CARDIFFREMEMBERED A reader helps solve mystery of the young winner of Glog Plate

WHEN a Cardiff Remembered reader kindly presented me with a selection of old press cuttings and photographs recently she helped to solve something of a puzzle.

Back in 1985, I published a book The Races Came Off: The Story of Point-ToPoint Racing in South and West Wales.

In it I referred to a report that appeared in the South Wales Echo in 1900 under the heading ‘Horse racing in the clouds.’

The races were held on Llanwonno Mountain and one of the races staged over a distance of eight miles was the Glog Plate, which the Echo reported was won by Lewis Morgan’s Sutton “ridden by young Willie Thomas of Pontypridd”. But who was Willie Thomas? Well, one of those undated Echo cuttings carries a sporting profile on a Willie Thomas by Dave Phillips which reads, “William Pritchard Thomas – or Tommy Trouble, Llew, Jimmy, Willie or any of the other radio aliases by which he was known in the Welsh Rarebit sketches was born at Mill Street, Pontypridd the son of Gomer Thomas, a harness-maker”.

We learn that, as a young lad, Billy gained quite a reputation as a horseman and among his many successes was a second place in the Welsh Derby at Llanwonno races in 1903.

Well, the Willie Thomas that Dave Phillips refers to is surely the Willie Thomas mentioned in my horse racing book and who also rode the winner of the Glog Plate.

Oddly enough, his name also appears in another of my books which is about a famous professional handicap sprint The Story of the Welsh Powderhall Handicap 1903-1934.

His name WP Thomas (Pontypridd) is down as one of the 1913 heat win-