Winning a life-changing amount of money is a dream harboured by many, but what is life like when that actually happens?
“Ray, we’ve got three numbers!”
Sat at home on a Saturday night, nurse Barbara Wragg had switched on the TV to get the National Lottery results.
Giving a running commentary to her husband Ray, those three matching numbers on the couple’s ticket quickly became “four”, then “five” and then astoundingly, the magic “six”.
Within half an hour, the pair learnt they had won the £7.6m jackpot and life had changed forever.
Recalling that moment almost a quarter of a century on, Ray remembers: “I said “you’re kidding me?!”
“We were stuck for what to do and what to say. We were just flabbergasted.”
Ray, who turns 87 on New Year’s Day, cracked open a can of Guinness, while Barbara had a glass of wine.
The pair sang ‘Who wants to be a millionaire’ as they called their three children to tell them the news.
“Half an hour later we rang Camelot and we found out we’d won £7.6m that night,” Ray says.
The next call roofer Ray, from Sheffield, would make was to his boss, Dave, the following morning.
He was due to be back at work on a building site in south Wales at 08:00 GMT on the Monday, which would have required the then 62-year-old to leave home for a four-hour drive in the early hours of a dark winter morning.
When Ray told him he had decided to retire, a surprised Dave responded by asking him tongue-in-cheek, “have you won the lottery?!”
“Well, yes I have,” was Ray’s honest reply.
Wraggs to riches
“I retired that Saturday night in some respects,” Ray says, recalling that weekend in January 2000.
“I didn’t know what to say but I’d never have said ‘stuff your job’ or anything like that. I’m not that kind of person.”
Although the construction industry eventually became “tiring” and involved him travelling up to 1,000 miles each week to all four corners of the UK, Ray says he enjoyed work.
But the chance of retirement for him and for Barbara, who had worked night shifts at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital for 22 years, was too good to miss.
The first thing Ray did with the winnings was buy a £52,000 white Range Rover, while the couple also went on a glamorous cruise.
Barbara’s fear of flying had previously restricted them to domestic holidays.
“I think we went to Torquay for about 20 years on the trot – all five of us,” Ray says.
Like most lottery winners, Ray and Barbara took the opportunity to pass on some of their winnings to their children and other relatives.
But it was their generosity to other people outside their family unit which would make headlines in the years that followed.
They reportedly gave away most of their winnings – earning a rebuke from their financial advisor.
Barbara, who died of sepsis in 2018 at the age of 77, once publicly said their winnings were “too much for two people”.
“We had people say ‘do you not want to keep it for yourselves?'” Ray says now.
“But we were in our sixties (at the time) and we made a lot of people happy.”
Tens of thousands was given away to the hospital where Barbara had worked, as well as to the local children’s hospital.
There was also £12,000 to allow World War Two veterans to return to Monte Cassino in Italy in 2004, 60 years after Allied Forces won a crucial victory there.
The couple were left touched by a some of the correspondence they got afterwards, which included letters from widows of soldiers who had died on the battlefield.
Another act of philanthropy stands out in Ray’s mind.
“We picked up the Sheffield Star newspaper one night, and a young lad of 11 or 12 had saved his money up to buy a bike,” he recalls.
“He’d gone into the park and these three lads had run off with it and left him, the poor lad.”
The Wraggs had a mountain bike they’d barely used and so called up the Star to make contact with the boy’s family so they could give it to him.
“You can’t buy the expression on his face,” Ray says. “He was jumping up and down for joy and riding up and down, as you would if you were a kid.”
The couple’s charity work earned them a special trophy from Camelot in 2002, as well as invitations to Buckingham Palace and the Pride of Britain awards.
They rubbed shoulders with Richard Branson, Princess Diana’s former butler and the Coronation Street cast, but Ainsley Harriott stands out in Ray’s mind as one of the “nicest” celebrities the couple met.
Sheffield United fan Ray still goes swimming at his local leisure centre three early mornings a week and he remains a Bramall Lane regular at the weekends.
He insists he’s never had any bother from people since that huge win 25 years ago.
“All they’ve wanted to do if they us in the street is rub our shoulder for a bit of luck and thank us for what we’ve done for the kids.
“We’ve had a fantastic time and helped a lot of people,” he smiles.
Ray says he and Barbara remembered their roots and would have remained happy people even had they not won the lottery.
“I was working, Barbara was working, the kids were working,” he says. “We were all right.
“Like other families do, we saved up.
“It changed our lives but not us as persons.
“That’s stood us in good stead. I still look at the price of a pair of socks you know!”
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