Viv Nicholson, who has died aged 79, having suffered from dementia after a stroke in 2011, was Britain’s best-known winner of a windfall and has probably secured that title for all time. Not just because she greeted a hefty football pools jackpot in 1961 with her gleefully notorious promise to “spend, spend, spend”, but thanks to the success she later enjoyed in turning her rollercoaster life into a cash earner.
Although money left her as wildly impulsive as did the lakes of alcohol she consumed before she became a Jehovah’s Witness in 1979, she was clever, persevering and deservedly proud to see her children enjoy a much better start and far more encouragement in life than she had had.
She was 25 and packing Pontefract liquorice cakes in 1961 when her second husband, Keith Nicholson, landed £152,319 – worth several million at today’s values – with eight score draws on Littlewoods pools. The money was not a record – long-forgotten Nellie McGrail from Stockport had won £205,235 four years earlier – but the couple’s reaction became legendary.
Perfect media game, from a poverty-stricken mining background in Castleford, near Wakefield, they had borrowed their stake, almost lost the winning coupon and only made it to the cheque presentation with Viv in her sister’s stockings and shoes. Blonde and gutsy, she teetered on these towards the officiating celeb, Bruce Forsyth, and fainted into his arms.
She and Keith were egged on relentlessly to stick to her spending promise, headlines surrounding every excess. Their bling new home was called Ponderosa after the ranch in a TV series; its swimming pool was often empty and used by the children to store their bikes. Viv bought a pink Cadillac like the one driven by one of her heroines, Jayne Mansfield, and dyed her hair to match. There were binges in the local Miners’ Arms. But the money lived up to its reputation of failing to buy happiness. Old friends and family were jealous and alienated, investment was too small and poorly advised and the story seemed to end in the pattern familiar in media sensations and morality tales. Keith died in 1965 in a car accident, after losing control of his Jaguar. The estate duties were punitive and Viv was left penniless.
That could have been it, in the same way that a different door had slammed on Viv, then Vivian Asprey, at the age of 13 and in her final year at school. She had won an art scholarship to stay on, but her parents, her father a heavy-drinking miner and her mother an asthmatic coping with seven children, could not afford to meet the balance. Instead of following, however modestly, in the footsteps of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth from the previous generation in Castleford and Wakefield, Viv foraged for coal on the mine dump, did shifts in local shops and was on £7 a week at the liquorice plant when the big win came.
But her brightness at school and tenacity thereafter came to the rescue with the need to earn a living after Keith’s death. The notoriety demanded by her image was met by a brief stint in a Manchester strip club, singing “Hey, big spender”, but she got her cards for refusing to take off her underwear. Less newsily, she worked with lawyers to gain access to the residue after tax of the £42,000 left in Keith’s will. A trust fund protected her children’s private schooling.
Viv embarked on three further marriages and a brief move to Malta, which ended in her being deported for punching a policeman. At times it all became too much, and she attempted suicide and spent time in psychiatric care.
Turning points came when she was converted by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and especially when she wrote her life story, with Stephen Smith, inevitably called Spend, Spend, Spend (1978). It was dramatised successfully for the BBC by the writer Jack Rosenthal and the director John Goldschmidt, who won a Bafta. In 1984 Viv posed for the cover of the Smiths’ single Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now. In 1998, a musical, Spend, Spend, Spend, was a triumph at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, transferring to the West End of London for a two-year run, with a revival at the Watermill in Berkshire in 2009.
Viv earned approaching £200,000 from these accounts of her life, and although she slipped back to an extent into her free-spending ways, her sons settled her in a two-up, two-down terrace house in Castleford, where, while never less than ebullient, she was reunited with old friends and enjoyed taking round the Watchtower and similar Witness tracts. Generosity rather than excess threatened to be her undoing, with a modest investment in a clothes shop failing because she gave away items. Her propensity to hand out tenners prompted one of her sons to buy a large pink pottery piggy bank for her £87 weekly widow’s pension, engraved with her famous slogan.
She is survived by her children, Steven, Tim, Sue and Howard.
• Vivian Nicholson, pools winner, born 3 April 1936; died 11 April 2015
