QUEEN OF THE TURF
With the Grand National a week away, a new book chronicles the incredible life of its most eccentric winning owner ever, the delightfully dotty Dorothy Paget
THE sport of kings has always had its fair share of eccentrics, from the windmill-armed TV tipster John McCririck to the outrageously behatted Ascot regular Mrs Gertrude Shilling. But both were amateurs in the dottiness stakes compared to Dorothy Paget, one of the wealthiest women and biggest gamblers ever to tread the turf.
Born in 1905 to an English lord and an American heiress, she was given a cheque for £1million plus a Rolls-Royce on her 21st birthday and proceeded to embark on a campaign to outdo close relatives who had landed some of the horseracing world’s top prizes.
Her father’s thoroughbred St Louis won the 2000 Guineas in 1922, one of the British Classic races. Her maternal grandfather had gone one better by winning the Derby with Volodyovski in 1901. Even her cousin, US ambassador to Britain Jock Hay Whitney, twice won the Cheltenham Gold Cup either side of finishing second in the Grand National with Easter Hero in 1929.
Yet by the time Paget was finished she had eclipsed all of them. As an owner she won no fewer than 1,532 races, including both the Derby and the Grand National, as well as the Cheltenham Gold Cup – seven times. There came a point when her haul of trophies was so extensive she was forced to employ a maid called Mary whose sole task was to clean them.
Dorothy, though, was shy and retiring and did her best to remain unknown to all but her closest friends and employees. However, she was “so much in the public eye that apart from royalty, became the best-known woman in the land” according to the late racing journalist Quintin Gilbey. As her fame grew, the reclusive millionairess became ever-more fascinating to the public though she never spoke to reporters and snubbed all requests for interviews.
Behind the scenes, however, Dorothy was a prodigious gambler who is said to have lost more money on the British turf than any other punter.
As she was a woman of nocturnal habits, many bookmakers hired someone to man the phone at night specifically to take her calls. They would even allow her to place bets on races that had taken place earlier in the day on her oath that she did not know the result. She was clearly true to her word because she lost money on these bets too.
MANY of Dorothy’s wagers were on her own horses and all of them were shrouded in superstition. She never travelled without a bundle of precisely nine freshly sharpened pencils which she used to write her betting slips. When an acquaintance bought Dorothy a splendid gold pencil she took it with her to the races a few times but, after realising she had lost her bets on every occasion she used it, she reverted to her precious nine pencils. “I’ve lost £20,000 today,” she told the acquaintance. “And it’s all because of your bloody pencil!”
The number nine resurfaced when it came to giving names to her favourite horses. Many of them were named in such a way that their letter totals were all divisible by three, such as Golden Miller (12), Insurance (9) and Straight Deal (12). Her superstitious attitude to numbers extended to her betting habits. Sometimes she would decide how much to bet on a horse by basing her stake on the telephone number of the last person who had called her.
She was also obsessed by colours and had an unaccountable hatred of green, even once warning her favourite jockey not to buy a car in that colour and threatening not to let him ride for her if he did.
When he ignored the instruction, she had his vehicle towed away from the racecourse while he was busy riding. When he returned to the car park to find his pride and joy had vanished he called the police. Days later he was stunned by the delivery of an identical model – of a different hue.
She would often travel to the races by car. On one occasion the motor in which Dorothy and her secretary were being chauffeured to Manchester broke down in a small village. She immediately offered an astonished local butcher £75 for the hire of his Baby Austin. When he accepted, Dorothy, whose generously proportioned figure was made even bulkier by the overcoat she invariably insisted on wearing, squeezed her frame into the driver’s seat and roared off, leaving her chauffeur with the broken-down vehicle.
When they arrived at the course Dorothy handed the butcher the agreed fee from the £5,000 wad of cash routinely carried by her secretary for just such eventualities. From that day forward she travelled in a convoy of two cars in case one broke down.
Sometimes she let the train take the strain, often booking a whole carriage to herself. When emergency regulations introduced during the war prevented her from doing so she reportedly appealed to the Ministry of Transport on the grounds that “the proximity of a strange male person invariably makes me vomit”. While sympathetic, the minister replied that in the interests of the war effort he was obliged to consider the greater good of the nation. In a similar vein, she was known to book an entire cinema for herself and would purchase multiple tickets when she went to Wimbledon – one for her, the others for her handbag and other assorted necessities.
IN 1934, at the age of 29, Dorothy placed her most astonishing wager of all. Her steeplechaser Golden Miller was due to attempt a hat-trick of wins in the Gold Cup and 17 days later compete in the Grand National. The Sporting Life newspaper reported that she bet £10,000 on her horse to win the Gold Cup at odds of 5/4 and the same stake on it to win the National at odds of 8/1. Not only that, she put a further £10,000 on the horse to win both.
Golden duly pulled off his Gold Cup victory but Dorothy arrived at Aintree on the morning of the Grand National “so overwrought as to be deathly pale” with nerves.
Perhaps because of the horse’s failure to complete the course the previous year, Golden Miller did Daily Express Saturday April 1 2017 not start favourite but jockey Gerry Wilson rode the perfect race, biding his time, saving energy and jumping the last alongside fourth favourite Delaneige before surging ahead on the run-in for a fivelength triumph. “What a horse, what a horse, what a bloody horse!” roared Dorothy’s Old Etonian trainer Basil Briscoe.
As the horse and jockey made their way through a throng of wellwishers, fans plucked hairs from the horse’s tail for souvenirs.
Dorothy, who died in 1960 aged 54, had every reason to be pleased. Apart from winning the race her bets had made her a small fortune – £285,000 to be exact, the equivalent of £18million today.
To order Dorothy Paget, The Eccentric Queen Of The Sport Of Kings by Graham Sharpe and Declan Colley (Raceform, £25, free UK delivery) call the Express Bookshop on 01872 562 310, or send a cheque to The Express Bookshop to: Dorothy Paget Offer, PO Box 200, Falmouth, TR11 4WJ or visit expressbookshop.co.uk