User:Lawson Speedway
Keith Lawson was a Speedway fan over two decades - 60s and 70s, supporting Oxford Cheetahs and Oxford Rebels. In 1974 he reported on Oxford Speedway at Cowley Stadium for the Oxford Journal and the Oxford Review - free press. He started taking photos later that year, which he continued to do for 4 years. His photos have appeared in national newspapers (e.g. Daily Mirror), Motorcycle News, Speedway Star and Speedway Annuals. Many of the Oxford Speedway programmes in that period carried his photos plus he designed a number of covers for the programmes under the patronage of promoter Danny Dunton.
In 1975, he was a volunteer with the Save Our Stadium Committee which helped retain speedway at Oxford, although the Rebels moved to White City and a new team was formed - the Cheetahs - under different promoters, Harry Bastable and Tony Allsop. Keith pliagarised a well-known advertising slogan to read "We have seen the Cheetahs of Cowley", which the Promoters produced on round stickers for the fans.
Under Lawson Speedway on Wikipedia Common, he is attempting to archive his photos from that era so that entries on Speedway Riders and Speedway Venues can have photo illustrations with the text. Not all the photos are best quality - this was a live sport, usually evening run, with poor lighting conditions, dirt, and fast-moving objects. For the photo-technical - most photos were taken using ASA400, which means high grain and contrast. Additionally, the archive is a mix of scanned negatives and photos, not stored for posterity as they were considered to be ephemeral, i.e. worthy for immediate news content but not durable. As riders from this era write their memoirs, there has been demand for his photos (e.g. Lee Kilby's biography of his father Bob "To the Heart of Kilb"). On the sad news of the death of Ivan Mauger (16th April 2018) his photos of this legend have been extensively shared across world media.
He has published 3 books on speedway: "Rebels 1975 - The Last Season", "The Cheetahs 1976- Resurrection", and "Riders, Teams and Stadiums". He is a member of the World Speedway Riders Association, and of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) (up to 2020), and is currently a member of the Royal Historical Society. In 2020, he was awarded Life Membership of the World Speedway Riders Association (WSRA) and attends events where he meets riders and promoters. Recently he has been working with present day teams and riders for their profiles on Wikipedia as well as extensive use across the media. Unfortunately, as a minority sport and working on profiles of riders from the 1970s means difficulties in obtaining references and he relies on statisticians who saved and recorded the race results and interviews with those riders still living and accessible.
