Whiskey business: Belfast Lotto winner on the demon drink, and realising his distillery dream

Peter Lavery was on £200 a week when he became an overnight millionaire on May 18, 1996.

The ordinary working man, from Belfast’s Short Strand, was thrown into the spotlight and became a local celebrity after he went public with his £10.2m win.

The BBC’s Our Lives: The Lottery Millionaire and the Spirit of Belfast hears how Peter’s newfound wealth almost killed him.

It picks up 27 years later as he tries to realise a dream and bring whiskey distilling back to his home patch.

“When you buy a lottery ticket, you dream of having success, but you never think it’ll ever come,” said Peter.

“You wake up the next morning and you’re still dreaming, but there’s reality.”

His friend Diane Poole recalled: “Peter in those days was eating, drinking, partying. I wouldn’t think Peter slept an awful lot in those days.

“But your health can’t take that, and Peter realised at one stage in his life that if he didn’t stop drinking he wasn’t going to be around.”

East Belfast DUP councillor Sammy Douglas, who knew Peter when he scooped the jackpot, recalled the excesses he indulged in after his win.

​“I knew Peter well. He was a party animal and loved socialising. For him to win £10.2m overnight, it was quite easy to expand the partying, which he did,” he said.

“It came to a point where he realised he just couldn’t go on like that because it was definitely going to damage his health.”

Speaking to the documentary team earlier this year, Peter said: “Doctors’ orders, I had to stop drinking or I wouldn’t be here today. I would be up in smoke in Roselawn.”

After knocking the fast living on the head, he went back to work, investing in commercial property and supporting community groups in his native east Belfast.

Fast forward to January this year and he was on the cusp of realising a long-held ambition of having the first operational whiskey distillery in the city for almost 90 years, all while remaining teetotal.

In his typical style, he did it with a special twist by setting it up in the pumphouse of the Thompson Graving Dock where the Titanic and her sister ships were completed.

Project manager Andrew Cowan explained: “You couldn’t have picked a more difficult location. You have to be respectful for the site, respectful for the building, respectful for what happened here.

“You couldn’t have picked a more difficult challenge, but that’s Peter Lavery for you.”

Peter said: “It’s been a labour of love and near put my head away, but it’s worth it.”

The programme shares some emotional moments and candid hiccups along the way — but the special moment eventually comes when Peter takes a break from the good life to sample his whiskey.

It also features his other pet project — refurbishing a sightseeing vessel, which he christened the Lady of the Lagan, to provide tours of the historic shipyard and docks.

This comes with its own headaches, and Peter is asked why, with his many millions, he does not sit at home with his feet up by the fire.

“I’ve worked all my life and I don’t see why I should stop now. What would I do in the mornings when I get up with nothing to do?” he replies.

“But it’s a business. We have to make it work, it’s their [his staff’s] livelihood also.”

Sammy Douglas said of Peter and his endeavours: “People are proud of him for what he has done because he hasn’t lost that local touch.

“I would say you can take a man out of the Short Strand but you can’t take the Short Strand out of the man.”

Summing up his post-lotto win life, Peter said: “The night I won my fortune there were 33 million people playing the lottery and I had the right six numbers, which is unbelievable.

“It has certainly changed my life and changed the lives of a lot of other people too. It has been a long journey.

“When I think of my parents, my father died at 66 and my mother died at 45. They’re not here now and that’s the saddest part of it.”

Our Lives: The Lottery Millionaire and the Spirit of Belfast airs on BBC One this Friday at 9pm