Willie Snaith, so popular in his longtime home Newmarket that he had a street named after him, has died aged 91.
Snaith rode his first winner at Newmarket in 1946 and in 1949 was champion apprentice. He rode over 700 winners in his career, the most memorable being Landau in the 1954 G1 Sussex S. for The Queen. He also won the July Cup, Nunthorpe and Dewhurst S.
Snaith ceased race riding in 1971 but continued on in the saddle as a work rider for Noel Murless and later his Warren Place successor Sir Henry Cecil. Snaith also became a popular Newmarket tour guide, and in 2004 he was appointed MBE on the Queen's Birthday Honours list for services to horse racing and the community in Newmarket.
Snaith's wife Silvia died in 2012 but he is survived by two sons, John and Derek. John told Racing Post on Saturday, “Dad passed away last night in West Suffolk Hospital. He'd had cancer and they operated on him, but we lost him.
“We've lost an icon really, and he was the sort of man who would speak the same to a person if they had a pound in their pocket or ten million. The girls in Tesco and Waitrose loved him as he would tell them the old stories and it would take him four hours to come back from the shops with a pint of milk and a loaf of bread. He loved the fact that Tesco was on the road named after him and he opened both stores that have been on that site. They offered him £3,000 to open the last one and he gave half of it to the Red Cross and the other half to the Injured Jockeys Fund.”
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