Second Yorkshire village wins £1m on Postcode Lottery in a week - with one resident set to buy excavator with winnings
A second Yorkshire village has won £1m on the Postcode Lottery in the space of a few days - and one lucky resident has already earmarked his winnings for an excavator.
Villagers in Birdsedge, near Huddersfield, are celebrating scooping a share of £1m as part of Postcode Lottery’s Millionaire Street promotion.
It comes just a day after Dacre, near Harrogate, also scooped £1m as part of the prize draw - with one lucky resident winning more than £350,000.
Richard Hurdley will be sharing the seven-figure winnings with 19 of his neighbours.
Each winning ticket with the HD8 8XP postcode was worth £45,454 but Mr Hurdley has doubled his winnings by playing with two tickets.
The 58-year-old optician has said he has set his eyes on an excavator to do some ‘extreme gardening’ on his two-acre plot in his back garden.
He said: “I’m going to buy a digger…a small excavator. It’s for extreme gardening!
“We’ve got two acres and I want to landscape it myself. I hope to get away with buying one for £9,000. I’ve wanted one for ages, but with four kids…”
His eldest daughter Ella, 25, is set to move to Australia to further her studies as a doctor, so he has pledged to pay for her plane ticket.
As part of the winnings, the village hall will also get £15,000.
Mr Hurdley added: “I’m a trustee of the village hall and the best thing is the hall becoming the 21st winner. It’s just brilliant. It’s the hub of the community and was refurbished in 2009 to become that, and it has.
“We raise money for the village hall, but to get £5,000 a year for three years from Postcode Lottery players is fantastic.”
Other winners include next door neighbours Sam Bambury and Tara Lynch.
Sam, 30, will get stuck into his passion project: restoring a classic 1984 Mini he snapped up for £5,000.
The motor racing fanatic wants to make the 42-year-old vehicle track ready by installing a new engine, upgrading the brakes and suspension, taking out the back seats and respraying it.
Sam said: “I love motor racing; my dad brought me up on it. I’ve just bought myself an old Mini. It’s running and driving at the moment, but it’s a work in progress.
“I want to make this a track project, probably not for racing in a competition but just to take it out on a track.”
Sam, a self-employed property renovator and log burner installer, said he was stunned the village landed the million.
The father-of-one, who will also treat his partner and three-year-old daughter, said: “It’s good to see quite a few people have won. I never thought it would happen here. A lot of people have never heard of Birdsedge. There’s no pub, no shop and only three buses a day.”
Tara, 30, broke down in tears when she pulled the cheque from the envelope – and now she’s making plans to speed up a family house move.
The mother-of-one said: “Sam rang me and I thought, ‘what’s he phoning me for?’ I’d missed a phone call from the Postcode Lottery and he said, ‘Tara, get back on the phone now…we’ve won’.”
Tara, who works in sales for an engineering firm, and her partner have been looking to move home to get more space for their two-year-old son, Theo.
She said: “It is life changing for us. We’re looking at houses all the time because we need more space.”
She added: “I’m going to Tenerife in two weeks; me and my mum and Theo. We’ll have a right celebration there. And maybe when Theo’s a little bit older, we’ll take him to Lapland.”