Photograph of Viv Nicholson from the early 1960s featured on the somewhat controversial sleeve cover for the single, "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" b/w "Suffer Little Children" (May 1984) by the Smiths.
Vivian (Viv) Nicholson (born 1936) became a public figure in Great Britain overnight in 1961 when she won £152,000 (equivalent to about £3 million today) on the football pools.
Living in the Yorkshire town of Castleford, she announced that she was going to "spend, spend, spend", and did indeed proceed rapidly on an extravagant spending spree. As such, she became an icon for a new kind of self-confident Northern woman some two years before Julie Christie's appearance in Billy Liar, and was popular tabloid fodder for some years.
By her own admission, however, she found it hard to cope with the psychological effects of the money she had won. She came to feel distanced from the people she had lived among, who in turn could no longer relate to her, and developed an ever greater longing for a much more affluent area.
After her husband Keith was killed in a car crash, her fortune rapidly dwindled to nothing; indeed, she had spent, spent and spent: banks and tax creditors both deemed her bankrupt and declared that all her money, and everything she had acquired with it, belonged not to her but to Keith's estate.
She made many attempts to regain both her public profile and her lost wealth, such as recording a single (entitled "Spend Spend Spend", written by her brother) and appearing in a strip club singing "Big Spender", but none succeeded.
Nicholson did win a three-year legal battle to gain £20,000 from Keith's estate, but rapidly spent it all on crack cocaine. After relocating to Malta, she was rapidly deported back to Britain amid a storm of tabloid publicity after assaulting a policeman, and was admitted to a mental home to escape from her third husband, who brutally abused her during the four days they lived together (the marriage lasted only thirteen weeks).
After opening a short-lived boutique she ended up penniless, and by 1976 claimed that she could not even afford to bury her fourth husband, who had died (and with whom she had broken up three years earlier). She also had a number of run-ins with the police, and attempted on one occasion to commit suicide. Naturally, the yellow press loved every moment — for them, the Viv Nicholson story had taken on the proportions of a real-life soap opera that no British television company (at least in that era) would have dared to produce.
In 1977 she co-authored "Spend Spend Spend" with Stephen Smith, a book in which she recounted her turbulent life; this led to a BBC "Play for Today" the same year, in which she was played by Susan Littler. It ends with the line that, however unhappy much of her life may have been before she won the pools, her days of industrial squalor were still "the best times I ever had".
More recent claim to fame
Viv Nicholson's nameNicholson has been married five times, and still lives in Castleford. She is now a Jehovah's Witness.
Categories: 1936 births | Lottery winners
