Eldest son of George Charles Champion. Educated at the Royal Grammar School Guildford and from 1908 at King's College, London University, before going to New College, Oxford, where he graduated with firsts in chemistry and botany. In 1914 he took a diploma in forestry which he subsequently made his profession serving firstly in the Indian Forestry Service (1914-1940) after a year in the USA, and then as Professor of Forestry at Oxford. During his time at Oxford he continued to travel extensively visiting Burma, Ceylon, Hawaii, Japan, USA, China, Malaya, the Seychelles, Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda.
Champion's entomological interests centred primarily on Lepidoptera but he did collect beetles too, particularly during his tenure as Central Silviculturalist, and later as Conservator, in the United Provinces, India. The beetles he sent home between 1919 and his father's death in 1927 formed the subject of 24 papers by the latter in which 259 new species were described. His interest in entomology was undoubtedly encouraged by his father, and as a boy in the family home at Woking, he collected on the surrounding heaths with his brother Reginald. By the age of sixteen he had published his first article in the EMM., the magazine with which he was subsequently much involved as an Editor.
Letters from his father (1916-25) and a few other letters and miscellaneous notes are in the HDO (Smith (1986), 71), and a collecting notebook in the NHM (Harvey et al.,(1996), 43). Pedersen (2002) lists a letter in the RESL from Oxford d.1914 to C.J. Wainwright and correspondence with the NHM re the gift of his father’s collections. There is an obituary, including photograph, and account of Champion by Gerald Thompson, one of his students, in EMM, 115, 1979, 93-94 (including portrait), and an earlier account, written at the time of his knighthood, in the same magazine (92, 1956,137). (MD 1/O2, 11/09)