The Abominable Queen of the Turf - Dorothy Paget

She was worth £100m and bet £4m at a time. She ate like a horse, smoked like a chimney and despised all men: Meet the abominable Queen of the turf

By Christopher Wilson June 2010

She was as eccentric as she was rich - and since she was worth the equivalent of £100 million, that made her some eccentric. She hated the sight of men so much that she claimed they made her physically sick. When she went to the theatre, she would order an extra seat for her handbag. When she travelled on a train, it would have to be the whole carriage. When she needed to pass water, she would call for a horse-box.

Nothing about the Hon Dorothy Paget was normal, from her clothes to her friends to her eating habits. She hated the colour green - yet called her staff not by their names, but by colour-coding. She slept all day, and then spent all night on the phone to her bookmaker. No wonder she was given the title Queen of the Turf  -  the amount she splashed out in pursuit of the gee-gees was enough to singlehandedly keep the British bookmaking industry afloat for years.

Tomorrow at Epsom - Derby Day - old men in top hats with long memories will raise a glass to Dorothy, the greatest female racehorse owner the British Turf has ever known. It will be 50 years since she died, but among the vast panoply of colourful characters who have flocked to the Derby ever since, there's never been anybody to match her.

Born in 1905 the daughter of an English aristocrat and an American heiress, Dorothy inherited most things at birth - except good looks. Dorothy was a shapeless, humourless hulk of a woman whose life, it would appear, was driven by the catastrophic irony that even with her millions, she would never attract a man. It never stopped her for a moment. Her ancestors had conquered the fledgling American nation with their coal and steel empires, their railway interests and their shipping lines. Her British forbears were true-blue aristocrats, tracing their ancestry back to Henry VIII.

She was a friend of royalty and behaved as if she were the Queen herself. A spoilt child, she soon awoke to her poisoned legacy of excessive wealth and remarkable ugliness. She was expelled from six schools, starting with Heathfield, near Ascot, and ended up in a school run by a Russian refugee in Paris. Here she found some consolation in the company of a fellow-pupil, Princess Marina of Greece, who was later to be a lifetime friend and marry the Duke of Kent. 

Her mother died when she was ten, and her father remarried: Dorothy was left alone with her money, and a sister she could not bear. She started to gain weight  -  by the end, she would weigh 20 stone, which was to curtail her love of hunting. But the thrill of speed had her in its grip and she sponsored motor racing before turning to show jumping.

Then came the racing proper... Dorothy spent the equivalent of tens of millions making her way to the top of the racehorse world, inspired by her grandfather William C. Whitney, a former U.S. Secretary for the Navy who won The Derby in 1901 with Volodyovski. In all, her horses were to win a total of 1,532 races on the flat and over the sticks, winning the Cheltenham Gold Cup seven times, the Derby (with Straight Deal in 1943) and the Grand National. But she never got a man.

Dorothy Paget with her 1943   

Derby Winner Straight Deal    

'Dorothy Paget paid little attention to her appearance and on the racecourse invariably clad her bulk in a substantial speckled blue tweed coat,' wrote her obituarist, coolly. 'Not easily approachable, she was domineering, often abominably rude. 'When, in the winner's enclosure, she congratulated Golden Miller (her five time Gold Cup winner) it was remarked that this was the first male she had ever kissed. Then someone pointed out that Miller was a gelding!' The only men she could tolerate were her male trainers, but her attitude to them could be summed up by the day her horses won five of the six races at Folkestone. Instead of cracking open the champagne like any other owner, she hauled in the trainer Fulke Walwyn and made him sit in another room while she shouted imprecations through the doorway. 'Go and kick him in the balls!' she ordered a startled female friend, Peggy Whitehead, who witnessed the event.

She bet in millions… She always backed her own horses, but according to racing expert Professor Wray Vamplew: 'Financially her sojourn on the Turf was a disaster, costing her over £3 million (£90m today). This was in addition to her vast gambling losses. She bet huge sums daily. Her largest recorded bet was £160,000 (£4m today) to win £20,000  -  and though this was successful, others were not.' In 1948 alone she lost over £100,000, the equivalent today of £3m. No wonder bookies employed people to stay awake all night just to take Dorothy's calls. She would even sometimes bet on a race that had already run, promising the bookies that she did not know the result.

Restless, chain-smoking a hundred a day, she was the ultimate compulsive gambler. And an arrogant one too, according to her biographer Quintin Gilbey, she knew nothing about politics but declared herself an ardent Conservative 'because I dislike being ruled by the lower classes'. 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 sitting next to a strange man 'is liable to make me vomit'. Her request was refused - but very few others were.

When her Rolls-Royce broke down on the way to a race meeting, she bought the local butcher's van to complete the journey. Then, when she got home, she ordered another Rolls-Royce so that one could follow the other in case such an eventuality should occur again. It never did, but when two Rolls-Royces approached a racecourse, everybody knew Dorothy Paget had arrived. At the racecourse, she would not allow her horses to go home until she had climbed into the horse-box to relieve herself; and if the lad had mistakenly put the horses in, out they would have to come until the ritual was completed.

She had no sex life but nursed an unrequited passion for Olili, the niece of her former Russian school ma'am Princess Vera Meshchersky, who came to run her stud in Britain. Domestic life at Hermit's Wood, her mansion in Buckinghamshire, kept the staff on her toes. She would eat dinner at seven in the morning, followed by a long sleep. Breakfast would be at 8.30 in the evening, when staff would receive their instructions - by letter. Her gardener was never allowed to mow the lawn during the day, even though he protested he could not see to mow it at night. And someone had to make sure the underfloor heating in the dog kennels was switched on. By midnight, Dorothy was ready to telephone her trainers to discuss the next day's racing, and when one of them tried to put a stop to it by disconnecting his phone, she had someone go round and wake him up to tell him to reconnect it. She would then settle down to play cards with anybody who had the strength to stay the course through the night.

Twelve days before her 55th birthday in 1960, Dorothy Paget was poring over her racing calendar and wondering which racehorse trainer to call next. It was 4.30am in the morning when she suffered a heart attack, and went to that great winner's enclosure in the sky, leaving behind her - after all the horses she'd bought, after all the gambling losses - a fortune which today would be worth £100m.

She was indeed, for all her cranky ways, the true Queen of the Turf.