After 50 years, Viv would ‘spend, spend, spend’ if she still had money

Viv Nicholson, 75, won £152,319 – the equivalent of about £5m today – in the Littlewoods Pools in September 1961, but the factory worker blew it all in just four years and now lives in a modest care home.

When Mrs Nicholson, and her late husband Keith, a miner, hit the jackpot it came at a time they were down to their last few pennies.

When she was asked what she would do with the cash, Mrs Nicholson, coined the phrase that would forever be associated with her: “I’m going to spend, spend, spend.”

But 50 years on, Mrs Nicholson, said: “I regret those words. They sound awful, like labelling myself.

“When we first won the money all we did was drink. I used to fall over, I was falling from one table of drinks to the next for the first month or two.

“I had never tasted whisky or champagne. We had lived poorly. We got the money and did what we did and jolly well enjoyed it. The only thing I didn’t do was end up in prison.”

Mrs Nicholson insists if she had her time again she wouldn’t change a thing and would happily blow her fortune again.

She said: “People say ‘what have you bought Viv?’ and I say ‘nothing’.

“If I won again today I would spend it. Money’s not for saving, it’s not been for all the years I’ve been on this earth.”

The couple moved from their home in Castleford, to a more upmarket house in nearby Leeds following their win and splashed their cash, with Mrs Nicholson infamously buying an ostentatious pink Cadillac.

Four years after their win however, there was heartache for Mrs Nicholson, when her husband died at the wheel of his Jaguar.

Mrs Nicholson said: “After Keith died I’d go driving my car screaming down the lane and wanting to die. I only ever loved him.

“Money couldn’t fix that. Money doesn’t fix everything, it just buys you what you want.”

A musical based on her life opened in 1998 and subsequently ran in London’s West End.