Royal Ascot 2019: Accidental Agent – ‘Extraordinary’ war hero who inspired favourite

It’s not just in Portsmouth and on the beaches of Normandy that the courage of World War Two heroes is being honoured in front of the Queen this summer.

At Royal Ascot, the wartime activities of Major John Goldsmith DSO MC, external will be recalled as the five-year-old Accidental Agent goes for a repeat success in Tuesday’s Queen Anne Stakes, the first of 30 races staged over the fixture’s five days.

Accidental Agent is named after the highly-decorated member of Winston Churchill’s enemy-sabotaging Special Operations Executive (SOE), who died in 1972.

Bred and owned by his daughter Gaie Johnson Houghton, the horse is trained by his granddaughter Eve.

Goldsmith, a colourful pre-war racehorse trainer brought up in Paris and consequently an impeccable French speaker, became ‘The Accidental Agent’ – the title of a book he wrote about his experiences – when recruited by the SOE and parachuted in behind enemy lines in France after being denied a place in the regular army.

“He was extraordinary,” Eve Johnson Houghton told BBC Sport.

“There are so many amazing stories; my favourite is when he’d been captured by the Gestapo and locked in a high-up hotel room in Paris, but still managed to escape through a window, edging round the building, despite being terrified of heights – that was brave.

“My mother met someone at a party who said she’d read this wonderful book about John Goldsmith and was going to name her horse after him, and my mother thought, ‘I don’t think you are – I am’ and that’s where the idea for the name came from.”