SUCCESS breeds success as perfectly illustrated by Eve Johnson Houghton’s Blewbury stables, near Didcot.

With a personal best 51 winners in Great Britain this year plus Ice Age’s valuable victory in Ireland, her runners have racked up more than £700,000 in prize-money.

It ensured Johnson Houghton was Britain’s leading female trainer for the second consecutive year and also made her Oxfordshire’s top Flat trainer for the first time.

Reflecting on the campaign at her recent annual yearling parade, she said: “We have had an amazing season and it has been brilliant. I am really pleased.

“With older handicappers you are not sure how they will do, but the likes of Silver Ghost and Frank Bridge actually went on, so I was lucky, and then I had some really nice two-year-olds.. Hopefully I have a nice bunch for next year.”

With her Woodway stables on an upward curve, Johnson Houghton has attracted new owners including Khalifa Dasmal, whose colours were carried by Europe’s 2011 champion sprinter Dream Ahead, and Dubai-based Saeed Almuhairi.

Their charges – an unnamed daughter of Charm Spirit and Jumeirah respectively – were among 17 of 28 new recruits who paraded in front of around 180 owners and guests.

Johnson Houghton’s stables will be bursting at the seams next season with a string of 70-80 horses, but she has no plans to expand further.

“I could take more than 70, but I don’t want more than that in my yard,” she said. “I like to be hands on.

“I have a really good staff. They are friendly and a great team with a family atmosphere. It works really well. If the string got bigger then I would have to change the system and I am not prepared to do that.”

Johnson Houghton’s sole Group race success came in 2011 when The Cheka landed the John of Gaunt Stakes at Haydock, and the trainer is keen to add to her tally next term.

“I would like to win a Group race and have more than 50 winners again,” she said.

A leading candidate to fulfil that ambition will be Accidental Agent, owned and bred by her mother, Gaie, who gave the trainer her most valuable career success when scooping the £112,050 first prize in the totescoop6 Challenge Cup at Ascot in October.

Ice Age was Johnson Houghton’s other big money-spinner, with his success in the ‘Bold Lad’ Sprint Handicap at the Curragh for owners Eden Racing III coming after the four-year-old had landed the Sky Bet Windsor Sprint Series Finale.

A new Eden Racing partnership for next season has been set up with the colours to be carried by the well-named yearling Tin Hat, who is by the sire Helmet out of the mare Precautionary.

On To Victory, a three-time winner last term, will have York’s Ebor Handicap as his long-term target.

Hopes are also high that Magnolia Springs, who impressed when making a winning debut at Newbury before finishing sixth in the Listed Radley Stakes at the Berkshire course, will develop into a pattern race performer.

Stable stalwart What About Carlo, who claimed his first Listed Race success when taking Newbury’s Steventon Stakes in July, will be back, while Scarlet Dragon, who went agonisingly close to capturing the Group 3 September Stakes at Kempton, has moved to Alan King’s yard and is set to go hurdling in the new year.