Lottery at Stratford-on-Avon: The Complete Story

Breeding and Origins

Lottery was bred from the flat racing bloodstock of the early 19th century — a period when the thoroughbred was still being adapted for the demands of steeplechasing, a sport that was itself still finding its identity as a regulated public competition. His sire was Lottery (the elder), and his dam's pedigree carried the foundation bloodlines of early English thoroughbred breeding.

He was owned by John Elmore, one of the leading steeplechasing patrons of his time, and trained by George Dockeray. Dockeray would go on to train four Grand National winners over his career — a total that placed him alongside Ginger McCain and Fred Rimell in the record books — and Lottery was the first and most significant.

Physical Description and Character

Lottery was described by contemporaries as a strong, powerful bay — a horse built for the demands of four-mile cross-country racing with a jumping ability that set him apart from most of his rivals. Steeplechasing in 1839 was not yet the regulated sport it would become; horses jumped a variety of obstacles in a variety of conditions, and the physical demands were substantially greater than those of the modern racecourse. A horse who dominated the sport in this era needed to be exceptional.

Jem Mason, who rode Lottery throughout his steeplechasing career, was one of the great jockeys of the early Victorian era. He and Lottery formed one of the first great partnerships in steeplechasing — a rider who understood the horse, and a horse who gave the rider the scope to ride boldly.

The Steeplechasing World in 1839

The Grand National as we know it — the fences, the distance, the course at Aintree — is a refinement of a tradition that developed over the first half of the 19th century. Cross-country races had been taking place for decades, often over natural country with primitive organisation. The 1839 race at Aintree represented a step toward standardisation: a defined course, an entry system, public access, and press coverage that created a national event.

Lottery's preparation on the country steeplechase circuit, including his races at Stratford-on-Avon, was the means by which a horse of this era built his competitive fitness and jumping education. There were no winter gallops specifically designed for jump racing. There were no artificial fences in training. The horses learnt to jump by jumping, in races, over the countryside.

The Career After 1839

Lottery returned to race in four subsequent Grand Nationals, failing to win any of them. He fell in 1840, the year he attempted to defend his title. The subsequent attempts, as the race grew in prestige and the opposition improved, produced defeats but no disgrace. He remained a significant presence in the steeplechasing world for several seasons after his 1839 triumph.

His career overall was characteristic of the horses of his era: a wide range of races over a wide range of courses, few of them now well documented, in a world before the Racing Calendar's full record-keeping. What survives is the outline — the Grand National victory, the Stratford connection, the Jem Mason partnership — and from that outline it is possible to understand what Lottery represented: the first great steeplechaser, the founding horse of the sport's most famous race.

Lottery and Stratford

The specific connection between Lottery and Stratford-on-Avon is his race wins at the course in 1839 and 1840. He competed there over four miles of country steeplechase racing in the same form that had carried him to Aintree success. The Stratford of 1839 was not the compact left-handed course that exists today; it was a country steeplechase meeting making use of the Avon valley landscape and the farms around the town.

That Lottery won at Stratford is recorded. That he returned the following year and won again suggests the course suited him — or at minimum that his connections regarded the Stratford meeting as appropriate preparation for their most important horse. Either way, his name is in the history of Stratford-on-Avon Racecourse at the very beginning, nearly two centuries before the course became the venue for the Horse & Hound Cup and the summer jumping programme it hosts today.

Lottery's races at Stratford-on-Avon belong to the pre-modern era of steeplechasing — before standardised distances, before uniform fence specifications, before the Racing Calendar recorded results with the thoroughness that later became standard. What is documented is the fact of his victories there, their distance (approximately four miles), and their context as part of the steeplechase circuit that also fed into the Grand National programme.

The Stratford Race of 1839

Lottery raced at Stratford-on-Avon in 1839 as part of the same season that culminated in his Grand National victory at Aintree. The exact date and the precise field are not recoverable from most surviving records, but the race occupied the same competitive context as his other pre-Aintree appearances — a steeplechase over country fences, at a distance that tested stamina and jumping ability simultaneously.

The Stratford steeplechase circuit of 1839 used the Avon valley landscape around the town. Races were run across agricultural land, over natural obstacles and temporary fences erected for the purpose. The course was not the defined, enclosed oval that Stratford-on-Avon Racecourse became in later decades; it was a cross-country track in the original sense — a race from point to point across the actual countryside.

The 1840 Return

Lottery returned to Stratford-on-Avon in 1840 and won again. The same four-mile distance. The same Avon valley setting. This repetition has two possible interpretations: either the connections regarded the Stratford meeting as valuable preparation for their most important horse, which would imply they valued the quality of the competition and the conditions it provided; or the Stratford win was a convenient confidence-building exercise before more testing engagements. Either interpretation places Lottery at Stratford twice as a victor, which is more than most horses managed in any era.

What These Races Meant in Context

In 1839, steeplechasing was still developing its identity as a regulated sport. The country steeplechases that made up most horses' competitive programmes were not standardised or nationally organised. A horse's record was not consistently or fully maintained. The public's awareness of individual horses came through the patronage of wealthy owners, word of mouth among the hunting community that provided steeplechasing's social base, and limited newspaper reporting.

Lottery was, by the standards of his era, a well-known horse even before Aintree. His victories in the country circuit — Stratford among them — would have circulated through the steeplechasing community that attended these meetings. His connections at Stratford were likely the same social network that supported the early Grand National: wealthy patrons, hunting men, the emerging professional jockeys and trainers who were shaping steeplechasing into a commercial spectacle.

Stratford Then and Now

The Stratford-on-Avon course that hosts racing today is a compact, left-handed National Hunt track set beside the River Avon on the edge of the market town. It has operated in approximately its current form since the mid-19th century, though the specific configuration has evolved. The Horse & Hound Cup, staged annually in May or June, is the course's most celebrated modern race — a champion hunters' steeplechase with its own distinct character and tradition.

The connection between the Lottery-era Stratford meeting and the modern course is one of location and lineage rather than direct institutional continuity. But racing on the Avon at Stratford began, in some recognisable form, in the 18th century, and Lottery's appearances there in 1839 and 1840 are among the earliest specific records of a famous horse competing at the course.

Racing at Stratford-on-Avon's Summer Programme

The modern Stratford summer jumping programme, explored further in the summer jumping guide, occupies a very different world from Lottery's era. It stages competitive National Hunt racing from May to August, with a card that attracts horses from the major jumping yards and provides a proper summer programme for horses who prefer that type of ground. But the history that Lottery provides — the connection to 1839, to Aintree, to the founding of British steeplechasing as a national sport — gives the course a claim that very few jump venues can match.

The 1839 Grand National

The defining moment of Lottery's career did not take place at Stratford-on-Avon, but it is inseparable from his Stratford connection because the preparation for it ran through the country steeplechase circuit that Stratford represented.

The 1839 Grand National — then known as the Grand Liverpool Steeplechase — was contested by 17 horses over a course at Aintree that bore some but not complete resemblance to the modern circuit. Jem Mason took Lottery to the lead at the first brook and maintained his advantage throughout. He won by three lengths in a time of 14 minutes 53 seconds. The race was, in the months and years that followed, retrospectively identified as the first official Grand National — a status conferred not by a contemporary formal decision but by the subsequent recognition of what that 1839 event had begun.

To have won the first Grand National is a singular distinction that no other horse can share. Lottery's name is the first entry in the list of Grand National winners that stretches from 1839 to the present day. His connection to Stratford-on-Avon gives the Warwickshire course a thread that runs from the very beginning of that tradition.

The Stratford Victories

The wins at Stratford in 1839 and 1840 — the course's four-mile country steeplechase — were moments in the career of a horse at or near his competitive peak. The 1839 Stratford win came in the same season as the Grand National. The 1840 win came the year after, when Lottery was the established champion of the steeplechasing world and his appearances at country meetings were events in their own right.

A crowd watching Lottery at Stratford in 1839 was watching the horse that would shortly be the most famous steeplechaser in England. In 1840, they were watching the defending Grand National champion. Either way, the appearance of Lottery at Stratford was not an ordinary race day.

Jem Mason's Riding

Jem Mason was, by most contemporary accounts, the finest steeplechase jockey of his generation. His partnership with Lottery at the 1839 Grand National produced a performance that the racing press of the time described in unusually specific terms — not simply as a win but as a controlled, authoritative victory in which horse and rider functioned as a single unit across the most testing race of the season.

Mason's background was in the hunting field, like most early steeplechase jockeys, but he had developed a finesse that distinguished him from the rougher practitioners of the sport. His ability to place Lottery correctly at each obstacle — to judge the take-off point in the conditions of 1839, over fences that were less uniform than modern racecourse obstacles — was a significant factor in the victory.

The Legacy of 1839

The Grand National of 1839, and Lottery's victory in it, initiated a tradition that has continued without interruption to the present day. The race has evolved substantially — the fences have been modified, the distance adjusted, the rules refined — but the essential competition that Lottery won in 1839 is the ancestor of every Grand National run since.

That Stratford-on-Avon was part of Lottery's preparation for that first National is a fact of historical record. It places the Warwickshire course in a narrative that begins with the founding of British steeplechasing as a national sport and extends to the present day.

Lottery's legacy at Stratford-on-Avon is specific and historical. He did not return year after year to become an institution in the way that a modern course specialist might. But he was there at the beginning — in the literal sense of the word, if 1839 is taken as the beginning of the Grand National tradition — and his races at Stratford place the Warwickshire course within a history that starts with British steeplechasing's first national moment.

The Founding Horse of a National Tradition

The Grand National has had 180-plus winners since 1839. Red Rum won it three times. Arkle won it once. Foinavon won it at 100/1. Every winner occupies a place in British sporting memory. Lottery occupies the first place — not the most celebrated, not the most dramatically memorable, but the first. The horse who established that the race could be won, who demonstrated what was required, who set the standard against which every subsequent winner has been measured.

Stratford-on-Avon's connection to that horse — through the races he ran at the Avon-side course in 1839 and 1840 — is not a central chapter in his biography, but it is a real one. And for a course with the long history that Stratford possesses, the connection to 1839 and the first Grand National winner is the oldest specific claim to fame in its racing record.

What It Means for Stratford Today

The modern Stratford-on-Avon Racecourse is a lively summer jumping venue with a competitive National Hunt programme and a distinctive social identity. The Horse & Hound Cup is its most celebrated race. AP McCoy rode extensively here. The summer card attracts trainers from across the jumping world.

None of those modern claims require Lottery to validate them. But the awareness that the course has been staging competitive jumping since before the Grand National as we know it existed — that horses of Lottery's quality used the Stratford meetings as preparation for the sport's greatest test — gives the course a depth of context that newer venues cannot access. Racing at Stratford is racing on ground where horses have been jumping since long before most of the current infrastructure of the sport was built.

The Broader Point: Historical Depth in Jump Racing

The Grand National has been shaping British jump racing's culture for nearly 200 years. Every National Hunt course in the country exists within that tradition to some degree. But very few courses can point to a specific, named horse who ran there in the months before the first Grand National and won. Stratford-on-Avon can. Lottery at Stratford in 1839 is a link between the course and the original act of the sport.

That link is historical, not competitive. But in a sport where tradition and continuity matter as much as current form, it is worth acknowledging.