Posted on 10/06/2007 6:25:29 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
Emerging from a cramped flat in the run-down Scottish town of East Kilbride, the dowdy middle-aged woman does not look out of place.
Clutching a handful of plastic carrier bags, she struggles down the street alongside the school-run mums and Asbo kids on their way to the chip shop.
The weather has turned her recently permed hair into a shapeless frizz and her lacklustre skin is devoid of make-up. Dressed in old jeans and a baggy top, another empty day unfolds.
Her look is not one which would ordinarily turn heads, but as she walks past, curtains twitch and the children stop and gawp.
For this is Angela Kelly: the Royal Mail worker and single mother who, two months ago, became Britain's biggest ever lottery winner, worth a staggering £35 million.
Angela Kelly: Clutching a bag of groceries despite a £35m lottery win
There's not much to spend your money on in East Kilbride. Lunch will be a burger for one at McDonald's, and later she might treat herself to a manicure at the Marina beauty salon.
Since her win, Angela has gained nearly a stone, lost her boyfriend and - apart from bleak trips to the shopping mall - become a virtual recluse.
Instead of living it up, she is driving a borrowed second-hand car, living like a hermit in a backstreet flat in an area plagued by joyriders, shopping in half-price sales at a retail park, going to drive-through fast-food chains, and living on supermarket ready meals.
An isolated, lonely figure, the moral of her story might be the old adage: "Be careful what you wish for."
It is a far cry indeed from the magical day on August 15 when Angela made front page news after her numbers came up in the EuroMillions triple rollover draw, making her richer than Princes William and Harry and footballer Wayne Rooney.
Then, she literally could not believe her luck. Financially stretched and worried about her overdraft, she had bought a £1.50 lucky dip ticket at her local supermarket.
Happy day: When she found out she had scooped a massive jackpot
Reading the newspaper during her break at work on Monday morning, she saw that someone had won many millions the previous Friday night, and that the prize remained unclaimed.
She pulled out her ticket. Number after number matched the winning draw. Still unable to comprehend her luck, 40-year-old Angela asked her colleagues at the post office, where she had worked from the age of 16, to check her numbers for her. The odds on her winning were one in 76 million.
"I didn't know what to do at first, I couldn't believe it," she said. "It was only when everyone in the office started cheering that I realised it must have been me who'd won.
"I rang the National Lottery phoneline to make my claim, but my hands were shaking so much it was difficult to write my name on the back of the ticket like they asked. I couldn't say anything. I pushed my chair back and put my head between my knees, I was so flabbergasted."
One colleague captured the fateful moment on her mobile phone; another brought a cup of tea to calm her nerves.
Minutes later, Angela's 14-year-old son John telephoned for a chat. With breathtaking understatement, she told him: "I've had a wee win on the lottery."
"Is it a million pounds?" he asked. "No," she replied, "it's 35."
By now, the Camelot machine was cranking into action. Their advisers arrived, collecting Angela from her workplace in a limousine and whisking her away to a secret location: the £250-a-night Airth Castle hotel in Stirlingshire.
There, Camelot's 'fairy godmother' Dot Renshaw prepared her for what lay ahead. Renshaw is head of a team of seven who help big winners cope with their windfall and the ensuing media frenzy. First, she took Angela shopping - but for the down-to-earth Royal Mail employee, designer shops were too daunting.
She confided to Dot: "I look in the window but never go in because I couldn't even afford a scarf in there." Instead, she chose a simple, brown, polka-dot dress from the department store House of Fraser in which to face the cameras.
Dot, of course, had seen it all before, but felt confident that Angela would cope. "We get some people who are already comfortable financially, or even wealthy, and they tend to absorb the news more easily," she says. "Then you get someone who's been made redundant and is struggling to pay the bills and they're stunned.
"Angela seemed to take it in her stride. But it can take weeks, months or even years for them to fully realise what has happened."
She arranged for Angela to bank her £35,425,412 cheque with a private bank and meet financial advisers - the interest alone on her win each week amounts to £21,000 after tax, the same figure as her annual salary at the Post Office.
Renshaw also counselled her on the consequences of going public with her win, but Angela was adamant that she wanted to embrace her good fortune openly. As we shall see, this is something she has come to regret.
At a glitzy Press conference hosted by GMTV presenter Fiona Phillips, Angela gushed about the joy her win would bring.
She would buy a new Seat Ibiza, to replace the one she had crashed in May, upgrade her ticket to first class for a planned trip to Canada, and possibly holiday in Hawaii - because it featured in her favourite 1970s television programme, the police series Hawaii Five-0.
Never mind that she could afford to buy a Caribbean island outright, she had recently bought a fitted kitchen in the sales, so she wouldn't be moving from her two-bedroom £80,000 former council house until it was installed. Friends and family were high on her list of priorities, and she was thinking of donating to a few charities.
Ominously, she added: "Inside, I am churning up really. I am not that calm. It is so weird - really, really weird - because a £21,000 salary is not a bad wage. It is liveable. I have always got by. To know that I have that every week and loads more, I just cannot get my head around it all.
"The most I've ever won before was a bottle of whisky in the works Christmas raffle and £20 in our lottery syndicate."
The fact that she was not formally separated from her husband, Gerald Kelly, would not cause problems, she said, and with a new boyfriend on the scene and money to burn, life was looking rosy for perhaps the first time since her marriage had broken down eight years earlier.
Her ex would get a share, she vowed, explaining that they had never divorced "because we didn't want to put John through more heartache.
"Gerry is so happy for me and John. I have spoken to him," she said. "He said: 'That's you, you never need to worry about anything again.' He said good luck and well done. I need to sit down and speak to Gerry about what he is looking for. He is not an unreasonable man."
Unguarded in her excitement, Angela then confided to the cameras that she did indeed have a new boyfriend, William 'Billy' Quinn.
He works at the Royal Mail's Springburn sorting office, where Angela was employed as an administrative assistant and her estranged husband is transport manager.
She said: "I have been seeing someone for a while. Things are going great, and we get on really well and have fun. I think he is stressed out at the moment."
Of her son, she said: "He's a handful at times, but he's a really nice wee boy who does as he's told. He isn't the kind of personality to go off the rails because of this."
Caught in the blaze of camera flashes, with her sleek hairdresser hair and professionally applied make-up, this was truly a Cinderella moment - fate had waved its magic wand.
Back home, however, the reality of this cataclysmic win began to set in. Life had not prepared Angela for riches. Born Angela Cunningham, she describes herself as a "£3 burger and pint girl". From a working-class Glasgow home, her father was also a Post Office worker, and her mother a housewife.
A friend says: "She's just a wee lassie from the Glasgow housing estates; she's not cut out for this sort of money."
In the weeks after her win, Angela went back to the sorting office where she had worked for 24 years to hand over to her successor and say goodbye to colleagues.
She intimated that she was already having trouble adjusting, saying: "The difficult thing for me will be not going in to work every day. I'll miss the adult company. I always liked a gossip and a gab at work."
Most troubling of all, it soon became apparent that her beloved son did not want a new life. He did not want to move from his comprehensive school, nor did he want to leave home and his East Kilbride friends or to abandon his aspirations to become a fireman after his GCSEs.
A source close to the family says: "This has been really difficult for Angela, because she lives for John. Once his wish-list of a PlayStation and various bits of teenage kit had been fulfilled, he wanted to settle back into life with his mates.
"Of course, that's not really possible when you're suddenly the heir to a £35 million fortune. The family are really struggling to cope with the change in their circumstances."
It had been reported that Angela was looking to buy a property in the upmarket village of Thorntonhall, on the outskirts of Glasgow, but this did not come to pass.
Instead, she and John have moved from their house into a modest property nearby, owned by Angela's sister, Patricia. This has enabled John to continue at his school, but has provoked much speculation locally on why they appear unable to embrace their wealth.
The family has indeed found it difficult dealing with the spotlight now fixed on them. A shy person, Angela was unprepared for the attention that comes with a massive lottery win.
She has been besieged by people begging for hand-outs, and received a deluge of hard luck letters asking for help.
Friends - apparently including John's school pals - have leaked stories to the press about their plans, and Kelly has now instructed lawyers to protect her son from intrusion.
Meanwhile, it emerged that Angela's exhusband has sought security advice over his fears for his son's safety. He has John to stay at weekends at his flat two miles away from Angela's former home, and is concerned that the boy could be a target for extortion attempts and ransom demands as a result of the win.
A colleague says: "He and Angela have had several conversations about it. It's a serious issue. Suddenly, John has gone from being an ordinary kid to the son and heir to one of Britain's richest women.
"Gerry has asked for help from the Royal Mail's security people in Belfast. They have massive experience of dealing with hijack and kidnap."
Then came the difficulties with her boyfriend, Billy. Apparently, the father-of-two has asked his employers for a six-month sabbatical, during which he plans to backpack around the world - without Angela.
The 43-year-old is still living in the flat he moved into in 2004 when he split from wife Janice, and friends say he and Angela are no longer together.
A friend says: "He's keeping a low profile, and it's obvious something has happened between them because he doesn't exactly seem thrilled about the whole thing. In fact, he's never mentioned Angela to colleagues since he came back.
"They were always very close at work, having breakfast and lunch together and travelling to work in the same car, but he's never mentioned how she's getting on. He's told the bosses he wants to take six months to a year off work to do the backpacking trip, but there's no way Angela would be going with him.
"She lives for her son. She's not going to go gallivanting around the world when the lad has got exams coming up. It just goes to show money can't buy love or happiness."
Little wonder, then, that recent pictures of Angela Kelly show her looking unkempt and strained. She apparently spends all day alone, waiting for John to come home from school.
She often has a budget lunch in a cheap family diner, The Leeburn, where the most expensive item on the menu costs £12.99 - but with her wealth she could pay for celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay to cook her breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Far from the legendary 'spend, spend, spend' mentality of 1960s pools winner Viv Nicholson, the only treat Angela appears to have allowed herself is a £63 perm at the local hair salon.
Last week, she answered the door to her sister's flat defensively, and refused to discuss the impact money has had on her life, saying: "How did you know I was here? I don't want to talk to anyone."
Asked if she had split from her boyfriend, she said: "I won't answer any questions about my personal life."
A neighbour says: "The tragedy for Angela is that had she won £50,000, she would have been over the moon - she would have paid off the mortgage, gone on holiday and felt financially secure.
"Winning £35 million has really ruined her life. The pressure is just too huge for her to bear. She's hardly living the dream - she seems to be at a loss as to what to do, and is just adrift. She was perfectly happy before. Now it's as though she's lost her sense of purpose."
How many pounds is that?
I’m happy for this lady. She needs to relax, loosen up, and pamper herself at least a little bit. I think she feels guilty because she won that much money, and she shouldn’t. If she wants, she could surely share some of it.
It looks to me as if this lady has a bedrock of common sense, and that she has the potential to do well once the shock wears off.
I agree.
A stone is 14 lbs.
I agree, when I read the title I thought it was another one of those “blew all her money on stupid stuff”. It was refreshing to see that was not the case. I hope she can find happiness.
A stone equals 14 pounds.
The fact that her son seems remarkably decent for a 14-year-old with millions says something about his mother’s character.
Her (ahem) domestic arrangements point the other way, but since the bf has absconded with his payoff, that’s kind of taken care of itself :-).
She will be flat broke with no money and nothing to show for her winnings within 5 years.
Oh, and in debt also.
This is very common to instant lottery winners who have no smarts in dealing with all the many problems that comes with this “good luck”.
At 24 pounds per, I weigh 8 stones 3 rocks and a few pebbles.
205 pounds.
Money may not buy happiness but it can sure make the downpayment.
Quote from the article:
“Winning £35 million has really ruined her life...she seems to be at a loss as to what to do, and is just adrift.”
Oh, please, shut up! If the money really ruined her life then she would just give it all away!
About 14.
Then at 205 pounds I am just a few pebbles shy of 15 stones.
Seems money can’t by happiness. I hope she can truly find the Cinderella she has become. I wish her love and peace within.
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