When David Attenborough rushed back from New Zealand in February 1997, he made it to his wife’s hospital bedside just in time. Jane had suffered a brain hemorrhage and lay in a coma. A doctor told him to hold her hand. She squeezed back. Hours later, she was gone.
Their marriage had lasted 47 years. She was 70.
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From Wales to Cambridge
Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel was born July 11, 1926, in Merthyr Tydfil, a Welsh industrial town. Her parents were John Augustus Oriel and Margaret H Oriel. Beyond these basic facts, little is documented about her childhood. She kept her early life private, a trait she maintained throughout her marriage to one of Britain’s most famous broadcasters.
She attended Cambridge University in the 1940s, where academic life brought her into contact with a young David Attenborough. Both were students. Their relationship developed over time, and by 1950, they were ready to marry.
Building a Marriage
The wedding took place February 17, 1950, at St Anne’s Church on Kew Green. Jane was 23. David was 24. After the ceremony, they moved to Richmond Upon Thames in London, where they would spend the rest of their lives together.
Jane gave birth to two children. Their son Robert grew up to become a senior lecturer in bioanthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. Their daughter Susan became a primary school headmistress.
David’s broadcasting career meant long absences. He traveled for months filming documentaries in remote locations while Jane raised their children at home in Richmond. The arrangement created a running family joke. “You were never there,” the children would tease their father. “You don’t remember that, do you, because you weren’t there.”
Despite the separations, the marriage held. Jane filled her time with charity work and community involvement while avoiding public attention. She had no interest in the spotlight that followed her husband.
February 1997
David was in New Zealand filming The Life of Birds when he got the call. Jane had collapsed. A brain hemorrhage. She was in a coma.
He flew back immediately. When he arrived at the hospital, doctors weren’t optimistic. He sat by her bed and took her hand. In his 2002 memoir Life on Air, David described what happened next.
“She did, and gave my hand a squeeze,” he wrote. “The focus of my life, the anchor had gone. Now I was lost.”
Jane Elizabeth Ebsworth Oriel died February 10, 1997, in Fulham, London.
After the Loss
David threw himself into work. “I coped by working,” he told The Express in 2009. “It was the most fantastic luck that I was able to work.”
He never remarried. He never moved from their Richmond home. When asked why in 2009, his answer was simple: “What would be the point? I would be leaving the home we made together, the garden we built up. This house is all bound up with her. I feel her here as much as anywhere.”
Susan moved in to help. David admitted to The Telegraph in 2016 that he struggled after Jane’s death. “I was getting myself into a mess without my wife,” he said. “She came and helped and eventually became a partner in my little company.”
His daughter took on tasks Jane once handled, helping run his business affairs and managing the household.
Finding Comfort
In a 2011 interview with The Telegraph, David talked about where he found solace. “In moments of grief, deep grief, the only consolation you can find is in the natural world.”
He spoke rarely about Jane in public. When he did, his words were brief and direct. During a 2017 interview with Louis Theroux for Radio Times, David expressed regret about his absences during his children’s early years. “If I do have regrets, it is that when my children were the same age as your children, I was away for three months at a time.”
Her Role
Jane Oriel spent 47 years married to a man whose work took him around the world. She raised two children largely on her own. She managed a household in Richmond while her husband filmed in jungles, deserts, and oceans. She did charity work. She stayed out of the public eye.
When she died at 70, she left behind a husband who called her his anchor, two grown children, and a family that had learned to function around the demands of groundbreaking television. Her contribution wasn’t filmed. It wasn’t narrated. But without it, the documentaries that changed how millions view the natural world might never have been made.
David Attenborough is now 98. He still lives in the house they shared. He still works, still films, still narrates. Nearly three decades after Jane’s death, her presence remains in the home they built, the garden they planted, and the work she made possible.
