How The Football Pools changed people’s lives
FOOTBALL fans may be primarily concerned about the fortunes of their own team, while keeping an eye on their rivals, but for some there is a bigger picture.
If you have ever been one to dabble with The Football Pools, then a whole new world has opened up.
Not only is predicting the outcome of matches fun, it can also pay well, as a dip into the archives will confirm.
There can be profound life-changing tales, all because of something which started way back in 1923 and which went on to become an institution.
Game on
Now there is a modern twist, with a new website which includes Footie5, a free-to-play score predictor game, with a cash prize of £25,000 available every week.
They had fun and won
Wales has featured in the history of The Football Pools, which saw the first £200,000 winner in 1957. Nellie McGrail, of Stockport, Lancashire, was a recently widowed 34-year-old taking home £5 10s a week when she scooped a then-record breaking £205,235 – or £4,650,000 in today’s money.
The following year Wally Brockwell and his wife Kath celebrated their £206,028 win by hiring a coach and taking 40 family members to London’s Grosvenor House for a slap-up meal of salmon, chicken, champagne and cigars.
The most memorable Littlewoods Pools story of them all remains Castleford’s Viv Nicholson, who famously promised to “spend, spend, spend” when her husband, Keith, won £152,319 (around £3.5m in today’s money) with eight score draws in 1961.
And the mum and dad-of-three certainly did that, splashing the cash on sports cars, a pink Cadillac, clothes, fur coats, jewellery and exotic holidays.
Viv had grown up in poverty in a Yorkshire mining community and at 14 had left school to work in a factory, making Pontefract cakes. She married her first husband at 16, then Nicholson when she was 18.
Keith Nicholson was killed in a car crash in 1965, by which time the young couple had made their way through the bulk of their fortune.
Widow Viv went on to marry three more times and struggled with alcohol addiction.
Her autobiography, Spend, Spend, Spend, was turned into a Play For Today on the BBC, and the infamous phrase was also used as the title of a musical based on her life that premiered in 1998. She became a Jehovah’s Witness in the 1970s, and died in 2015, aged 79.
In 1991 Rodi Woodcock won more than £2m for an investment of just 54p. And there were happy tales of syndicate winners like a group from Worsley who, in 1994, won nearly £3m.