Midwife awarded £500k ... thanks to pub chat in 2006
IT was a simple chat over a drink in a pub.
Thirteen years later, however, it has helped a midwife win her legal battle against her ex over their £1million home.
Claire Chipperfield, 52, and technology boss Andrew Horn, 58, had escaped London to move into the detached family house in Hampshire.
After they split up, Mr Horn sued Miss Chipperfield, claiming most of the property belonged to him because he contributed more when they bought it.
But a judge has now sided with the midwife after she told how Mr Horn said to her in the pub: ‘Well, that’s it Chip, we are now 50/50 owners but that means you owe half the debt as well.’ The judge said Mr Horn also ‘failed to acknowledge the sacrifices she made to the family in terms of her career and the significant contributions which she made to the family finances’.
Miss Chipperfield, who raised two children with Mr Horn, had argued that the house was a joint purchase, reflecting their committed relationship and ‘status as a nuclear family’.
The couple, who were not married, bought the large home in Lymington for £740,000 in 2006. Mr Horn, a chief executive and consultant in the tech industry, put forward most of the deposit – contributing £231,820 from the sale of a former London home, as well as an extra £23,741 and £29,600 for costs and taxes. Miss Chipperfield put in £39,000 and they took out a joint mortgage for £486,725. She reduced her hours to part- time and then stopped working when their children, born in 2002 and 2005, were young. When they separated in 2016, after living together for more than 15 years, Mr Horn sued Miss Chipperfield claiming that most of the house should go to him. The argument centred on whether the couple were joint tenants or ‘tenants in common in unequal shares corresponding to their financial contributions to the purchase’.
Mr Horn agreed the 2006 pub conversation did take place but insisted it did not mean the house should be shared equally. ‘ The words were not to be treated as meaning what they said literally,’ he claimed.
Mr Horn said he and Miss Chipperfield ‘kept their finances separate’ throughout their long relationship and insisted she did not deserve half the property.
But Mr Justice Freedman, at the High Court in London, upheld an earlier finding that the conversation took place in the way it was described by Miss Chipperfield.
Refusing Mr Horn’s bid to resurrect his case on appeal after losing in a county court, he said: ‘Contrary to the submission made on behalf of Mr Horn, the words were to be given their literal meaning, which is also their natural and ordinary meaning.
The reference to 50/50 meant both literally and in context that the ownership would be shared in those proportions,’ he said.
He also backed an earlier finding that the couple and their children ‘ were a true family and the parties had thrown their lots in together’.
‘We’re now 50/50 owners’