Greatest Steeplechase In World Run By Woman

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28528, 6 March 1958, Page 2

Greatest Steeplechase In World Run By Woman

[By SUSAN VAUGHAN)

LONDON. It is the greatest steeplechase in the world. It costs about £90,000 to stage each year. It attracts hundreds of thousands of racegoers. And it is run by a woman.

This is the Grand National, which, with the prize money raised to nearly £ 17,000, will soon become the richest steeplechase ever run in Britain. The National will be held this year on March 29, and for Mrs Mirabel Dorothy Topham it will be a hectic time. As managing director of Topham’s Ltd., who lease the Aintree racecourse, near Liverpool, she is in charge of preparations for this historic sporting event.

It is a tough task for a woman, but not too tough for Mrs Topham. This remarkable woman has been nicknamed the ‘Amazon of Aintree.”

‘Mrs T.”, as her employees call her, has plenty of energy. “A person of dominating and masterful character and personality, and no doubt of considerable business acumen,” was how Mr Justice Lewis described her some years ago, when she appeared as a witness in a Court case. Gentler Side

And yet there is a gentler side to this woman who works in a

man’s world. She loves flowers, and she has brought a feminine touch to Aintree by packing the prickly fences with moss and laying barriers to prevent horses hurting themselves. During the night before the National, she goes from stable to stable to make sure her charges are comfortable.

Mrs Topham has not always been a bustling business woman. She was once an actress, Hope Hillier. She played in “Quality Street” on the West End stage, and in pantomime. Her only sister was a Gaiety Girl. Then, in the early 1920’5, she married into the Topham family, race managers for more than . a century. In 1938, she became managing director and chairman of Topham’s, Ltd., and made her home by the racecourse at Aintree.

Aged 60, she has no children of her own, but during the war she and her husband adopted a girl and boy—two orphaned children of Mr Topham’s cousin.

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