Aintree’s intriguing Queen Bee

Sep 22 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

HER name was synonymous with the Grand National. But what was the real Mirabel Topham like? Peter Elson meets a writer who knows

SHE was one of the biggest characters on Merseyside, a place with plenty of competition from other memorably vivid personalities.

Mirabel Topham didn’t just run the Grand National at Aintree through the family company – for a generation, she was the Grand National.

A larger-than-life character in every sense, in later years this former Gaiety Girl and actress tipped the scales at 18 stones – the weight of more than two average-sized jockeys.

A formidable woman, then, who operated successfully in a man’s world of racing, it was her fortitude and business acumen that saved the National from oblivion, giving pleasure to millions worldwide – and not just the bookmakers.

I recall asking the doyen of racing commentators, Peter O’Sullevan, about her and he chuckled: “Oh yes, she was a real old battle-axe.”

It’s this caricature image that writer Joan Rimmer, formerly of the Birkenhead News and Daily Express, dispels with the first biography of this intriguing grande dame of the turf, aptly titled Aintree’s Queen Bee.

Having known not only Mirabel, but also her live-in companions – her husband Ronald’s niece, Pat, and nephew Jim Bidwell Topham – for many years, Joan wants to provide a fuller picture.

“She was a star performer, but few people penetrated the facade. I was very fond of her,” says Joan, who received much material from Jim.

Indeed, Joan does justice to Mirabel’s extraordinary life in this extremely readable and entertaining book.

She was an early feminist role-model.

This kind of leading lady and her semi-aristocratic lifestyle, including a London townhouse in Regent’s Park, has disappeared completely and is unimaginable on Merseyside today.

Joan, the widow of Winwick farmer James Rimmer, now living in Knutsford, presented Mirabel with a Jack Russell terrier called Topper.

“She wrote such funny letters from Topper Topham to my Jack Russell, Nippy Rimmer. She had such a wonderful sense of humour, which most people didn’t realise,” says Joan.

“But she called a spade a shovel. This was the ace in her marriage. The reason why she is the Queen Bee is that Ronald succumbed to her authority and he gave her a brooch representing this which she wore.”

THE daughter of a successful publican, and then manager of London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket, Mirabel went on stage at the Gaiety Theatre and was well-versed in role-playing.

Her greatest and longest-lasting part was as the head of Aintree, but, like all performers, she knew the show must go on in spite of considerable personal heartbreak and suffering behind the scenes.

For, in the Topham household, there were overtones of an over-heated Tennessee Williams family melodrama, set in north Liverpool rather than the Deep South.

With no children of from her fraught, largely sexless marriage, Mirabel not so much adopted as took over Pat and Jim after they lost their mother. They were nicknamed in racing circles as the Topham Trio.

It was an arrangement they were generally happy about. They lived in comfort at Paddock Lodge, the Tophams’ famous house in a glorious, public setting in the Aintree compound, but isolated from the warp and weft of ordinary life.

Pat became cook and housekeeper, and Jim fulfilled the job of male companion and course secretary.

However, Mirabel sabotaged Pat’s embryonic relationship with a suitor, and Jim’s tentative attempts at getting a girlfriend were scuppered and dismissed.

Mirabel wanted to keep them both for herself in a set-up she found reassuring and safe. Unsurprisingly, food became the emotional substitute for them all.

Jim blew most of his cash on fine dining and, as noted, Mirabel’s love of food caused her figure to balloon, a price she said she was happy to pay.

“She was the most wonderful hostess and the food was out of this world. She would invite the Jockey Club to lunch and one member said to her, ‘Mrs Topham, I disagree with every word you’ve uttered, but I can’t beat the succulence of your roast beef’!

“Mirabel had secrets and didn’t want anyone to know them. Several writers tried to uncover the truth and she once took out a court order to stop it,” says Joan.

“The trouble was all due to her husband, Ronald, who was politely known as the genial Peter Pan, a happy-go-lucky man.

“The reality was that he was often irresponsible and concealed an excessive amount of liquor, which fuelled his violent and aggressive tendencies.

“She had a difficult time in private; it was not a great love match. For her, it was like dealing with a naughty child, but fortunately she was a very strong lady.

“Everyone was aware of his weaknesses and she was warned (not least by her father) before she married Ronald.

“I think she saw Ronald as a bit of challenge and then when her theatrical career as a young leading lady was approaching its limits, he provided the means of comfort.” Perhaps Mirabel was also very pig-headed, the natural leader who had to show that her choice was the right one?

She probably enjoyed always having the upper hand in the marriage, but paid a stiff price. The couple were engaged for six or eight years, so there were plenty of chances for her to discover his weaknesses.

“She was very loyal to him, in spite of his fear of other suitors, which was part of his insecurities. When they got engaged, he was always accusing her as she had a lot of fan mail during WWI,” says Joan.

“The problem was that they never had any children, but he was a womaniser.

“Jim Topham told me that she followed him one night in disguise (not difficult for an actress) when he kept disappearing.

“Once she found him with a lady of ill-repute and sloshed him one with her handbag. Then, another time in Warwickshire, she actually caught him again in the very act. She was so hurt and upset, she threatened to leave him.

“He begged her not to, but she insisted he move into his dressing room and her niece, Pat, who lived with her, move into their room.

“Clearly, there was never a lot of sex in the marriage, which is maybe why he went looking for it. But you never know, really.”

The biggest revelation was the court case in London, when an off-duty policeman spotted him at Speaker’s Corner, in Regent’s Park, pleasuring himself beneath a hat before exposing himself to a young female passer-by.

“When Mirabel got home, she found this note saying ‘Mrs, if you find me asleep, please wake me up’ as he wanted to get his side of the story in first!” says Joan.

“He was convicted of indecent exposure, but these stories she never told. Then they were incredibly lucky as a newspaper strike occurred. The story was unpublished and never reached Liverpool.

“She had a wonderful bonhomie with people and lovely attitude to life, and no one suspected that she had all this ghastliness to put up with behind the scenes.

“Before his death in 1958, she treated Ronald like a child and he would irritate her when working on important racecourse papers by switching off the light when he left the room.

“There would have been no National without her because he could not have coped, even though he was the direct descendant who inherited it.

“She was the stronger of the two. When he was appointed to head Tophams Ltd, the racing community were in dismay because they thought he could not cope. It was she that pulled it through,” says Joan.

“The other important point is that she got letters accusing her of running the cruellest race in the world and gave her a lot of flak, yet she absolutely loved animals.

“When an inebriated Ronald aimed a kick at her beloved scottie, Jeanie, she felled him with a blow that would have done justice to a boxer and yelled at him never to do that again.

“And he didn’t. Years after, when the dog died, she locked herself in her bedroom and sobbed for several hours.”

More depressing was the family’s demise.

Firstly, Mirabel died on May 30, 1980, aged 88, and then Pat died of cancer, aged 55.

Jim was bereft and became a virtual recluse.

Although a former course secretary, he never stepped outside on Grand National day.

Joan says: “He lived in the kitchen at Paddock Lodge with the rain coming in through the roof, and died in a public ward at Aintree Hospital.

“It was a terribly sad ending after 159 years of the Tophams. There will never be another Mirabel Topham.”

AINTREE’S Queen Bee, Mirabel Topham and the Grand National, by Joan Rimmer, SportsBooks Ltd, £7.99

peter.elson@dailypost.co.uk

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