Brian Lee – Winner of Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2020 ROA Welsh Horse Racing Awards
Author and journalist Brian Lee, 84, has been writing about racing and point-to-pointing in South and West Wales for well over 50 years.
Brian didn’t come from a horsey family, but his interest was ignited by his father taking him racing at Chepstow in the late 1940s. His first visit to a point-to-point was in 1952.
There’s always been a sporting thread running through his life. One of his first jobs was working for Cardiff’s Parks Department marking out football pitches on the former Ely racecourse. Later Brian represented Glamorgan in cross-country and road races, and he has run in marathons.
He had worked in the printing department of the Western Mail and Echo for some years until 1966, when the racing editor Brian Radford gave him the job of reporting on the local pointing scene. His vigorous, honest and always readable reports on the point-to-point scene won him many admirers. Radford described him as “a walking encyclopaedia” on the Welsh point-to-point circuit. Evan Williams’ daughter Isabel recently praised him as her favourite writer “as he is so passionate about the sport”.
In addition to his two main books on Welsh racing, The Welsh Grand National and Racing Rogues, he has written 25 others about his home town of Cardiff, all of them full of historic photographs. He is still writing weekly columns for the South Wales press and there is another book about Welsh racing on the way.
Members of the Welsh Horse Racing Awards panel were delighted to receive the nomination for a Lifetime Achievement Award and had no hesitation in agreeing it.
