Accidental Agent catapults Johnson Houghton in to Royal Ascot dreamland

It took just over a minute and a half for Eve Johnson Houghton and Charlie Bishop to claim a surprise first Group One in the opening race of Royal Ascot 2018.

Rather longer in terms of history is the storied tale of their Queen Anne Stakes winner Accidental Agent.

Johnson Houghton had appeared ambitious at the least in aiming her four-year-old at the all-aged mile championship and victory was beyond her wildest dreams - literally.

The popular trainer was reduced to an emotional stream of consciousness after Bishop helped the 33-1 shot, who was owned and bred by her mother, Gaie, to stay on best ahead of Lord Glitters in a driving finish.

“I just cannot believe it,” she was still repeating a few minutes after the presentation.

“I thought I was tilting at windmills. I dreamt about finishing third and then watching it I said 'oh my god, we are going to place.’

“Everyone was saying ‘run him in the Hunt Cup, he’ll win the Hunt Cup’, and I said ‘no, he’s going to be placed in the Queen Anne’.”

She continued: “The poor people sitting in front of me and my Mum - I apologise to them - they will definitely be deaf because there was an awful lot of screaming going on. It is just ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

“You might need to man the lifeboats as there are a lot of tears! Group One winner... I've never trained a Royal Ascot winner, let alone a Group One winner at Royal Ascot!

“And my mother bred him. What a legend she is - I'm so proud of her. And luckily I had a tiny bit each-way at 50-1 to pay for the party - come on!”

Johnson Houghton was assistant to her father Fulke when he caused a similar upset in the 2002 Dewhurst Tout Seul and has been building up her historic Woodway stable in Oxfordshire in steady fashion, hitting half a century for the first time last year.

Her father trained such fine horses as Ile de Bourbon, who landed the King Edward VII Stakes and King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes here exactly 40 years earlier, whilst Fulke’s mother Helen won the 1956 2000 Guineas with Gilles de Retz.

Accidental Agent is also the sixth generation of the mare Sirnelta, who Fulke acquired for Lord Leverhulme in the early 1970s before buying her back off him.

There have been some useful Stakes fillies in the family tree but none have excelled in his wife’s blue cross belts and orange cap to the level of this one. Possibly because the Johnson Houghtons have tended to keep the fillies and sell the colts, with Accidental Agent himself sent to Tattersalls in 2015.

“We bought him back for £8,000, they didn’t sell very well that year,” said Gaie Johnson Houghton.

"Eve knew she had Accidental Agent as well as he has ever been. It is the first time she has got him to a race this year with a clear run. We had little hiccups on the way to the others. I own and bred Eve's first Royal Ascot winner! Doesn't it sound wonderful? It is what dreams are made of."

The winner’s name has great resonance in the dynasty too. It belongs to the title of the autobiography of John Goldsmith, Gaie’s father.

The book looks well worth reading as it documents the crucial part that the remarkable Goldsmith played in helping the French Resistance during the Second World War. Originally a racehorse trainer himself, and by account something of a bon viveur, he was recruited as a Special Operations Executive after an unexpected covert meeting.

His first mission involved getting from southern France to Lyon to aid a French air force general to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, in order to meet the General Henri Giraud in Gibraltar.

“He went in with a felucca (wooden boat). It took about two weeks to jib and dump them off and he was terribly seasick,” said Gaie. “He had a wonderful war story, he was a marvellous, marvellous man who trained horses as well.”

Goldsmith delivered letters behind enemy lines in France, was captured and escaped the Gestapo, and helped to ambush a German military convoy at Mont Ventoux. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, the Military Cross, the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur.

A Royal Ascot winner hardly compares with such extraordinary feats of courage, but one suspects that Goldsmith would have enjoyed this moment, too.