Mark, right, celebrating his winnings with business partner Paul and their wives Brenda and Ruth (Picture: PA)
Everyone has some ideas of what they’d do once they win the jackpot – and top of the list for many is handing in their notice.
Why work to pay off a mortgage when you could just buy up your whole street?
But one man who became an instant multimillionaire when he won £22,000,000 says that would be a mistake.
Mark Gardiner, 61, was barely into his thirties when he won what was then the largest prize in the National Lottery’s history.
He and business partner Paul Maddison won £22,590,829 – which in today’s terms with inflation would be more like £55,000,000.
Paul immediately gave up on their glazing business, eventually buying himself a mansion in remote Scotland and losing touch with Mark before he died last year aged 73.
But Mark stayed in Hastings, where he can still be seen driving around in his Croft Glass van, the company he founded four years before the life-changing win.
‘Whether it was nervousness or fear of the unknown, I thought, “I’m going to keep working,”’ he told the Daily Mail.
‘There was no lightning bolt. It was more a case of clinging on to what I knew. It was my safety rail and I thought I would take time to decide when I was going to let it go. Weeks, months, I had no idea.’
It turned out to be longer than that, as he is still doing it.
People seeing him in his modest van assume he must have blown all his cash on ‘fast cars and fast women’, he said.
But the truth is he just didn’t want to give up the 9 to 5.
Mark still gets up and goes to work like the rest of us drones (Picture: Spartacus/SplashNews.com)
‘If I wasn’t with you today, I’d be working,’ he told the reporter. ‘But I don’t have to take any nonsense. And if I want to take a day off on a sunny day then I can.’
And he did treat himself to some of the trappings of the super-rich, using the winnings to buy the kind of house and pool we only dream of while browsing RightMove, a fleet of cars and even a yacht.
Unlike many with horror stories after winning the lottery, however, he’s happy with his lifestyle, especially after getting back together with his childhood sweetheart.
He is now on his fifth marriage – although he’s still only had four wives, as he is now back with the first one after reuniting unexpectedly when he was called out to fix her windows without either realising (or so they claim).
Lottery winners Mark (right) and Paul parted ways as business partners after their win (Picture: PA)
Mark, who now has an 18-year-old son with Bridget as well as children from previous marriages, is so keen on working for a living rather than a life of leisure that he took on an extra job advising other big lottery winners on how to deal with their changing circumstances.
But he wasn’t always very cheerful about their prospects, telling it straight that they would ‘probably’ fall out with friends and family.
Looking back on the past 30 years, he said that given the chance to change anything, he would still have worked but might have invested in property instead of keeping up as a glazer.
Other than that, he’s the happiest he’s ever been – although he is still yet to achieve his dream of appearing on I’m A Celebrity: Get Me Out of Here!
With all that money, he can buy himself a ticket to Australia as well as some camel testicles for the full experience – and a couple more press articles might see him on the way to TV too.
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