£ 45 million.
A London penthouse, a gleaming black Range Rover, a trip to New Zealand ( first- class, naturally), a Selfridges spree, cash for family and friends... my “If I won the Lottery” shopping list goes on – and on. I imagine yours does too. The difference betwe
One bleak Tuesday in February 2012, Cassey returned home from her shift as a supervisor at Iceland. Browsing the web for replacement parts for her fiancé Matt’s broken computer, she decided to check her online National Lottery account. When the winning numbers exactly matched those she’d played four days before, she assumed there was a glitch.
But there wasn’t. Cassey and painter-and- decorator Matt, then both 23, had won big on the EuroMillions: £45,160,170. And 50p, to be precise. “The lady on the end of the line at Camelot was ecstatic, but I was in shock,” laughs Cassey. “I just asked, ‘What next?’” After telling her mum, she called her boss and quit, then had a bath because… what else do you do when your life has just tilted on its axis?
When I meet Cassey in the meeting room of a four-star Nottingham hotel, flies buzz around a plate of congealed pastries and a carafe of tap water sits between us. As she bats the flies away, four diamond rings catch the light – she has two on each hand. But they are the only markers of her immense wealth. The blue dress she’s wearing is Boohoo (her favourite shop) and there’s a few inches of dark root above her blonde highlights. Even now, seven years later, Cassey is still in shock about winning. “It took me a long time to process it,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll ever understand the amount of money that it actually is.”
Two days after learning of their win, everyone in the country knew how much money the couple had as, after telling Cassey’s parents, Matt’s dad and their friend Eddie (who popped by with a bottle of Tesco champagne), the couple went public. Lottery winners don’t have to reveal their win – only around 10 to 15% who scoop over £50k opt for publicity – but Cassey and Matt wanted to tell people in one go. Camelot’s PR team organised an event in which they posed with a giant cheque and sprayed champagne for the cameras. It made local and national news. Within minutes of the announcement, Cassey’s phone began to buzz. When she answered the first call there was no noise – the friend was too dumbstruck to say anything at all.
Then the spending began. They bought Cassey’s parents a house and paid off Matt’s dad’s mortgage. Cassey got her dad a Porsche and herself an Aston Martin (she’s now a “friend” of the brand). At the time, Cassey and Matt were saving for their wedding; the venue was booked and she was repaying the cost of her dress in instalments, with any extra cash going towards a honeymoon in Malta. The win didn’t change this: they used the same venue and dress and still went to Malta. The only add- ons were fireworks and real flowers (she had planned to use artificial ones). They paid off friends’ mortgages,
“Strangers would shout, ‘ Will you pay for my petrol?’”
gave others property deposits and cleared student loans. Their friends have never asked for cash, but strangers did. “They’d shout, ‘Do you want to pay for my petrol?’ across the station as I filled up my car,” she says. The pair’s only “blow- out” was a two-week Spanish holiday with friends – they covered the 12-bedroom villa, a dolphin cruise and the first round of drinks, after which their pals wouldn’t let them pay. In 2014, they bought a new six-bedroom house in the East Midlands, where they still live, and Cassey chose a chandelier for their hallway. A year and a half after their win, they visited New York. Shopping for rings in an expensive jewellery store, Cassey had what she calls a“Pretty Woman moment”, where a snooty sales advisor declined to let her try things on. “When I said I’d buy it, her demeanour totally changed,” she tells me. Did that feel good? “Oh, yes!” she says, with a wry smile.
And therein lies the Lottery’s unique power: it parachutes ordinary people into stratospheric wealth. Studies have shown that middle- and upper- class people are less likely to play the Lottery than someone who is working class.* You can go from Iceland one day to Tiffany the next. In that way, yesterday’s Lottery winners are not dissimilar to the reality-TV stars and influencers of today. Those who win the Lottery and go public are catapulted to fame and wealth overnight, with no previous experience of dealing with the pressure of either. When the fallout comes, things can go wrong – sometimes disastrously so (more of which later). Thankfully, Cassey and Matt fared OK. Even so, when they won, paparazzi camped outside their home, and journalists followed them and quizzed relatives. They were papped at Tesco (headline: Every Little Helps) and were said to be going on Dragons’ Den – a total fabrication. “Most stories were so bizarre, we could laugh,” Cassey says. Others, I imagine, were harder to ignore. Matt’s estranged mother spoke to the press about her sadness over not seeing her son, insisting it wasn’t because she wanted his cash. The couple hit the headlines again when the Nottingham Post reported that a £1.2m house of theirs had fallen into disrepair, attracting drug users and vandals.
But despite the intrusions, Cassey and Matt’s lives have retained a sense of normality: their relationship remains solid, they own two businesses – a secure storage company and a farm park attraction – and have two sons. The only hallmarks of wealth are a cleaner and gardener. On an average day, the children wake Cassey at 6am, she gets them ready for nursery or school, does a supermarket run in her Fiat 500 (the Aston Martin is for special occasions) and cooks. In the afternoon, she plans events or hires staff for the farm. The businesses provide routine and are a useful foil when it comes to explaining to strangers what they do for work; tellingly, they’ve made few new friends since the win. “We try to keep things normal. Our friends and family wouldn’t allow us to be big-headed or extravagant. Matt cleans the car, I do our weekly shop.” Does she go to Iceland? “No,” she laughs. “Tesco or Asda.” These days, they splash the cash on holidays and cars. One does not become a “friend” of Aston Martin, I’m guessing, after a single purchase. She also loves Valentino bags and McQueen dresses. So, can money buy happiness? “It helps,” says Cassey. “It has allowed us to do things we’d never have dreamed of.”
It ’s in the stars
“If a Pisces and a Taurus play the Lottery, they’ll win,” read Carly Wiggett’s horoscope in The Sun. Spurred on by
the eerie coincidence, Carly (a Taurus) and her best friend and colleague Becky Witt (a Pisces) decided to take the advice. The two police officers quickly bought a ticket, 10 minutes before the deadline, one freezing Friday in March 2013. Four hours later they discovered they’d won a total of £336,277.60.
The money – which they split down the middle – arrived in their accounts four days later. They went to their local nightclub in Tunbridge Wells where they spent most of the evening jumping up and down in the toilets. “Winning with somebody was amazing,” Carly says.
Almost instantly, she bought a house (“so I wouldn’t waste the money”), then a dog and a car. She and Becky went on their yearly trip to Norfolk as planned – albeit with a few extra bottles of wine. She knew the money, while lifechanging, wouldn’t sustain her forever, but sees that as a blessing. “If I’d won more, I might have quit my job and disappeared into the sunset. Instead, I stayed on at work and met my partner there [who, thanks to the office rumour mill, already knew about the win] and had a little boy. There’s a chance I wouldn’t have that if I’d won millions. I’ve got just the right amount of money I need for the life I want.”
Twisted fairytale
When Jane Park opens up her email account, she still finds pleading messages from strangers, often recounting their life’s struggles and sadness. In 2013, aged 17, she won £1 million on the EuroMillions. This amount – while undoubtedly large – would never be enough to donate to every person who asks (around 2,000 a year). “At first I struggled to balance what I should give away versus what to keep for my future. I don’t want to be tight but equally I want to look after the money. It’s difficult reading people’s stories, but if I do help someone, I never talk about it,” she says, adding that she also began to dread Christmas and birthdays, worrying that whatever she’d buy wouldn’t meet expectations. Like Cassey and Matt, she keeps her friendship circle “tight” with those she was close to before the win.
“People imagine that if they won, they’d never have problems again, but there’s a dark side,” she says. Since going public she’s a constant fixture in the papers. She’s had her phone hacked, and been threatened by acid attacks and trolls saying they’ll leak personal photos. She calls winning the Lottery a “twisted fairytale”.
Yet Jane has also become something of a deliberate Lottery celebrity: the year after her win, she was followed by a camera crew for the BBC documentary Teenage Millionaire:
The Year I Won The Lottery. She offered to pay £60,000 per year to a potential boyfriend (a process which had 10,000 applicants but, apparently, no winner), and sold topless photos of herself
“There’s a dark side to winning that sort of money”
for £50 per shot (though she says the proceeds went to charity). Recently, she offered to pay Scottish singer Lewis Capaldi to be her boyfriend. As for the money? It went on: a Louis Vuitton bag, a Range Rover, two houses and a Magaluf holiday. Then there’s the surgery: a boob job, teeth procedures and a Brazilian bum lift in Turkey that left her hospitalised for a month with sepsis. Unsurprisingly, then, Jane is sanguine about the question of whether money leads to contentment. “Thanks to the Lottery,
I can buy material things and take time away from work. But wealth attracts the wrong people, the free time it creates is filled with boredom and you’re always second-guessing people’s motives. I don’t regret playing the Lottery, but I regret announcing the win.”
At least, unlike some, Jane still has some money left, and lives off the proceeds of investments she’s made. But the same can’t be said for Callie Rogers. At just 16, she was the UK’s youngest- ever winner, scooping £1.8m in 2003. She left the foster home she was living in and reportedly spent £250,000 on cocaine, £18,000 on three breast enlargements and gave at least £500,000 to family and friends, some of whom she later realised were using her for cash. Now in her thirties, she has nothing left and works as a carer, living in Cumbria with her son, Blake, six, who has cerebral palsy. Callie says her biggest regret is not having any money to give him a better life. “[Blake] loves sensory stimulation. If I had that money now, I’d give him the biggest sensory room you could buy,” she told the Daily Mail in 2018.
It’s hard not to see Callie and Jane’s stories as cautionary tales. If our current crop of influencers and reality-TV stars are anything to go by, we haven’t learned from the pitfalls of unexpected wealth and fame. Money can buy you Range Rovers and designer bags, and bring with it attention and status, but what happens when it disappears? And if you’re not able to deal with the trappings of wealth, the results can be catastrophic. I was initially amused to hear of a Lottery winners’ Facebook group, where they share advice, but having explored their myriad fates for this piece, I’m starting to understand why such a resource might be helpful. “We protect each other,” says Cassey. “They are the only other people who know how this feels.”
While Cassey, Matt, Carly and Becky were young at the time of their wins, they were at least adults; the scaffolding of their lives was largely in order when their worlds were transformed by windfalls and, as a result, they’ve spent wisely and remained level-headed. But Jane and Callie were both under 18. I think back to when I was 17 and consider what I’d have done had I become an overnight millionaire… can we really blame those who win the Lottery in their teens for making some questionable decisions along the way?
Camelot offers extra support to every £50,000+ winner, while newfound millionaires also receive help from a solicitor and a financial advisor. Despite that, Jane believes the age people can play the Lottery should be raised to 18, to bring it in line with other gambling laws. She also thinks more support should be on offer; though she met with the financial advisor facilitated by Camelot, she found the information “hard to retain” at such a young age.
And that’s the thing with great wealth – we can all daydream about it, but none of us know exactly how we’d behave were that wish granted. The winners I spoke to seem, in some ways, lonely, a large portion of their energy devoted to protecting themselves from those trying to exploit or humiliate them. There’s an ugly fascination with the difficulties of those who once had good fortune. But when we hold up a mirror, what does this behaviour say about us? Watching those who’ve had good luck squander money might feel oddly sweet, but it also reminds us that money can be a curse, as well as a blessing. Will it stop me or the millions of people who now, 25 years after its debut, play The National Lottery every week? No. Because luck – or even the prospect of it – is probably the most intoxicating thing of all.
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