DOROTHY PAGET
Dorothy Paget leads in Golden Miller after his win in the 1934 Grand National
incidentally sired the Champion Hurdle winner of 1957, Merry Deal. If Dorothy Paget wanted a horse, she invariably got it. When one of her longsuffering trainers, Basil Briscoe, asked how much she was prepared to pay for a horse that caught her eye, she told him, “Don’t ask bloody silly questions. I said, buy him!” According to her biographer Quintin Gilbey in his 1973 “Queen of the Turf; The Dorothy Paget Story,” she knew nothing about politics but declared herself an ardent Conservative “because [she] dislike[d] being ruled by the lower classes.” Gilbey goes on to recount the tale that during
World War II, she wrote to the Minister of Transport asking for a special dispensation that she could reserve a railway carriage to herself, because, she said, sitting next to a strange man “is liable to make me vomit.” This request was not surprisingly turned down. When she didn’t arrive to the races via train, she pulled up in a Rolls-Royce – followed by a “spare” in case of a breakdown, as had happened to her once – so the sight of a small convoy of Rolls-Royces approaching a racecourse came to signify that Dorothy Paget had arrived. Paget also showed up her women-only
entourage, whose various tasks were not only to keep her company but also to find out the prices, carry messages, and place bets. Sitting next to her on the back seat of the Rolls would be a battered old wooden box, which she would entrust to one of her assistants. This box would contain nine sharpened lead pencils. She would take one to make notes on her race card or to send a message, but as soon as it was blunt a lackey would be despatched to get a replacement. However, one Christmas, her secretary presented her with a beautiful gold one, bringing the total of pencils to ten. Paget promptly gave it back to her the following ISSUE 51 TRAINERMAGAZINE.COM
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