Expert’s book exposes racing’s Scams, Scandals and Gambles
VETERAN Welsh horse racing correspondent Brian Lee has exposed some of the country’s greatest stories and surprises from the tracks in his latest book.
In Racing Rogues: The Scams, Scandals and Gambles of Horse Racing in Wales, the well-respected writer – who also pens the Cardiff Remembered column for our sister title the South Wales Echo – tells a comprehensive collection of true stories including:
The Oyster Maid affair, when a great gambling coup engineered at Tenby in 1927 nearly put paid to horse racing in Wales and was said by the Queen Mother’s jockey, Dick Francis, to have been “the most bitterly resented betting coup National Hunt racing has ever known’’.
The astounding story of Am I Blue’s when, in 2010, a four-year-old filly, owned and trained by Aberkenfig’s Delyth Thomas, romped home at Hereford after being backed from 25-1 to 5-1, despite having woeful form. As one reporter put it: “There was outrage in some quarters and amusement in others.”
The elaborate switching of horses and the cutting of the telegraph wires at Bath races in 1953 which saw well-known Cardiff bookie Gomer Charles jailed for two years for fraud after his syndicate placed £100,000 worth of bets on a ‘ringer’ racehorse that won at 20-1.
Now 80, Brian said: “Having written a book on the history of the Welsh Grand National and another on Welsh Steeplechase jockeys, I thought it was time to write about the ‘ darker’ side of the sport having met many of the characters that are featured in the book such as the notorious John Bowles, who died a few years ago, and who, although warned-off, I discovered in the sponsor’s tent at the Talybont Hunt Steeplechases one year holding court with officials! Seeing me, he said: ‘Brian they were terrible things you wrote about me in the paper.’
“As a warned-off person he shouldn’t have been anywhere near a point-topoint or race meeting and was later fined.
“As a young lad in the 1950s, I worked for Cardiff Corporation Parks Department at the defunct Ely Racecourse marking out football pitches and little did I think then that one day I would be writing about some of the horses and riders that appear in Racing Rogues.
“Some of my reports got me in trouble and, apart from being banned from one point-to-point, I turned up anyway – I have been reported to the Jockey Club on several occasions and even threatened by bookmakers.
“However, in June last year I was presented with the John Ayres Special Recognition Award at the annual South Wales Point-to-Point Dinner/ Dance for my 50 years of reporting on the Welsh hunt-racing scene for the national and local press.
“Also some special friends presented me with a specially commissioned painting of my favourite point-to-pointer Mandryka to mark my halfcentury.
“For such a little book, Racing Rogues has been a long time coming – nearly four years – as the publisher Ashley Drake had a lot of books to get out.
“He has suggested that I do a series of them now but at 80 my time and en- ergy is running out.
“However, I have a Welsh horse racing miscellany in mind which could be adapted from my many press cuttings books I have kept from the 1970s.
“I wish I would have started them back in 1966 when I first started reporting on the Welsh horse racing scene.”
Racing Rogues is published by St David’s Press priced at £14.99 and is available from www.ashleydrake.cymru