Dorothy Paget

Paget too owned a stable of thoroughbreds as well as the Ballymacoll Stud breeding farm in County Meath, Ireland.

She owned seven Cheltenham Gold Cup winners, Golden Miller five times, 1932–1936 inclusive, Roman Hackle in 1940 and Mont Tremblant in 1952.

Golden Miller also provided her with her solitary victory in the Grand National in 1934, still the only occasion any horse has won the two major prizes of British steeplechasing in the same season.

[2] Although Paget spent today's equivalent of many millions of pounds on bloodstock, Golden Miller and Insurance were by far the best known of her horses.

Her many trainers, seventeen or eighteen in all, included Basil Briscoe, Owen Anthony, Frenchie Nicholson, Fulke Walwyn, Walter Nightingall (under both codes), Henri Jelliss, Sir Gordon Richards and, for a brief period, Fred Darling.

She famously, and very publicly fell out with Basil Briscoe after Golden Miller's repeated failure to win a second Grand National, despite it being very clear that the horse disliked the Aintree course.

At the outbreak of war in 1939 and for some five years previously the two biggest racecourse gamblers, as opposed to professional backers, were both women.

In the late 1920s financed the team of supercharged Bentleys created by Sir Henry (Tim) Birkin, a member of the Nottingham lace family.

It was Dorothy Paget who purchased the plot for the cemetery, where such notable Russians as Ivan Bunin, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Rudolf Nureyev were later buried.