In February 2019, Natalie and her then fiancé Andrew Symes won £1 million in the EuroMillions UK Millionaire Maker draw. Just days after becoming millionaires, the couple also welcomed their second child. Seven years after winning the lottery, the couple spoke about the win, welcoming their daughter a month earlier than expected, and how their whole lives have evolved ever since. Their story comes as new data names Bristol as one of the luckiest places in the UK for lottery winners. There are now 100 National Lottery millionaires, while 669 players have won £50,000 or more on National Lottery games.
An emergency shop visit and an impulse ticket purchase
It was a Friday. Natalie was eight months pregnant and had a toddler. “I didn’t know at the time, but I also had swine flu. So I was feeling pretty awful,” she told Bristol Live recently.As it was snowing badly, she grew anxious. “I could just see the snow getting worse and worse from our house in Thornbury. I was frantically ringing my fiancé at the time to say that he needed to get home in case the roads weren’t clear and he wouldn’t be able to get back. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with our toddler myself in the snow.”Andrew Symes left work early and stopped at the local Tesco to grab some supplies in case the snow got worse. “I think he heard it on the radio in the car that there was a rollover jackpot on the lottery. He just decided to buy a ticket while he was in there,” Natalie recalled. The purchase was quite out of the blue. “We don’t usually play the lottery. It was a real spur-of-the-moment thing,” she said. Andrew even joked with the man who sold him the ticket, saying, “I’ll be back later, this is the winning ticket.” Turns out, his words were prophetic.The ticket was for the EuroMillions UK Millionaire Maker draw on Friday 1 February 2019. It was left on a shelf at home and almost forgotten. Natalie was jokingly waving around some cash from the sale of an old pushchair, pretending they were rich, when Andrew checked the ticket numbers and told her they actually were!
The unexpected win
Most people who buy tickets don’t really expect to win. Natalie thought the same. “It’s not something you ever expect to happen to you.” On the day of the result announcement, Andrew checked the ticket and was surprised.“We’re huddled around his computer screen and we didn’t believe what we were reading. Neither of us knew what to do next, because obviously it’s never happened to us before and it’s not something you ever expect to happen to you,” she recalled.She sent Andrew back to Tesco with the ticket. The same man who sold it was on the till. He scanned the ticket and told Andrew to ring Camelot, the operator at the time.“We rang. They confirmed it. And we were in disbelief. It didn’t seem real. Before we spoke to the woman on the phone, I thought it was all a prank or something.”
A new life
The couple were living in a bungalow and owned no property at the time. So a home of their own was the obvious first purchase. By the weekend, they were touring new builds. While they were shopping for homes, their daughter Poppy thought this was the best time for her to arrive on Earth, and that too a month before her due date.“We won on the Friday and we went to look at a few of the new builds nearby on the Sunday. And I remember not being able to go up the stairs, because I was having lots of pain. I thought maybe my daughter had just moved around and she was in an uncomfortable position. I didn’t really think too much of it, but then that didn’t go away, and I ended up going to the hospital on Monday. Labour must have started while we were house viewing and she was born at 36 weeks – a whole month early,” she revealed.Poppy arrived on 5 February, four days after the draw. “She did want to join us for it all!”They won the lottery at the right time. With lockdowns arriving the following year, Andrew, a payroll supervisor at a pensions firm, might otherwise have spent them working from a cupboard under the stairs. The money also covered the couple’s wedding and a second property, which now brings in extra income. The lottery money changed their lives for the better. Natalie can now be at home with the children, something she thought she’d never manage.“They were all just pipe dreams at the time, but now we’re married and have our own home, and I can do the school runs and see the school plays and, if I’d have been working, I wouldn’t have been able to do all that. It also helped relieve some pressure during the Covid lockdowns, which was nice,” she said.Plenty of lottery winners keep it quiet. Natalie rang her mum straight away.
