Not all about Eve as Johnson Houghtons stride on together

Like grandmother, like father, like daughter. Eve Johnson Houghton sits at the big table where her forebears sat before her, an heiress without so very many airs and graces, and fixes her interrogator with a steely glare, something she manages as expertly as she trains horses.

"Are you calling me old?" she asks, provocatively. Well, er, no, but, it's just that . . . um. Satisfied she has the upper hand in the conversation, she defuses the situation with a laugh. Formidable in a nice way, in the best tradition of the Johnson Houghton women, the last of the line pauses to examine her place in the world and is reasonably pleased with what she sees.

The Johnson Houghton dynasty is rich with contrasts. One of them trained but wasn't allowed to be a trainer. Another became the man of the house before he came of age, which is where the slight local difficulty with Eve arose. Fulke Johnson Houghton inherited the licence from his mother Helen – who, in a quirk of antediluvian social perversity didn't actually have a licence to pass on, but we'll come to that – when he was only 20, which made his daughter Eve, who took over the reins a week or two shy of her 40th birthday, a bit of a late starter in comparison.