Birthday for Ernie after £66m paid out

THE ODDS may be 30,000 to one for ever winning a prize, but that has not dissuaded millions of Britons from chancing their luck.

And Premium Bonds are today celebrating a landmark 60th anniversary since the first draw on June 1, 1957.

For the June 2017 draw, Ernie paid out more than 2.3m prizes worth over £66m in total. This brings the total number of prizes since the first draw to 371m and the overall value of those prizes to £17.4bn. The popularity of the bonds over the decades means about one in three UK adults now hold the investments.

Alderman Sir Cuthbert Ackroyd, the then Lord Mayor of London, bought the very first Premium Bond on November 1, 1956. The investment caught the imagination of the British public to the extent that by the end of their first day on sale, £5m of Premium Bonds had been sold.

By the time of the first prize draw on June 1, 1957, there were 23,000 prizes drawn – with a top prize then of £1,000. The first jackpot winner in 1957 was from Cumbria. June’s Premium Bond millionaires are a man from Devon and a woman from Surrey. The two jackpot winners this month are the 363rd and 364th people to have won the top £1m prize since it was introduced in April 1994.

Ernie – or Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment – generates numbers at random for the prize draw. The odds of each individual bond number winning a prize are 30,000 to one.