On Saturday, many will sit down to watch the Grand National – the biggest horse race in the world – at Aintree in Liverpool.

What you may not know is that the very first official winner of the race in 1839 was a horse that started its racing life in Fermanagh.

The story, which is not without its controversy, will be told in the next edition (18th) of the Fermanagh Miscellany, says John Cunningham, Chairman of the Fermanagh Authors’ Association. The Miscellany will be out in time for Christmas.

It is a quite remarkable tale.

The Grand National at Aintree has been a British sporting institution since 1839. In those days, horses jumped a stone wall, crossed ploughed land and finished over two hurdles.

A horse called ‘Lottery’ (a Fermanagh horse, originally called ‘Protestant Boy’) won the inaugural race and Captain Becher fell at a now world-famous brook. In 1940, The Impartial Reporter ‘s W.C Trimble recalled the famous win just over 100 years after the actual event, in an extract that reads as follows:

The greatest Fermanagh horse I ever heard of had the strange name of ‘Protestant Boy’, and his name was perpetuated in ballad rhymes.

He belonged to one of the Nixon family, of Nixon Hall, who lived in Bellanaleck, not so far from one of the Hassard family at Skea, who also bred and owned racehorses, and who became the owner of a famous horse which he raced under the name of ‘Kate’ with an addition I do not like to mention here.

(Ed. – The horse was called ‘Papish Kate’.)

The trainer of Protestant Boy was a man named William Lloyd, from near Derrygonnelly, while the trainer of Kate was Mick Lynch, of Holywell. These horses and their trainers became famous in local history a century ago.

It was about the year 1826 that the ‘broad road to Irvinestown’ was made from Enniskillen round the lough now called ‘Mill Lough’, but at that time, as seen on old maps, it bore the name of ‘Racecourse Lough’ (for Fermanagh’s racecourse around it), which gave its name to ‘Halls of the Racecourse’, in the land of Drumclay.

Raceview – the home of the Teevans, now of the Rutherfords – gets its name from the same cause.

When the new road was made, it put an end, of course, to the racecourse there, and then came the course at Banagher, which in those days, with rival racehorses, often became the scene of many a faction fight.

General Archdale, of Riversdale, put up a prize of 100 guineas to bring the best horses in Ireland for a contest over the Banagher course. These races were to be run in heats, or ‘hates’ as they called them in those days.

Eight competitors came from all Ireland and these horses included Protestant Boy and Papish Kate.

Bets were freely made on these two horses, and the party spirit which they evoked resulted in many a fight.

The race was won but only narrowly by Protestant Boy. A street ballad was written about this contest.

It was after this that Protestant Boy was sold to John Elmore for £500, which was estimated to be worth £65,000 in 1940, and goodness knows how much nowadays.

It was Elmore who changed the name of the horse to ‘Lottery’, and ridden by Jem Mason, they won the first official Grand National in 1839, with it estimated that Lottery was an 11-year-old at that time.

It was also noted that before going to England for that inaugural win, the horse’s intentionally provocative title was a guarantee of hostile opposition when it raced locally.

Tales are recounted of 1,500 to 2,000 ‘Ribbonmen’ marching through Enniskillen to Magheraboy races, threatening to kill Protestant Boy and its jockey. Ribbonmen were a 19th Century popular movement of poor Catholics in Ireland. They were active against landlords and their agents, and opposed Orangeism, the ideology of the Protestant Orange Order.

The racing was suspended, a stand-off developed as Protestants assembled to defend the horse and its jockey, and it took three loads of military to descend on the area and quell any potential disturbance in what was described at the time as a “disgraceful scene”.

It is believed that Lottery, formally Protestant Boy, lived to the age of 25, and the year after he won the Grand National, the horse that almost started a riot back in Enniskillen was barred from Cheltenham, for fear nobody would enter to compete against him.