Did you know Clare Balding is from England? In this piece, you get to know Clare Balding’s husband, children and other necessary information.
Husband
Clare Balding has no husband but his wife is Alice Arnold. The couple had their wedding in 2015.
Biography
Clare Balding is a broadcast journalist and author. She currently presents for BBC Sport, Channel 4 and BT Sport and formerly presented the religious programme Good Morning Sunday on BBC Radio 2. Balding was appointed as the 30th president of the Rugby Football League, serving a two-year term until December 2022.
Clare Victoria Balding CBE was born on January 29, 1971. She is 52 years old and is the daughter of Ian Balding and his wife Emma Hastings-Bass. She was privately educated at the independent Downe House School in Berkshire, where she was head girl and a contemporary of comedian Miranda Hart (Hart and Balding are in fact tenth-cousins, sharing a nine-times-great-grandfather in Sir William Leveson-Gower, 4th Baronet).
Balding applied to read law at Christ’s College, Cambridge, but failed her interview and realised that law was not what she most wanted to do. She later successfully applied to Newnham College, Cambridge, and read English. While at university she was President of the Cambridge Union Society in Easter 1992 and graduated in 1993 with a 2:1 honours degree.
She was a leading amateur flat jockey and Champion Lady Rider in 1990. Her memoir My Animals and Other Family, which documents her life growing up in a racing yard, won the National Book Award for “Autobiography of the Year” in 2012.
Clare Balding has close family links to horse racing: her father, Ian Balding, trained Mill Reef, 1971 winner of The Derby, Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes; and her younger brother, Andrew Balding, trained Casual Look, the winner of the 2003 Epsom Oaks. The latter win led to a very emotional post-race interview with her brother.
Her uncle Toby Balding-trained winners in the Grand National, Cheltenham Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle. Furthermore, her maternal grandfather was the trainer Peter Hastings-Bass and her maternal uncle William Hastings-Bass, 17th Earl of Huntingdon was once a trainer to Queen Elizabeth II. Her maternal grandmother, Priscilla Hastings, was descended from the Earls of Derby and was one of the first women elected to membership of the Jockey Club.
Clare Balding’s well-documented aristocratic lineage on her mother’s side can be seen in records that TheGenealogist has identified in the research. Researchers found Balding’s maternal line reveals that she is the great-granddaughter of Sir Malcolm Bullock, a Member of Parliament, whose sexuality had to be kept hidden because homosexuality was illegal in Britain. His sexuality was investigated in her episode of the Who Do You Think You Are? programme first broadcast in July 2017.
Balding’s paternal grandfather Gerald Barnard Balding Sr, was a 10-goal polo player who immigrated to America to play polo in the 1920s when he was in his 20s. Outbound passenger lists on a genealogy website include Balding’s grandfather and it was at this time that Gerald Balding Sr met and later married the American heiress, Eleanor Hoagland.
She discovered her great-great-great-grandfather was Joseph Hoagland who, in 1866, founded the Royal Baking Powder Company with his brother, Cornelius. Through the pioneering use of mass advertising campaigns, they contributed to building one of the largest producers of baking powder in the U.S.
Is Clare Balding married?
Clare Balding is a married woman and has no children with her wife.
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