Cancer victims hail £7m winner who gave away

They enabled 60 veterans of the 1944 battle of Monte Cassino to fly to a reunion in Italy, paid for a class of inner-city children to see a pantomime and bought a scanner for the ward at Sheffield’s Royal Hallamshire Hospital, where Barbara was a night shift support worker for 22 years.

Mum-of-three Barbara said she and Ray “got our pleasure from giving money away” and said their winnings were “too much for two people”.

Network Rail worker Scott, now 31 and with a three-year-old daughter Kennedy, has just celebrated ten years cancer-free and remains eternally grateful to Barbara.

He said: “To win the kind of money she did and to plough so much back in to such an amazing cause is unheard of.”

As well as medical equipment and supplies, Barbara and Ray helped kit out the cancer unit in Sheffield with bespoke furniture, TVS, DVDS, gaming facilities and laptops, vital to keep up morale of teenagers spending months in hospital.

Scott says: “The environment she helped to create was so positive, you would

have walked in and never guessed it was a unit for cancer patients.

“It was a place that helped me feel like a normal teenager when I was anything but.

“It’s because of people like Barbara and Ray – who’ve made the unit the way it is – that patients pull through.”

Their main beneficiaries were Sheffield Children’s Hospital and the Teenage Cancer Trust Unit at Weston Park Hospital.

Their daughter Amanda had been treated for Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer, in Sheffield. Scott was applying to join the police when he was struck by severe migraines and loss of vision in December 2006. A scan showed a golf ball-sized tumour against his pituitary gland. Next day he had an emergency operation to drain a build-up of fluid on his brain. Two weeks later came the devastating news the tumour was cancerous. He said: “At 19, you think you’re invincible. Then suddenly I didn’t know where I was going or what was going to happen. Everything stopped.”

He was admitted to the Teenage Cancer Unit and spent the next six months having chemotherapy.

Despite some “real low points” during his gruelling treatments, Scott says the staff, facilities and atmosphere at the unit “got him through” dark times.

“I had a positive experience because of it,” he said. “I was with other teenagers. It was a community. It felt like more of a hangout than a hospital.”

Barbara and Ray were regulars at the unit over the years, arriving to deliver Christmas gifts and hampers.

Scott says: “I remember the nurses talking about how lovely they were.

“They weren’t flash. They genuinely cared about the cause. Staff told me how the cash from the Wraggs had been used