A class of his own

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Reginald ‘Rex’ Benson (1889–1968) was one of the three polo champions who introduced the sport to public schools – but that was just one aspect of his colourful life, says Nigel à Brassard

Opposite The incomparable Rex Benson on one of his ponies

It is said that when Rex Benson entered a room, people felt exhilarated to see and hear him. He was a brilliant piano player who enjoyed entertaining friends with renditions of Cole Porter songs. Rather like a character out of a Wodehouse novel, he would, even in his 70s, spend hours driving his tractor recklessly around his charmingly named Cucumber Farm. He would have been chuffed to have known that his Dorset Down rams were awarded the Supreme Championship Prize for All Breeds at the Royal Show only months after his death. He is still remembered at Cowdray Park, where the Benson Cup is played to this day.

On his retirement in 1967, The Times described Benson as ‘that John Buchan character among City bankers. It was from a not-wholly-conventional career in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers that Sir Rex joined his family merchant bank of Robert Benson – later Kleinwort Benson. He combined international polo with an attachment to the French Sûreté at the time of the Mata Hari affair; and he followed a spell as military secretary to the Governor of Bombay (where, in 1922, he organised the official tour of India of the Prince of Wales) with a tramp round post-revolutionary Russia trying to sell tea.’ Reportedly, Benson made a hasty exit from Russia by canoe through the Polish lakes, with £10,000 stuffed into his boots, and The Times records that ‘fortunately, for his comfort, the notes were of large denominations’. In 1913, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the Viceroy of India. During World War II, he was the British military attaché in Washington. He served as vice-president of the English-Speaking Union and was a trustee of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and the World Wildlife Fund.

Benson was educated at Eton, was captain of the cricket XI, played the Wall game and racquets for the school, and was president of the most prestigious society at Eton, known as ‘Pop’. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1910, he was gazetted as subaltern in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers, a regiment that included the leading polo players Noel Edwards, the Earl of Rocksavage and Francis and Rivy Grenfell.

His competitive polo-playing career really began in India in 1912, where his handicap reached 5 goals – he won, among other tournaments, the Indian Polo Association Championship. After joining the family bank, he continued playing civilian polo and had success at Ranelagh, where he won the Buenos Aires Cup and Invitation Handicap, and at Rugby winning the Junior Cup. He played for a number of teams during his polo career, including the Duke of Beaufort’s Hunt, Winston Guest’s Templeton team, Lord Louis Mountbatten’s Adsdean, and his own Cavaliers (with the young Humphrey Guinness playing at Back). He also played for Buck’s Club, Stephen ‘Laddie’ Sanford’s team the Hurricanes and Robert Lehman’s Camberlot.

Following England’s successive defeats in the Westchester Cup, there developed a widely held view that American polo players benefited by starting to play at a younger age than was then the practice in Britain. In March 1929, Viscount Astor presented a wooden polo horse to Eton College, Benson gave some polo sticks and balls, and he and Captain Pat Roark visited the school to open the polo pit and give a demonstration. Polo Monthly commented, ‘This marks the arrival of polo at one of the great public schools’, and this was soon followed by Roehampton’s announcement that it would offer free polo lessons to all public-school boys during the Easter holidays. Benson also did much to try and encourage the sport at British universities and was one of the pioneers of the indoor version of the game in Britain.

He took great interest in the Anglo-American Westchester Cup and accompanied the England squad on a number of occasions, often lending them his ponies. In 1930, he became treasurer and reserve for the team that went to the US.

Benson was appointed a steward of the Hurlingham Polo Committee – a role that he carried out for a number of years. He was elected to the committee of the Beaufort Hunt Polo Club when it was revived in the late 1920s and expanded from its original Norton Ground to include Down Farm.

Towards the end of his playing career, Benson had confined most of his polo to the Old Etonians team (or the Very Old Etonians, as they originally called themselves) and entered a number of the London tournaments. Polo Monthly remarked that they were ‘a very cheery team who thoroughly enjoyed their polo. A good team for four chukkas, but lack of ponies … prevented them showing the same form for six.’

In 1935, the Palm Beach Post recorded that Benson ‘is one of the best-known players in British polo, an authoritative voice in the councils at Hurlingham – not only one of the most potent figures in polo today, but also a fine performer and a horseman of outstanding merit.’ But for all his far-flung, versatile achievements, his friends remember that he never spoke of his many exploits, because his mind was on his plans for that afternoon or the next morning. As a friend wrote, by way of an obituary, ‘to Rex, the adage applies: that what a man was counts more in the hearts of his friends than all his public fame’.