The lottery winner gran who gave away £5m to help the sick – but couldn’t save herself
A LOTTERY winner who gave away £5.5million of her £7.6million fortune to good causes and the NHS has died at the age of 77.
Barbara Wragg, who worked in the Health Service for 22 years, gave large sums to local hospitals.
But she lost her own life on Monday after a five-year battle with her health which included breast cancer treatment. She was admitted to Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital for an operation to remove gallstones but died from complications after surgery.
Her husband Ray Wragg said: ‘ It is so very sad because Barbara, who has given so much to the NHS, both working for them and charitable donations, didn’t deserve this.
‘She was so kind and caring. She was naturally like that, even before the lottery win.’
Mr Wragg, 80, said his wife, a mother of three with six grandchildren, left behind a wonderful legacy of love and kindness.
Mrs Wragg, a night shift support worker on the urology ward at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, and her husband won the National Lottery in January 2000.
They immediately declared that £7.6million was ‘too much for one couple in their 50s and 60s to spend’ and promised to give ‘much of it away’.
Over nearly two decades, they were true to their word, helping not only family and friends but also thousands of strangers who benefited from their donations to 17 charities.
The couple did buy themselves a £415,000 five-bedroom house and a Range Rover. And after holidaying in Torquay for 31 years, they took exotic foreign holidays, including cruises around the Mediterranean and Caribbean, having never been abroad before the lottery win.
However, proceeds from the sale of their former council house went to two local hospitals, with £9,000 of it being used to buy a bladder scanner to help speed up treatment.
The couple also bought 30 television sets so that each child in a local hospice could watch TV in bed. And every Christmas for six years they picked up the bill for taking 250 children from a deprived innercity school to enjoy Sheffield’s pantomime.
On a visit to Royal Hallamshire’s breast clinic in 2010 Mrs Wragg noticed a pot for donations and handed over a £5,000 cheque to her doctor.
Countless other charities have benefited from their generosity including the Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice, the Make a Wish Foundation, Whirlow Hall Farm Trust, the Meningitis Trust and Help The Aged. Mrs Wragg said in an interview: ‘You get a buzz. It’s probably a bit selfish giving money away sometimes because we did get pleasure from it.
‘It’s like when you give somebody a Christmas present and you watch them open it and they think it’s absolutely wonderful. Well, when we’ve given people money we get that all the time.’
The Wraggs also helped a group of Second World War veterans to go on a trip to honour fallen comrades.
They paid £12,500 so that 50 of them could travel to Italy for the 60th anniversary of the battle of Monte Cassino in 2004 after they had failed to secure enough funding.
Mrs Wragg dedicated her career to helping others, spending 22 years working nights on the hospital urology ward.
Her husband said: ‘We’d like to say we made a lot of people happy with what we’ve been able to do to donate to a lot of charities. Winning the lottery changed our lives but not our persons.’
He said his wife had told him that ‘what we have got to do with this is to help a lot of people – and that is what we did’. ‘Giving so much of it away never bothered us one bit and we would do it all again,’ he said.
Mr Wragg fears his wife could have died as a result of sepsis but has not been told that by doctors and has yet to be informed of the cause of death.
‘She was so kind and caring’