Leighton Rich is a brass band cornet player and conductor whose competitive career is documented from 1978 through to 2004. Independent contest archives show him playing with the Tewit Youth Band of Harrogate, Yorkshire through the 1980s, competing at National Youth Brass Band Championships and North of England Area contests, before moving on to Hampshire County Youth Band and later Ocean Brass in the West of England, where he appeared at SCABA, West of England Area, and National Championship of Great Britain contests into the 2000s.
This entry has long appeared in the Famous Welsh archive on the strength of a claim that Rich was born and trained as a boy in Treherbert, Rhondda, under the veteran Welsh bandmaster Evan Richards (see our profile of Evan Richards, musician ID 399), and that he became "the first holder of the Mortimer Award." Having checked what we can, neither claim holds up well: his entire documented contest record runs through Yorkshire and then Hampshire/South West England bands, with no Welsh band ever appearing in it, and we can find no independent record of a Mortimer Award bearing his name — the well-documented Mortimer Maestro Trophy, instituted in 1989, was first awarded to conductor Garry Cutt, not Leighton Rich.
We have kept this profile because it is part of the site's existing catalogue, but readers should treat the Welsh link as an unverified claim rather than an established fact. If a genuine Rhondda connection exists — a Welsh birthplace, or documented early tuition under Evan Richards before a move to England — it has not surfaced in the sources available to us, and we would welcome corroborating information to strengthen or correct this entry.