JESSICA V, Heidi Hauri’s Los Angeles bronze medal-winning mare, isn’t the only Williamstown Stud link. Another is Chippison, Marie Burke’s title-holder and the four-legged result of an amicable agreement with Willie Boland, who passed away just last week.
“Chippison was definitely my horse of a lifetime, I suppose you don’t get too many of them around,” Marie, one of the well-known White show jumping family, said. “We were lucky to get him.”
Willie, “born and bred in Tulla”, as he described himself during his West of the Shannon feature in 2019, decided to buy a broodmare as the farms around east Clare emptied of horses in favour of tractors.
One of that unnamed mare’s four Hill Tarquin offspring was a filly foal, Little Chip and she later produced a Flagmount Boy filly in 1981: Chipmount.
“I suppose I wanted to keep her as a broodmare first. I said, ‘We’ll try this one to see what she can do’,” Willie said, that afternoon in his farmhouse kitchen, where his good neighbours John Mulconroy and Caoimhe McParland were also gathered.
There was only one yard and rider to send his four-year-old to for breaking. “Jim [White] and I hurled together,” he remarked about his longtime friendship with the vet. Although Jim, one of ShowJumping Ireland’s founder members, later moved to Patrickswell, the Clare men met up again on the hunting field. “There was a hunt in Tulla and this little lady, with a head of red ringlets, was riding a grand black pony that day. It was Marie White, Jim’s daughter.”
Years later in 1985, Willie dropped off Chipmount for Marie to break in. Having advised her owner-breeder to take “the particularly difficult” grey home for a year, Willie had a choice to make at the crossroads in Patrickswell after he’d collected Chipmount. “Go left and get her covered or go right and go home. He went right and, if it wasn’t for that, there would be no Chipmount competing or Chippison,” said Marie, about how the correct turn at the crossroads later worked out.
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Marie Burke and Willie Boland's Chipmount at Iverk Show \ Fiona Jackson - from TIF archive
Little brown suitcase
“We’d nearly gone to a thoroughbred horse, Arctic Que that day, but I brought Chipmount home. Marie wanted her back the next year, she knew she never sat on anything like her. The way Chipmount jumped, you’d want to be saying an Act of Contrition on her!” said Willie, who began fending off offers for the mare once the good results, such as winning the Grade C Navan championship, started rolling in.
He nominated Chipmount’s runner-up place to Touchdown at Ennis as one career highlight. James Kernan won the leading rider prize of a car and, during the prize-giving, Willie had smiled at the memory of the chalk-and-cheese pair.
“When Chipmount was standing beside Touchdown wasn’t she looking up at him! She wasn’t 16 hands if you went to measure her tight.”
“Himself and Jimmy Flynn were two of a kind,” Marie said fondly, describing the era of the Banner men, following the progress of their respective ‘Chip’ and ‘Heather’ horses on the circuit.
“I always remember Willie going off with his little brown suitcase with the strap around it. You couldn’t say enough about Willie, only you don’t meet too many kind of people like him. He never had a bad word to say and left the whole control to us.”
The travel tales built up, such as Willie hitching a lift back from Hickstead in Edward Doyle’s lorry or navigating the Paris metro system like a pro, after his first visit.
“The mare [Chipmount] went to Canada, the biggest show in the world in Spruce Meadows. It was Noel C Duggan that got Frances Connors and Marie into the show. One fence down was all that kept Marie out of a jump-off. They were very well looked after in Canada, brought around everywhere and to look at big stud farms.
“Chipmount was as cute as a fox, she was a grand big character,” continued Willie. “If she was inside the lorry and I’d say ‘How are you, Chippy?’ you’d see her head nodding. I suppose Chipmount would be the favourite one I had.”
“She was such a brave little mare. I don’t know how she would jump around today’s technical tracks. She was half-Draught, wasn’t even 16 hands but she would have tried. She had a huge heart,” recalled Marie about the reformed character, one of a rare group of horses to jump clear through the Hickstead Derby’s Devils Dyke.
Hickstead proved a lucky hunting ground as she and Chipmount’s Diamond Lad half-brother Chip A Diamond teamed up with John Ledingham to win the pairs class, when each pair jumped the course side by side. The same Diamond Lad bay added the Welcome Stakes win at the 1994 Dublin Horse Show to his CV too.
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Marie Burke in action with Chippison
Along came Chippison
The story of Chippison and a legendary gentleman’s agreement is part of Irish show jumping lore. The Cavalier Royale colt foal was one of the earlier embryo transfer success stories after his dam Chipmount went to Williamstown Stud.
“It was Willie’s idea, he was more into breeding than I was at the time. We had a Coevers Diamond Boy mare we couldn’t get in foal, so when John [Hughes] said to have a second mare on standby, we brought her. He put the stronger-looking embryo into Willie’s mare, our mare kept but Willie’s didn’t and that one foal was Chippison.
“There was no question in Willie’s mind about who got the foal,” said Marie, explaining how her future World Equestrian Games horse was bred and gifted to her, thanks to Willie’s ‘auld decency’.
Rewind 20 years to those Games, held in Aachen.
“I was in Hickstead when I got the call that I was on the longlist for Aachen. I was doing my own thing, I’d even done the Spruce Meadows Tour for six weeks the summer before.”
That high risk/high reward option paid off through the experience the pair gained in Canada. “I was very lucky that John agreed and we funded it ourselves, as it wasn’t that cheap to go out there. I think it was the making of me and him [Chippison] that I’d prepared enough to go into another big ring at Aachen.”
“Be ready to jump”
The pair placed third that WEG summer in the Longines Dublin Grand Prix and, “I got a very late call-up, I was driving to Kilkenny to freeze semen when I got a call to be ready and I was going out as number five. It was all rush, rush to get ready to go and then, as it was so late, I got Jessica Kürten’s stuff to wear!”
Her brother-in-law Pat Greene was her groom at WEG, where in another last-minute plot twist, the Banner County pair got their team call-up. Cian O’Connor’s Waterford Crystal was withdrawn after an injury, which meant Marie and Chippison joined Shane Breen (World Cruise), Cameron Hanley (SIEC Hippica Kerman) and Billy Twomey (Luidam).
“In fairness to Cian, he would always say ‘Be ready to jump. Always be ready’.”
Her sisters, Joan and Sheila, were ringside too in Aachen to watch Marie’s dream start, after she placed ninth in the opening speed round.
“We knew what the horse could do. Robert [Splaine, Chef d’Equipe] had told us just to go for a clear. It was just a flowing round, more than a fast round.
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Marie Burke on Chippison competing in the Team competition at the World Equestrian Games in Aachen \ Tony Parkes
“The next day, the first round of the Nations Cup, he lost a shoe halfway round on the approach to the combination. It had rained a lot and the ground was very slippy, I remember him slipping on take-off at the first part of the combination, but I didn’t know the front shoe was gone.
“It was the first time with Chippison that I felt I had to work hard; everything had always felt so easy for him. Even for him to slip at the first part, but still jump clear through the other two parts of the combination was a great achievement for him.
“He came out the next night under lights and jumped that same course clear. I always remember coming out from that clear round thinking, ‘Oh God, that was worth keeping him!’
“Obviously we had chances of selling him but, for me, it was a measure of his brilliance that he came out and jumped that clear round after the previous night.”
“Something we loved”
Their performance not only boosted the Irish team to sixth place, but also meant they qualified for the individual final, when the pressure piled on.
“I went into the final and I think nearly everyone was riding the horse at this stage and giving me different advice! I’m not ‘blaming’ it on that, but I know I met the water fence wrong and he kind of ran through it, the combination came up straightaway afterwards, and we had two or three parts of that wrong.
“The horse was upset, he knew, and of course I knew, we’d done something wrong,” said Marie, who finished overall 24th.
“We bred him, we travelled up and down to [vet] John Hughes to get that embryo. He was one of the first embryos, so we had him from the start. For sure, he was part of the family and that is why he was never for sale as such.
“People will say we were mad [not to sell] but he didn’t cost us a fortune, we were doing something we loved and I was very lucky to get that far and do all that with him.
“You have to give him credit. Obviously, I’m not a professional at that level at all, by any means and having just one horse at that level, it’s very hard to compete at that level. I think people didn’t realise what a good horse he really was.”
Their performance earned two awards at the Show jumpers Ball - International Show jumper and the Paul Darragh Special Achievement accolade - which had added value, as the late Darragh was one of Marie’s trainers.
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Maureen White with daughters Sheila, Marie Burke and Joan Greene \ Aine O'Sullivan
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More top results included a winning Nations Cup team appearance at Lummen that springtime, their 2007 Longines Classic win at Hickstead and third place in the Arezzo Grand Prix, won by Katie Monahan Prudent (USA).
Marie and Chippison competed in the individual classes too at the 2007 European championships. “I had a great Mannheim, we were second and third, he jumped great there. We ended up doing about 14 Nations Cups over the years; Copenhagen, Falsterbo, Drammen and Barcelona.”
However, as Marie was to discover, overseas wins paled in comparison to home ground wins exposure. “There was no social media then like there is now and, no matter what you did abroad, you had to do it at home to promote the stallion. I remember winning a Grand Prix at Cavan and there were more farmers on about using him after that 1.40m class!”
Does she think that Chippison was sufficiently supported by Irish breeders? “I suppose we didn’t capitalise on it enough. Again, social media wasn’t what it is now and he had no progeny on the ground in comparison. He was pre-Facebook days and some wouldn’t be aware of his performance record,” she said about two marketing drawbacks.
Then there was the growth in demand for frozen semen from continental-based stallions and what she philosophically terms a ‘Far away fields are greener’ preference towards fashionable stallions.
“We still have Chippison frozen semen available though, very fertile!” Marie added, in a rare ‘plug’ from the unassuming owner of the Cavalier Royale son who died in March, 2017.
Time to think
Every horse has its time in the sun, before the next famous one comes along. There’s something both of its time and yet timeless about revisiting Chippison’s story - that afternoon in the Tulla farmhouse kitchen is a scene that could be replayed in Normandy or Holstein; hearing the farmer-breeder’s pride in breeding a ‘good one’.
A couple of shoeboxes with rosettes and photos, including that iconic one of Marie and Chipmount coming down the Hickstead bank, are tangible souvenirs from that era. Along with the stories and endearing images, such as Willie on his travels abroad with his “little brown suitcase”, following his pair of horses. “The funny thing is when you’re travelling all the time, it is just show after another show. It’s only after it’s over, you realise what it all meant to everyone,” then remarked Marie, who runs Clare Equestrian Centre, alongside husband John. “Willie is just such a gentleman. What can you say to express what a gentleman, the utmost gentleman, Willie Boland is.”
That gratitude to the Tulla man, often pictured wearing a trademark flat cap, is as strong this week. “Willie let everyone know he was in his 98th year, he was 97 when he passed away.
“I suppose I could talk forever about Willie and the influence he had on my life. I was so lucky to have got to know him and he felt likewise. He’d never have left the country but for Chipmount and Chip A Diamond.
“I am forever grateful to him, he was a great man.”
By the numbers
347 - Chippison recorded progeny on CapallOir.
Five - Chippison was one of five Irish Sport Horses competing at 2006 WEG.
Third - place for Chippison and Marie in the 2006 Longines Dublin Grand Prix.
Two - Cavalier Royale x Chipmount embryos.
One - was Chippison.
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