THE racing world, especially the pressroom, was stunned to learn of the death this week of The Times correspondent Alan Lee at the tragically early age of 61.

It was known he had undergone heart surgery several weeks ago but the prognosis was good and he had recently started attending meetings again.

Lee, who started off on the sports desk at the Watford Observer, worked his way up to become cricket correspondent of The Times, gaining the confidence of the then England captain Mike Atherton in the 1990s.

Atherton paid handsome tribute to him in the paper on Monday, pointing out that he was ‘the journalist’s journalist - an assiduous gatherer of contacts, a good source of stories and a writer of clean, efficient and copious copy.”

Despite his abiding love of cricket, Lee very probably adored racing, especially jumps racing, even more. He made his home in Cheltenham, switched codes at The Times in 1999 and included biographies of Richard Johnson, Peter Scudamore, Pat Eddery and Steve Smith Eccles among 30 or so published books. He was the Horserace Writers’ Association Journalist of the Year on three occasions and overall Sports Writer of the Year in 2001.

Watching him work was an education. Lee was a popular, respected member of the pressroom but there was an essential reserve about him. He tended to travel alone and operate alone, often seeking out a farrier, a fence-builder or a promising apprentice when most of his colleagues were aiming microphones and notebooks at more obvious targets.

Yet he never missed anything and the ‘big’ names trusted him implicitly. He lived for old-fashioned ‘exclusives’, with John Gosden and Jamie Spencer among those to trust him with significant information.

Indeed, Spencer’s revelations about his sacking and subsequent brief retirement following his spell as Qatar Racing’s jockey left other newspapers at the starting gate.

He was a journalist of the old school - modest, amiable and helpful but never quite clubbable. His first loyalty was to The Times and his second to the sport. If he said he needed 700 words, that was exactly what he got, even at a time when racing suddenly had to fight tooth and nail to hold on to the space it used to take for granted.

If he felt there were specific areas where racing might improve, he waited for a function like the HWPA lunch, accepted his award and then, with no showboating or ribaldry, quietly made his points. Small wonder that former Cheltenham supremo Edward Gillespie was among his closest friends.

“He didn’t simply report on racing, he challenged, queried and worried about it,” he said. “We knew he was going to get better so something catastrophic has clearly happened.”

It has indeed. We shall not find another like Alan Lee for a while, and maybe not at all. He leaves a son, James, and daughter Vicky.