Lottery winners celebrate huge jackpot

Britain's biggest lottery winners were revealed to the world today as they celebrated scooping a record-breaking £91 million.

Les Scadding, 53, and his wife Samantha Peachey-Scadding, 38, from Caerleon, South Wales, landed £45.5m in the Euromillions jackpot, along with a seven-strong syndicate of IT workers in Merseyside who won an equal amount.

The Scaddings celebrated with a traditional Sunday lunch washed down with a couple of bottles of champagne at their local restaurant, while the Liverpool winners today told their stories of delight and disbelief at realising they had won.

Unemployed driver Mr Scadding discovered that he and his wife had won the jackpot after going to a Tesco supermarket on Saturday evening to buy some groceries.

Mr Scadding, who has three grown-up children from his first marriage, said his first purchase would be to replace his Citroen C5 with a Range Rover Sport. His wife revealed she would also be looking to give some money to a heart and lung transplant fund at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital, where her late father received a heart transplant.

Meanwhile, the Liverpool syndicate, who called themselves the Magnificent Seven, were also shown off to the media. The winners, who all work for Hewlett Packard carrying out IT work at a BT office in Liverpool, only formed their syndicate four months ago. It includes John Walsh, 57, James Bennett, 28, Sean Connor, 32, Alex Parry, 19, Emma Cartwright, 23, Ceri Scullion, 35 and Donna Rhodes, 39, who have each banked £6.5 million.

Syndicate leader Mr Walsh said he left the winning ticket in his desk drawer at work so went in on Sunday morning to make sure it was still there and then called the rest of the syndicate. He said: "I didn't quite get the response I expected because, with the economy in the state that it is in, everyone has been worried about jobs, so they all thought I was calling them to tell they had been made redundant. But thankfully I got to tell them some good news instead."

The news was perfect timing for John and his wife, Margaret, who was made redundant from her job at Woolworths in January.