Death linked to crash injuries sustained 18 years ago, inquest heard

Forty-seven-year-old Christopher John Gregory was “dealt a bad hand of cards” by life, his grieving brother told the hearing in Newbury Town Hall yesterday (Wednesday).
Berkshire coroner Peter Bedford heard he was just five years old and living in Lambourn with his parents – the late jockey Michael ‘John’ Gregory and his wife Rita – when he was badly burned, sustaining lifelong scars to his torso.
Then, in 1996, he was involved in the horrific accident which would change his life for ever.
Police and hospital records of the incident had been lost or deleted so the Newbury Weekly News agreed to provide details to the hearing from its archives.
The article, published in December 1996, was read to the inquest by Mr Bedford.
It stated that Mr Gregory, then aged 31, of Baydon Road, Lambourn, was found in a snow-covered field next to Mount Lane, Chaddleworth, at 9am by a gamekeeper.
He was in the advanced stages of hypothermia and paralysed from the waist down and a stopped car clock suggested he had lain there since 11.22pm the previous night.
The article continued: “Mr Gregory had been catapulted through the air as his car veered off the road, ploughing through woodland before overturning... He had been flung from his car as its windscreen and sunroof had been forced out as the car hit the ground and rolled over.”
Mr Gregory, who subsequently lived in Newbury and then, later, a specially-converted flat in Speen, survived, but he never walked again.
The inquest heard that he had been playing snooker with friends in Chaddleworth and had planned to stay the night with one of them.
His brother Richard said: “He seemed to block it from his memory. Whether he really remembered the circumstances, I don’t know. Did he have an argument and decide to drive home? I could never get him to talk about it.”
He added that his brother was a sensitive, loving man, devoted to his family but that he “hated being dependent on anyone”.
His godfather John Burnell, of Lambourn, continued to visit Christopher regularly after the death of Mr Gregory senior, the inquest heard.
In the latter years of his life, he developed pressure sores, described as appalling by his GP, and needed extensive and risky surgery to improve his quality of life.
But therein lay the crux of the problem, the inquest heard – he needed to gain weight to be fit enough for an operation which would probably involve the removal of his legs.
Mr Gregory, the inquest heard, was understandably conflicted over this.
After repeated stays in hospitals in Thatcham, Reading, Basingstoke and Oxfordshire, his frail body finally succumbed to sepsis.
In a narrative verdict, Mr Bedford recorded that Mr Gregory died at West Berkshire Community Hospital on March 1 this year from pressure sore sepsis resulting ultimately from his accident-induced paraplegia.