From a carpeting for Piggott to a Triple Crown winner denied

Hats off to Mrs Shilling

If you want to get ahead, get a hat. Gertrude Shilling followed those instructions to the letter and became as much a part of Royal Ascot as the monarch herself.

Shilling wore hats, vast unwieldy hats that were as catnip to the gossip columnists and diarists of the 1970s and 1980s. Royal Ascot is a place to see and be seen, and no-one could miss Shilling in one of her eyecatching creations 'constructed' by her milliner son David.

There was the five-foot black top hat with a rabbit emerging jauntily from the top of it; a huge green apple with a four-foot arrow skewering it; a three-foot wide daisy with a tapering stalk down her back; a giant football; a television; a five-foot giraffe.