The influential All Party Parliamentary Group for Speedway – a group of MPs who represent the interests of the famous motorcycling sport within Parliament – have bestowed a major honour on Kent SLYDE Kings veteran co-promoter Len Silver.
Meeting this week, the Group which was set up two and half years ago and is chaired by the Newcastle-upon-Tyne MP, the Right Honourable Nick Brown, presented awards to mark the life-time achievements of three of the sport’s most long established administrators. The awards were divided into three categories: acknowledging the influential work carried out over their long careers of Colin Pratt, Len Silver and Tony Mole in – respectively – the three divisions in British Speedway: the Elite, the Premier and the National League.
Kent co-promoter Len Silver has been a promoter in the sport since retiring from racing himself in the mid 1960s: promoting at top division Hackney (the last club the East Ender rode at before injury ended his career) and at the Hertfordshire side Rye House (alongside a range of other circuits across the UK over his remarkable fifty years- and- counting promotional career – from Crayford to Crewe; Rayleigh to Sunderland) before being a driving force in opening the sport at Central Park in 2013.
The award acknowledges in particular his role in Speedway’s Premier League with Rye House over the years – Len recently left the club based in Hoddesdon, Herts and is now devoted full time to the Sittingbourne-based Kings club in the county he has for a long time now called his home.
This honour comes just a year after the World Speedway Riders’ Association bestowed a similarly titled ‘lifetime achievement’ award on the octogenarian, who commented on the news that new British Speedway Promoters Association [BSPA] Chairman, Keith ‘Buster’ Chapman had accepted the award from the MPs on his behalf,
“I’m very pleased and proud to be honoured by this important group of MPs. Following on from the Lifetime Achievement Award last year, I can’t help but feel also that people must be thinking I’m going to retire. Well, they’re wrong!”
Picture supplied by Ian Bush.