Viv Nicholson: UK pools winner who blew the lot
1936-2015
VIV Nicholson, who has died at the age of 79, was a factory packer from Yorkshire in Britain whose husband won a record pools jackpot of £152 319 in 1961 — the equivalent of more than R90-million today; she disastrously fulfilled her much-vaunted promise to “spend, spend, spend”, and blew the lot on a life of luxury that lasted less than five years.
She and her husband won the money when she was 25. By the time she was 30, Nicholson had not only spent it all, but had also buried her husband, Keith, and returned to her humble roots, reflecting ruefully on her fate as one of the first media celebrities of the pre-Beatles ’60s.
Portrayed in the papers as a hellcat with the outrageous personality to match her money and her looks, Nicholson laboured under the image of a working-class blonde who had led a champagnefuelled life and whose fall, when it came, was no less than she deserved.
Certainly she struggled with the culture shock of winning such a stupendous amount of money.
Two months after her win, she estimated that she was spending money at the rate of £1 400 a week. After the luxury house came the cars, a silver Chevrolet and a pink Cadillac, in which she would roar up the gravel drive and over the manicured lawns of her children’s private school, having dyed her hair pink-champagne blonde, then green, then yellow, then blue.
With the cars came the clothes, furs, dresses, shoes — she once bought 14 pairs at one go — jewellery, watches and exotic holidays.
But her chief excess was drink. After the open house at the Nicholsons’ local pub to celebrate their win, there were lavish parties at the new home they had named the Ponderosa, with its own corner cocktail bar literally awash with alcohol, and so much champagne that Viv claimed to bathe in it. They filled their days back at the pub, with daily sessions starting at lunch and often not ending before four the next morning.
Four years after hitting the jackpot, Keith was killed at the wheel of his new Jaguar.
By the time a dispute over his will had eventually been settled in her favour, Nicholson had taken a job in a strip club to cover her children’s school fees. As she divorced or mourned a further three husbands in rapid succession, she lost heavily on bad investments and sank into debt.
But this was not the end of her cautionary tale: her memoirs, Spend, Spend, Spend, published in the ’70s, earned her £60 000 and a West End musical of the same title about her life a further £100 000. This money, too, seemed to trickle through her fingers; she lost a fortune in a failed boutique venture because — out of guilt — she gave the clothes away.
Even in her impoverished retirement, Nicholson retained a penchant for “spiffing” clothes and costly bottles of perfume. She wound up penniless.
She was born Vivian Asprey on April 3 1936 at Castleford, a working-class satellite of Leeds. The eldest child of an epileptic miner who drank often and worked seldom, Viv won a scholarship to art school when she was 13, but was forbidden to go by her father, who sent her instead to scavenge for coal at the local pithead.
Because her mother was asthmatic, she found herself having to look after her six siblings, and although considered bright at school, Viv had to leave at 14 to take a job at a local liquorice factory. By 16, she was married and pregnant, but became infatuated with her neighbour, a trainee miner called Keith Nicholson, whom she married as soon as her divorce came through.
In 1961, now with four children, Viv and Keith Nicholson were between them earning the equivalent in today’s terms of £280 a week. On September 30, a Saturday night, Keith was checking his pools coupon against the football results on TV when he realised he had eight score draws. For a line costing a farthing, part of Keith’s stake of a borrowed five shillings (25p), they had scooped a £152 000 jackpot.
In London, the Nicholsons were asked by reporters what their plans were. Viv’s boast — that she planned to “spend, spend, spend” — made headlines around the world.
Finding the money had run out, she drank to excess and took at least one drug overdose. Two suicide attempts took her to the edge of a nervous breakdown. But in 1979, she became a Jehovah’s Witness and renounced drink.
She was enormously proud of her children, whose expensive education had been protected by a trust fund set up immediately after the pools win. Her children survive her.