Why I’m so happy to have lived life on the racecourse
FOR more than half-a-century I have had the pleasure of reporting on the Welsh hunt-racing scene for the Western Mail, Sporting Life, Horse & Hound, Racing Post and a number of other national and local papers.
And during that time I have interviewed rogues, rascals, royalty and even, on one occasion, a countess!
I also interviewed the captain of the ill-fated Titanic. Well, truth be known, it was Bernard Hill the actor who portrayed him in the blockbusting movie.
Over the years, I have been threatened with solicitors letters, warned off two race meetings – I turned up anyway – and was promised a beating by a bookie who had taken exception to what I had written about the short odds on his betting board.
And of the nice things that have happened to me? Well in 2016 I was presented with the John Ayres Special Recognition Award for my services to Welsh point-to-pointing.
And as I had known John Ayres personally for many years, and had reported on his many successes as a winning owner, this really meant a lot to me.
As did being presented with a special painting of my favourite pointto-pointer Mandryka by four of my media friends to commemorate my 50 years of reporting on point-topoint racing in Wales in a few years ago.
Over the years, I have met many of my horse racing heroes such as Sir Gordon Richards, Sir Harry Llewellyn, Carl Llewellyn, Hywel
Davies, John Buckingham, Brian Fletcher, Jenny Pitman who incidentally I was the first racing scribe to write about long before she became a household name.
Another was Bob Champion who also on another occasion had presented me with a trophy as I was a member of the Les Croupiers athletics team, which won the Bristol Marathon
back in the 1980s and Bob was presenting the winners with their trophies.
As for the most notorious racecourse character I knew that was surely the late John Bowles of Crickhowell, who back in 1980 was declared a disqualified person by the Jockey Club after a jury had found that he had switched a broken down 10-year-old no hoper In The Money with Cobbler’s March, a winner of six races, in a selling hurdle at Newton Abbot in 1978.
Although a disqualified person, I found him holding court in the sponsors’ tent at the Talybont Hunt Steeplechases and on seeing me he shouted out: “Brian they were bad things you wrote about me in the Western Mail’’. See my book Racing RoguesThe Scams, Scandals and Gambles of Horse Racing in Wales published by St David’s Press for the full story.
At the age of 84 and with racegoers not being allowed on the racecourse owing to the coronavirus crisis, I am having my doubts that I will be seen on a point-to-point or racecourse ever again.
So I gain some consolation in knowing that Peter Scudamore MBE in the foreword to my book The Welsh Grand National from Deerstalker to Emperor’s Choice wrote that the book is “an engrossing study that not only documents the history of the great race, but also charts the development of National Hunt racing.’’
And that I was dubbed ‘Historian of the Welsh Turf’ by the now long gone and much missed The Sporting Life.
■ Please email your racing news and views to brianlee4@virginmedia.com or phone 029 2073 6438.