Dorothy Paget (1905 - 1960)
To celebrate Cheltenham’s feature-race centenary we will also be looking at some of the Owners who have graced the Gold Cup winner’s enclosure during that time. Following on from Jock Whitney, who’s Easter Hero took the race twice, we now move on to the 1930’s, where his cousin, Dorothy Paget, dominated with her legendary chaser Golden Miller.
Born in 1905 and educated at Heathfield School, Ascot, Dorothy Paget was known as a supreme eccentric. An early indication of this was when she trained as a singer, and chose to give her first public performance in front of an audience of 500 prisoners at Wormwood Scrubs. She also set up a colony for displaced Russian aristocrats in Paris.
She inherited a vast sum of money from her mother’s side of the family when she was 21, and invested in motor racing, setting up a team of Bentleys which never managed to win a major race. Dispirited, motor racing’s lost was horse racing’s gain – a passion for which she gained from her father’s side of the family, as her father owned the 1922 2,000 Guineas winner St Louis.
Some historians suggest she invested over £3m into owning horses, and at one time had over 50 horses in training. This was in spite of the onset of chronic shyness, and as one tale suggests if she went racing she would lock herself in the toilets until the crowds had left, and then would summon her trainer for a debrief of the race. She was always accompanied to the races by a posse of secretaries, protecting her from the crowds when she did surface from hiding.
Another of the legendary eccentricities of “DP” was her sleeping habits – she slept mainly in daylight hours, breakfasting at 8.30pm and was served dinner at 7am. This would drive her trainers to despair, with late-night phone calls demanding running plans and jockey changes. Her odd hours also allowed her carte blanche with the bookmakers, who trusted her not to have found out the result of races and place bets – sometimes as much as £10,000 - hours after the race had been run.
She had a number of bloodstock failures in her early foray into ownership – notably the 15,000gns yearling Colonel Payne who was later sold on for 250gns – but things changed after she met trainer Basil Briscoe in 1931. He told Miss Paget he had both the best Chaser and Hurdler in the country and he would sell them to her for a combined £6,000. She agreed, with Insurance becoming a Champion Hurdle winner, and the Chaser, a gangly unfurnished five-year-old called Golden Miller, going on to win five Cheltenham Gold Cups and a Grand National.
As was a theme, Golden Miller won his first Gold Cup in 1932 against the advice of both trainer and jockey who feared the going too firm for the gelding. However, Miss Paget had already put her money on the horse, and her faith was rewarded when beat a field including Grakle.
Golden Miller went onto win the race four more times – including in 1935 when he beat her cousin Jock Whitney’s Thomond II in an epic battle. His bid for a sixth Gold Cup was thwarted by the weather then the 1937 Festival was cancelled, whilst Morse Code became the only horse to ever beat him at Cheltenham in the 1938 renewal.
Golden Miller was retired in 1939 to her paddocks in Stanstead where he lived out his days with Insurance, before passing peacefully as a 30-year-old, whilst Dorothy Paget went to own a Derby when Straight Deal won the Epsom Classic in 1943. She died in her sleep at just 54 years of age, her reputation as fearsome and eccentric intact. As Basil Briscoe once remarked “Training horses is child’s play. It’s a hell of a bloody job to trying to train Miss Paget!”