Claude Champion de Crespigny

The Champion de Crespigny family originated in Normandy, France. Crespigny first acquired its name as a settlement containing a church, a chapel or some form of a shrine to Saint Crispin.

Claude Champion de Crespigny (1620-1697) was the first member of the family to settle in England. He arrived after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and served in the British Army. His grandson Philip Champion de Crespigny (1704–1765) was the father of the first Baronet, Sir Claude de Crespigny (1734-1818). The family’s home was Champion Lodge, near Maldon, in Essex.

The subject of this profile, Sir Claude Champion de Crespigny, 4th Baronet, was born in Chelsea on April 20, 1847, the son of Sir Claude William Champion de Crespigny, 3rd Baronet (1818–1868). He became a man of many parts, often sporting and certainly dangerous. As well as been an accomplished and fearless steeplechase rider, he was at various times a sailor, soldier, boxer, magistrate, bull-fighter, big game hunter, balloonist, foxhunter and hangman’s assistant.

The latter bizarre activity came in 1886 when Sir Claude, by then already an Essex magistrate, thought be might be appointed High Sheriff of the County and thus would be responsible for all executions. On the basis that he would not like asking anybody to do something he was not prepared to do himself, and having taken an interest in the Netherby murderers, one of whom was also suspected of killing an Essex policeman, he travelled to Carlisle where he persuaded the public executioner, James Berry, to allow him to act as his assistant. Berry was sworn to secrecy and Sir Claude adopted the pseudonym ‘Charles Maldon’. However, a member of the press, suspicious that the ‘assistant’ was staying at one of the best hotels while Berry was lodging in the prison, saw through the subterfuge. Once the secret was out, Sir Claude made no mystery of it and fully explained why a member of the aristocracy should be involved in such a process.

He had served as a midshipman in the Royal Navy before switching services and joining the 60th King’s Royal Rifles Corps as an ensign. He made successful debut in the saddle on May 7, 1867 when winning the South of Ireland Military Steeplechase at the 12th Lancers meeting on a grey mare named Maid of the Mist, owned by Major Watts Russell, beating the accomplished rider ‘Bay’ Middleton on Lady Gray.

He inherited the baronetcy in 1868 on the death of his father. In 1882 he took up ballooning and in 1883 became the first man to cross the North Sea, winning the Balloon Society’s gold medal for the feat.

However, race-riding remained his number one passion. He rode at more than 50 different racecourses in the United Kingdom, winning at most of them. His many victories included the Ladies Plate at Rugby (left) in 1887 on Flushing, when, after an interval of 20 years, he once again beat a horse ridden by ‘Bay’ Middleton.

He achieved his most important success on Corréze, whom he bred, owned and trained, in the Great Sandown Steeplechase on December 9, 1893. Earlier that year they had finished fifth the National Hunt Chase, run on that occasion at Sandown. They then won a two-mile military chase at the Household Brigade meeting at Hawthorn Hill. The partnership returned there in October to win the Army and Navy Chase, beating the previous year’s Grand National winner Father O’Flynn. They then won a chase at Lingfield by 20 lengths before recording their greatest triumph in the aforementioned Great Sandown Steeplechase.

Corréze’s dam, Wild Georgie, had originally been bought to ride as a Yeomanry charger, but proved rather better than that and won the Ladies’ Cup in the inaugural Champion Lodge steeplechase meeting in 1881, of which, more shortly.

In addition to his successes in Britain, Sir Claude rode winners abroad, including, in 1869, the Cawnpore Chase in India, which in those days was regarded as the country’s version of the Grand National, on a mare named Baby Blake. The race was won as early as the third fence, which was composed of a couple of high mud walls, at which the whole field refused with the exception of Baby Blake, who gave Sir Claude a commanding lead which they never looked like surrendering.

Another notable triumph came when landing the Nairobi Steeplechase in what was then British East Africa in 1905, on an Australian-bred horse named Whale, belonging to Sir Donald Stewart. By the time of that win, Sir Claude was rising 59 years old.

Back in 1881 Sir Claude had constructed a racecourse in the grounds of his home at Champion Lodge. It was, in essence, a private meeting organised by him to provide sport for his friends as local residents, but it complied with all the regulations laid down by the stewards of the National Hunt committee and thus qualified as a proper race meeting.

The opening meeting of the Champion Lodge and Military Steeplechases took place on March 30, 1881. Sir Claude himself rode the winner of the Ladies’ Cup on Wild Georgie, owned by his wife, Lady Mary de Crespigny. However, he failed to make it a double when beaten on Cartridge in a match race.

The Champion Lodge meetings continued throughout the 1880s but after the 1889 fixture Sir Claude’s adventures were to take him far and wide and the next meeting did not take place until 1892, following which there was an even longer interval until racing returned to Champion Lodge in 1901.

One of the casualties of the Boer War had been Sir Claude’s great friend and fellow amateur rider Major Henry Shelley Dalbiac. When Major Dalbiac had set off for Africa he left behind his steeplechaser Kozak, declaring he was far too good a horse to get shot. On his return at the end of the war, Sir Claude bought Kozak in memory of his friend and proceeded to win three chases on him in 1901, including the Champion Lodge Cup.

The final meeting at Champion Lodge took place on April 19, 1902. Fittingly, the Champion Lodge Cup again went the way of Sir Claude and Kozak. In fact, Kozak went on to win some two dozen races over hurdles and fences, ridden mainly by Sir Claude or one of his two sons, Captain Claude and Captain Raoul de Crespigny, who were both accomplished soldier riders

He was in his early sixties when he rode Prince Talleyrand in the two-mile Selling Chase at Sandown’s 1909 Grand Military meeting. The horse fell at the water, but Sir Claude quickly remounted and completed the course to resounding cheers as he galloped past the stands.

In that same year, John Maunsell Richardson and Finch Mason’s ‘Gentlemen Riders Past and Present’ paid him this memorable tribute: “As for the elderly sportsman who, equipped with scythe and hourglass, backs Time on all occasions with such marked success, he has long now ceased to lay against Sir Claude de Crespigny.”

In his memoirs, ‘Forty Years of a Sportsman’s Life’, published in 1910, Sir Claude devotes two chapters to his steeplechasing adventures. Despite having incurred a score of injuries, including a severed artery when falling from a horse named Birds’-Eye at Lingfield in January 1893, he continued to ride in races until 1914 when he finally retired at the advanced age of 67.

In 1923, aged 76, he thought nothing of a daily ten-mile walk or ride, and a plunge into the sea from the highest diving board in Brighton. Indeed, he offered to match and back himself over Sandown’s four-mile steeplechase course against any other “youngster over seventy” in the country.

Sir Claude Champion de Crespigny died on June 26, 1935, aged 88. He was buried in the mausoleum he had erected for himself and his family in a secluded part of the garden at Champion Lodge, joining his wife and eldest son, both of whom had predeceased him.

Some years later the coffins were removed to Hatfield Peverel Church and Champion Lodge underwent a change of name to Totham Lodge, as it remains called to this day. It now functions as a home for the “retired elderly gentlefolk”, a description that would never have fitted its previous energetic owner.