A Lotto winner has revealed how he has given away most of his winnings.
Big-hearted Ray Wragg, 86, from Sheffield won a £7,649,520 Lotto jackpot in January 2000, with late wife, Barbara but has amazingly given the majority of his winnings to good causes. Ray retired as soon as his winning numbers came up, and the couple immediately started thinking about who they could help.
He said: “We gave £5.5million away to family and friends, hospitals and good causes.” The couple once paid £12,000 for war veterans to revisit the WWII battlefield of Monte Cassino and have also taken 250 local school children on an all expenses paid trip to see Disney on Ice, among many other things.
Ray very sadly lost his beloved wife, Barbara in 2018 but has since found happiness again after meeting Anne on a cruise and they’ve just jointly purchased a three-bedroom bungalow together. Before he lost his late wife the pair, from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, lived in a £10,000 council house and lived a modest life never living beyond their means or even leaving the country for holidays.
They played the lottery every week, choosing five lines and picked numbers at random from registration plates. But their life changed forever on January 22, 2000, when their numbers 7, 9, 10, 40, 41 and 44 netted them the jackpot.
Within weeks the pair decided to hand most of the fortune away for the betterment of local people. Family, friends, kids, hospitals and 17 charities all benefitted from their extraordinary generosity over two decades.
Their kindness also saw them donate an MRI and bladder scanner to two hospitals and they also bought 30 TV sets so each child in a local hospice could watch telly in bed. At the time, Barbara said: “I look at it this way - £7.6million is too much for one couple in the 50s and 60s to spend.
“You get a buzz. 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.”
But the couple didn’t go without some luxuries, quickly moving to a £415,000 home with a bay window - Barbara’s dream feature. The South Yorkshire natives also snapped up a Range Rover. And they went on their first foreign trips - cruises around the Med and Caribbean - having holidayed in Cornwall for 31 years straight.