Rose Paterson
Aintree chairman and political wife who reinvigorated the Grand National and took part in a gruelling race across Mongolia for charity
ROSE PATERSON, who has died aged 63, was, as chairman of Aintree Racecourse, the boss of the Grand National; she was also the popular and devoted wife of Owen Paterson, Conservative MP for North Shropshire and former cabinet minister.
The daughter of the 4th Viscount Ridley, and sister of the present viscount, the science writer Matt Ridley, Rose Paterson became Jockey Club Racecourses’ first female chairman after succeeding Lord Daresbury at Aintree after the 2014 Grand National, having been a non-executive director at the racecourse since 2005.
Highly intelligent, slim, always elegantly dressed, and beautiful (in looks, though not in her politics, she bore a certain resemblance to Jane Fonda), Rose Paterson stated her ambitions as “giving the racegoer, at every level, a better time” and “putting something back into the local community”.
Though she had to handle all the difficulties of not being able to run the Aintree meeting this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, she succeeded brilliantly and was much loved.
She was on the board which revolutionised the design of the Aintree fences, to save the horses, thereby maintaining the reputation of the race against attacks by animal rights activists. Record turnstile and television audience numbers were achieved under her leadership; a free day’s racing for local people attracted a crowd of 30,000, and because of her concern for horse welfare she was put in charge of the Jockey Club review of the use of the whip.
While not ostentatiously beating the feminist drum (she insisted on being called “chairman”, not “chairwoman” or “chair”), through charm and quiet diplomacy Rose Paterson succeeded in making the very male world of Aintree – and to some degree the Jockey Club, where she served on the main board of stewards – a much more welcoming environment for women.
She was instrumental in the establishment of the now annual Grand Women’s Summit, a panel of leading figures in women’s sport and business. In addition she largely succeeded in persuading the tabloids to resist the temptation to publish unflattering photographs of Liverpool ladies letting their hair down at Aintree, which she saw as unrepresentative of Ladies’ Day. “All we are asking is that they are fair,” she told Marcus Armytage in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. “There are all sorts of people in wonderful outfits and behaving well. Some won’t be, for sure, but be fair.”
A less well-known aspect of her contribution to public life was the very active support she gave to her husband in his role as an MP and, successively, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2010 to 2012, then Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs until 2014.
While many spouses of Northern Ireland ministers prefer to stay on this side of the Irish Sea, Rose Paterson remained at her husband’s side and, during the two years the couple were in residence at Hillsborough Castle, the historic 18th-century property which serves as the official home of the Secretary of State, she made her mark with improvements to the house and garden, transforming it into a welcoming home and attracting more members of the public to visit.
An art expert who had worked for Sotheby’s before becoming her husband’s office manager, Rose used her experience and contacts to negotiate the loan of significant pieces of art to adorn the house and arranged for two new large canvases by the Warwickshire artist Marcus May, depicting the Castle as it is today, to be specially commissioned to mark the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, gifted by Lord Ballyedmond.
The paintings, which now have pride of place in the main hallway, include an aerial depiction of the back of the house and the gardens, featuring the Patersons and Hillsborough staff.
It was in restoring the gardens that
Rose Paterson made her greatest impact at Hillsborough. The lake was dredged and cleared of overgrown vegetation; hedging was replaced; two neglected small temples were restored to their former glory, and the main entrance gates, which had been out of use for many years, were reinstated as the Jubilee Gates, and opened to allow the Queen to enter when she visited the castle in 2012.
But the Patersons’ pride and joy was a new formal Jubilee Garden – a classic box-hedge garden, planted out with a variety of new shrubs of different sizes and shapes, designed by the Castle’s head gardener, Stephen Martelli, with input from the Prince of Wales.
Notably, at a time of stringency in the public finances, Rose Paterson transformed Hillsborough within the existing Castle maintenance budget.
Rose Emily Ridley was born in Northumberland on August 13 1956, the second of four children of Matthew White Ridley, who would succeed his father as the 4th Viscount Ridley in 1964, and Lady Anne, née Lumley, daughter of the 11th Earl of Scarbrough. Rose’s paternal grandmother, Ursula, was the daughter of the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Both politics and horsemanship were in Rose’s blood. Her father was, for many years, chairman of Northumberland County Council, while her uncle, Nicholas Ridley (later Lord Ridley of Liddesdale), would serve as a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher.
In her interview with Marcus Armytage, Rose recalled her mother as a “great television punter” and she herself was hooked on racing at an early age, though the family’s one racehorse, Rosa Do, failed to shine and soon earned the nickname Rosa Don’t.
The family lived in a house on the family’s Blagdon Estate, near Seaton Burn, before moving into the main house when Rose was eight or nine. As a child she raised from an orphaned chick a collared dove called Hamish which lived free within the house for 12 years, became romantically obsessed with her toes and liked to make itself comfortable in the hair of visitors.
Rose was educated at Westfield
School, Newcastle, and West Heath Girls’ School, Sevenoaks, and spent a gap year before reading History at New Hall, Cambridge, working as a stable “lad” for Gavin Pritchardgordon in Newmarket, where she “learnt a lot of new swear words and had to endure the other lads discussing the size of my bottom as we set off for a canter.” She also did a course in art history in Venice.
After graduation and a brief stint working at the Mayfair booksellers Heywood Hill (she was always incredibly well read), for some 20 years she held senior roles in the paintings department at Sotheby’s, Chester, mainly valuing 19th and 20th-century art.
One of her big coups, in the early 1980s, was finding a painting in the basement of Macclesfield Town Hall, where it was being used as a pingpong table. She recognised it as a major work of art and it was subsequently identified as a Guercino. Though in poor condition, it sold for £100,000, a lot of money for an Old Master at the time. She also spent 10 years as the Daily Telegraph’s Northern art critic.
In 1980 she had married Owen Paterson, a fellow history student who had been one of many admirers at Cambridge. When, in 1997, he became MP for North Shropshire, she gave up Sotheby’s to become his secretary, researcher “and everything”, as she put it.
Like her husband a keen rider to hounds, Rose Paterson owned point-to-pointers as well as breeding, owning and training eventers; her daughter Evie represented Great Britain three times in the European Eventing Championships as a junior and young rider.
However, Rose’s only race-riding experience was the gruelling 600-mile Mongol Derby which she undertook with her husband in 2011 to raise money for charity. On a series of semi-wild horses, the couple rode across the desolate steppes, swamps and mountains of Mongolia, braving falls and atrocious weather, and fighting off wild dogs each day to reach the pony stations; their nights were spent on the hard floors of a series of Mongolian “gers”, under hanging carcasses of goats. Food was invariably pasta with goat gristle (particularly hard on Rose, a vegetarian) and sour yak milk.
“The worst leg of each day was the last one,” Rose recalled in 2012. “If we missed the ger we would have spent the night outside, with no food or drink, taking turns to hold on to the ponies.” If the animals had bolted, the couple would have lost everything, including their passports.
At 55, the Patersons were joint oldest in the group, but through sheer determination they were among 11 of the 23 starters to finish. Together they raised £120,000 for their chosen charities, the Royal Irish Regiment Benevolent Fund and the Midlands Centre for Spinal Injuries, and were particularly touched by the many small cheques received from the people of Northern Ireland.
“It was a very silly thing to do,” Rose admitted, “but I am quite wistful about it now.”
Rose Paterson was the most loyal friend, wife and mother. She was utterly furious when her husband was relieved of his cabinet post by David Cameron. She had a flair for decoration and created a wonderful family home in Shropshire and a holiday home in France. She was chairman of the Weston Park Foundation.
Earlier this year she had contracted Covid-19 – possibly at the Cheltenham Festival. In a statement on June 24, her husband reported that she had been found dead at the family home.
The British Horseracing Authority chief executive Nick Rust described Rose Paterson as “one of those people who always seemed to see the bigger picture, do her best for the wider good and work tirelessly and selflessly towards achieving results. She also had the knack of being able to say the right words at the right time.”
She is survived by her husband and by their two sons and daughter and by a granddaughter.
Rose Paterson, born August 13 1956, death announced June 24 2020
Charles Moore writes:
At Cambridge in the 1970s, all the men were in love with Rose Ridley, captivated by her beauty, charm and intelligence. Owen Paterson overcame strenuous competition to marry her.
Rose’s subsequent career displayed a fascinating combination of the old-fashioned and the modern.
On the one hand, she was the last, best old-style “political wife” of a Member of Parliament – fighting her husband’s cause, feeding his friends, and doing the diplomacy for which he was by nature ill-suited. She was a superb mother to their three children, and a natural hostess with an eye for making any residence – from Hillsborough Castle to a small London flat – a home.
On the other, she brought distinctive woman’s leadership to a public role. Unlike most men of comparable energy and determination, she was modest and a good listener. As chairman of Aintree, she understood that the high global reputation of the Grand National was precarious. Although she loved racing deeply, she loved horses, with their nobility and bravery, even more. She looked at the race through their eyes, reconciling proper safety with great sport. She brilliantly conveyed this vision to the race-going public, and inspired horse-loving women rising in a world still over-controlled by men. Watching all this, Owen felt a Denis Thatcher-like pride in his wife’s achievements.
Just before each Grand National, Rose made a short speech to the jockeys. The National, she said, was “a precious vase”, and she was handing it to them for the course of the race. They responded gallantly to her call for the highest standards. When Davy Russell won on Tiger Roll for the first time, he whispered to her in the winner’s enclosure: “I looked after your precious vase, Rose.” Nothing made her prouder.