I was an F1 heiress with a jet in back garden but lost it all… I ended up on £60 benefits & got rejected from McDonald’s
AS the daughter of a British Formula 1 legend, Christianne Ireland lived a life few could imagine.
With a private plane in the back garden of her mansion home, she was driven around in Aston Martin and Rolls-Royce cars, attended a private boarding school, had her hair cut by Vidal Sassoon and had a wardrobe of designer clothes.
Her dad Innes Ireland won the US Grand Prix in 1961 and counted racing icons Stirling Moss, Graham Hill and F1 team founder Frank Williams as his closest friends.
Her incredible upbringing should have been the springboard for a life of success.
But Christianne’s world came crashing down after she became an alcoholic, went through two divorces and her dad failed to leave her money in his will.
By 2016, she was on benefits of around £60 a week, living in a homeless hostel and was even turned down for a cleaning job at McDonald’s.
She describes her astonishing riches-to-rags story as “like falling out of an ivory tower”.
Christianne, now 65, says her life was saved when she started volunteering at an allotment and she has rebuilt a future as a support manager at a charity called Unity which helps the most vulnerable in society.
She said: “When I think back on the life I had it seems crazy.
“My childhood was bizarre, bonkers. We lived in a Grade One-listed Georgian mansion house with its own stream-fed lake and a miles messenger plane parked out the back.
“They were very heady days. I got a pony and trap as a Christmas present aged five and I remember Frank Williams and F1 racer Charlie Crichton-Stuart coming to paint it one weekend.
“We always had wonderful exotic cars parked outside and we used to go to the village in the 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO built for Stirling Moss, which later sold for £27million.
“He never got to race it after his terrible accident that ended his racing career but I used to get into the passenger seat, my mum would shove the chocolate Labrador in the footwell and we’d go shopping.
“When I fell out of the ivory tower years later and had to clean up my drinking, I’d look at beggars on the street and think ‘do I want to be one of them, because I have that option, or do I want to get off my backside and do something to get myself sorted?’”
Cursed by fame
Christianne’s story is full of twists and turns and a long battle with the bottle which left her homeless with just a suitcase full of expensive clothes – remnants of her past life.
Her dad Innes was a former paratrooper and apprentice engineer with Rolls-Royce who started racing in an old three-litre Bentley when he was 22 after being left the car by a dead relative.
After winning the Motor Sports Brooklyn Memorial Trophy in 1957 he joined the Lotus team, taking part in 50 Grand Prixs.
He was a larger-than-life character who, according to a rival team boss, “lived without sense, without an analyst, and provoked astonishment and affection from everyone”.
He married Christianne’s mum Norma Thomas, a Scarborough school teacher, three years before his career took off but the trappings of fame cost Innes his marriage.
Christianne said: “My father’s success was a double-edged sword.
“He was travelling to a lot of races which took him away from my mother and the family and it elevated him into a jet-set world.
“ My mother wasn’t really kitted out for that life. I think she was quite happy with the little life they had, it was very suburban and nothing flash and I think she would have preferred that.
“When the money came on board we had a big mansion house called Downton in Powys, Wales, with an airstrip out the back. Dad got a private plane and really enjoyed the lifestyle but mum was often left rambling around alone in this big home.”
Christianne says her mum struggled to cope and she was sent to a convent boarding school just before her fifth birthday which she “hated” because “we weren’t from a strict Catholic family, dad was becoming famous and I was the oddball there”.
When she next returned home, Christianne’s mother had gone and they never really reconciled.
She said: “My dad got custody of me and I didn’t dare ask what had happened. I remember saying Goodbye when I went to boarding school and that was the last I saw of her at that time.
“Dad wasn’t the type to sit you down and talk about what happened and a lot was shoved under the carpet.
“There was a lot of hurt and I would later use that as a ‘poor me’ excuse to drink.”
Battle with the bottle
By the time her dad retired in 1967 to become a journalist for Autocar magazine, he had remarried and the family moved to London where Christianne would have her hair cut by Vidal Sasoon.
She said: “I would go home from school whenever dad was around and we did have some wonderful times. I watched him race at Le Mans for one of my birthdays and I was taken to designer shops where I was allowed to buy lots of beautiful French clothes.
“In London we shopped in Harrods and Fortnum and Mason. I had lovely things, but in hindsight I’d have swapped it to spend more quality time with my father.”
Christianne was sent to private girls boarding school Oxenfoord Castle in Midlothian where she says she developed into a “rebellious teenager”. By now her dad had remarried.
“I would do anything to shock my father and, looking back, I think I must have been angry.
“I’d wear dreadful make-up, hippy afghan coats smelling of patchouli oil and bring home unsuitable boyfriends. I had a best friend whose father had also been a driving racer and we used to go to Annabel’s nightclub with our fathers’ cards and dance on the tables.”
When she was 20, Christianne married farmer John Gee and had three children Charles, now 45, Sasha, 43, and Jeffrey, 41.
The couple married at Welford Park in Newbury, the home of C4’s Bake Off, in a lavish ceremony where she says dad Innes told her: “Right darling, that’s the last big thing I do for you.”
Christianne says she started drinking copious bottles of wine throughout her marriage, adding: “My poor husband didn’t know how to cope with it, none of it was his fault.
“I had no instruction manual and my marriage failed.”
When her dad died of cancer at a rented cottage near Welford, Newbury, in 1993, Christianne was left out of his will.
Eventually her relationship with her father’s third wife, ex-model Jean Haworth, became estranged.
Christianne went on to meet Tristram, her second husband, who she wed in 1995, at an AA meeting in what she describes as a “typical cliche.”
“He was very smartly dressed and I thought ‘oh he’s got money’ while I think he probably thought I had. Neither of us had a pot to p*** in,” she laughs.
Christianne volunteered with the local AA and went on to speak to prisoners in Broadmoor, the psychiatric hospital which has housed lags like Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe and four-times killer Robert Maudsley.
She said: “I wasn’t allowed near people like that but I spoke to people with mental health issues who had issues with drinking or drugs.
“I was terrified going in there for the first time but came across people who had committed terrible crimes when they’d been on drink or drugs and blacked out, and I thought ‘there by the grace of God go I.’
“One 6ft 4in man murdered his mother with an axe and a woman who set her house on fire with her family in it. Neither of them had any recollection of what had happened.”
Rock bottom
Nine years into her marriage, Christianne said she started secretly drinking again after moving to Gloucestershire and becoming unhappy.
She said: “I’d do a bit of social drinking but most of it was in secret.
“I was socially a bit anxious and I needed to drink before we went anywhere. If it wasn’t vodka it would be half a bottle of wine before stepping out the door and the tolerance started to go up.
“At its worst I’d secretly down half a bottle of brandy.”
She and husband Simon, who Christianne says “didn’t know how to help me”, broke up after nine years of marriage and he moved to New Zealand.
She said: “Over the next five years I went through all my savings, sold some jewellery to live off and tried to find jobs, but I wasn’t in the right headspace.
“I even tried for a cleaning job at McDonald’s but was turned down. My children weren’t able to help me financially or put me up.
“They never actually asked me to stop drinking, because nobody should ever ask anyone to stop. Instead they distanced themselves from me.
“Eventually I moved to Camberley in Surrey when I got a job in a clothes shop for a couple of years, but then the drinking caught up with me.”
In 2015, Christianne went to live in London to help support a distant relative but it didn’t work out and her daughter advised her to make herself homeless to get a flat.
She said: “By this time I was on benefits of about £60 a week. I thought maybe I should try the Southampton area because I’d lived there for a little while when I was younger.
“From there the local authority sent me to Romsey and then to Andover where I was given a crash room in a hostel.”
Christianne spent eight weeks in a hostel where she had to sleep in a single bed in the dining room.
She said: “All I had was my suitcase. It was quite large with some of my best clothes in it but that was it.
“You had to be out of the hostel most of the day so it was quite hard. There were quite a few drug addicts there and I’m not very streetwise.
“The local authority eventually got me a flat but I had no furniture for three weeks and just slept on the floor.”
Brighter future
Christianne started to volunteer at a charity called Unity, and a locally-run allotment – a move she credits with saving her life.
She said: “When I started digging, clearing, growing, pruning it felt like I was getting rid of debris, not just from the allotment but from my life.
“On the days I wanted to drink I’d go there instead and I slowly started feeling better.
“I found my local drug and rehabilitation services and signed up with them. I did a course called smart recovery for three months and it gave me strategies to cope with my drinking.
“I realised it was an ability to cope with life on life’s terms and I was given a toolbox of strategies to help me cope.”
Now Christianne works as a voluntary sector support manager for Unity and helps oversee a food pantry project.
She has also taken up racing herself after joining the Brighton and Hove Moto Sports Club, taking part in speed trials and hill climbs.
She said: “I don’t regret all those things that happened because they brought me to where I am now. I’m like a snake shedding its skin.
“I’ve had an amazing, crazy life.”