked as child actors.
While at the Liverpool Playhouse she
was offered a place at Rada but by then
she had fallen in love with Briers, who
had already been through stage school.
She did not take up the place and
instead the newly married couple
transferred as a team to repertory at
Coventry, before Davies
made her London stage
debut at the Arts
Theatre in 1959.
She was soon
a regular on Brit-
ish television,
if slightly less
high profile
than Kendal or
Prunella Scales,
who played Bri-
ers’ wife in the
1960s TV sitcom
Marriage Lines.
One of her earliest
television appearances
came in 1964 as Jenny in
Doctor Who, battling the Dal-
eks alongside William Hartnell, the first
incarnation of the Time Lord. In those
black and white days, she was required
to dye her hair blonde to distinguish her
from the Doctor’s other two dark-
haired companions, Barbara and Susan.
There were regular appearances in
Z-Cars and in the 1970s she was seen in
Poldark and Within These Walls. One of
her finest performances came in 1996 at
an age when most female actors are
bemoaning the lack of suitable parts. As
a woman with dementia who is
revealed as having been a double killer
many years earlier, she was utterly con-
vincing in the acclaimed TV adaptation
of Minette Walters’ The Sculptress.
Her final appearance came fittingly
with her husband when they both
joined a long list of actors, including
Judi Dench, Scales and Donald Sinden,
taking cameo parts and donating their
fees to a theatrical charity in the 2012
film adaptation of Ray Cooney’s farce
Run For Your Wife.Ann Davies, actress, was born on
November 25, 1934. She died of
undisclosed causes on April 26, 2022,
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