Hostage to a fortune

In 1995, Mark Gardiner landed Britain's biggest ever single lottery win. Ten years, £11m, two Caribbean beach-houses and a fleet of Aston Martins later, he's fallen out with most of his family and friends. Any regrets? Malcolm Macalister Hall finds out

Built like a nightclub bouncer, Jack the Lad, Jim Davidson fan, mobile ringing all the time, Mark Gardiner's bursting with stories about the rows and the ex-wives and the string of lethal motorbikes he bought as he sits in the restaurant of The WorkPlace, the health club he runs in the grounds of his home, a couple of miles outside Hastings.

Built like a nightclub bouncer, Jack the Lad, Jim Davidson fan, mobile ringing all the time, Mark Gardiner's bursting with stories about the rows and the ex-wives and the string of lethal motorbikes he bought as he sits in the restaurant of The WorkPlace, the health club he runs in the grounds of his home, a couple of miles outside Hastings.

He's just getting into his stride when his phone rings. It's some kind of furniture supplier, and Gardiner's really, really not happy with something they've delivered. Politely, but combatively, he tells the caller to fix it - immediately - or he'll get his lawyers onto them, OK? He puts the phone down. "That..." he says, with a huge, conspiratorial grin, "that's power."

A decade ago, Gardiner would never have imagined he'd be sitting here - and his deepest wish is that he'd known then what he knows now. Ten years ago tomorrow, on 10 June 1995, Gardiner and his good friend and business partner Paul Maddison wrote the numbers 12, 15, 26, 44, 46,and 49 on a lottery ticket. They hit the jackpot and won £22,590,829, the biggest single lottery win there has ever been in Britain.

When more than £11m suddenly hits your current account, you'd think all your problems would be over. But, after 10 years to reflect on the Learjets and Aston Martins and beach-side homes in Barbados - and the rows and court cases and fallings-out - Mark Gardiner knows different.

In a nation now obsessed and haunted by the mirage of instant, life-changing wealth - a rich seam heavily mined by a slew of TV shows from Pop Idol to The Apprentice - Gardiner and Maddison were early winners at a time when the National Lottery was in its infancy. Winners were even bigger news then than they are now. Within 36 hours of their numbers being drawn, Gardiner got the full tabloid treatment. That, at 33, he'd already been married four times was a godsend for the red-tops.

"They were just flashing chequebooks," says Gardiner. "They found my parents, and ex-girlfriends, and the pubs we drank in and they only wanted the dirt that they could get on us. They weren't interested in any good things that we'd done. On the Monday morning I went to breakfast at the hotel we were hiding in and the Camelot guy said, 'Come up to my room, I need to show you something'. All over the bed were copies of the Sun, the Star, the Mirror - and it was 'lottery rat', 'he's going to drink himself to death', 'wife-beater', and this and that, and I just looked at all these things and I thought: Who are they writing about? I couldn't understand it. They were treating me as if I was a criminal.

"I'm guilty of one thing - and that's winning a lot of money. And I seem to be persecuted for it."

His win revealed - with brutal starkness - the thick streaks of jealousy, resentment, and avarice in human nature. "It's the green-eyed monster," he says. "I've had everything: people saying 'You've got my money - I played the lottery that week so you've got my tenner'." And they were genuinely implying he should give it back. "I've had people say: 'I'm really in debt and you could clear up my mortgage; what's £80,000 to you? That's loose change'. I've had things like: 'Buy us a house'. Umpteen people that I've never met sent me proposals for businesses. We had sacks of begging letters. I had proposals of marriage; they were sending them to my glazing company, and when I came out of hiding the two chaps who worked for me said: 'Bloody hell, all these letters are coming in from girls, with their photos in and everything'... and some of them had actually sent pound coins so that I could phone them." (Unimpressed, his secretary Gwen put the money into the firm's tea fund.)

Even now, 10 years on, Gardiner still seems to be trying to come to terms with his win. Whether the money has made him more combative or not, and who is really to blame is hard to say, but he clearly does not easily forgive a slight. He's not on speaking terms with any of his relations, apart from one cousin and her family.

"I bought houses for five friends, and they don't speak to me now either," he says, shrugging this off.

He and Paul Maddison have drifted apart, and haven't been in touch for ages. Maddison could not be contacted for comment, but Gardiner says he gave up work and moved to Scotland soon after the win to try to escape all the grief they were getting. Gardiner says that on one occasion when they did speak, on the phone, at a point when he too was thinking of leaving Hastings for some peace and quiet, Maddison told him he was getting just the same sort of grief in Scotland - rows, hostile comment, fallings-out. Gardiner decided he might as well stay put.

"In my book, Paul's never been scrubbed out of the mates list," says Gardiner. "I feel sorry for Paul because he and I used to enjoy a laugh together - but I think he's turned into a bit of a recluse, and I guess he's quite lonely. I think he must be bored shitless, too."

Born in Reading and adopted when he was a few months old, Gardiner was brought up in Hastings. He is full of praise for his teachers at Priory Road School for Boys, who helped him get seven CSE's and win admission to the Royal Navy as a rating. Though he excelled here - and officers tried to persuade him to stay - he left after six months. He then took a job with a glazing firm but was out after a few years.

"I got sacked, for fiddling," he grins, "and I'd just got married, just got a mortgage..." He survived on small glazing jobs before starting work at another firm, where Maddison was a manager. Eventually Maddison became a partner in Croft Glass, a glazing firm Gardiner started and still runs.

In early 1995 they decided to try the lottery. "We cut up little paper squares, and wrote 1-49 on them, and put them in a bag. We shook it up, and picked out lines of six numbers. We'd decided we would do £50 a week." They kept to these 50 lines and didn't change them. "Our theory was: Why chase the lottery? Let the lottery come you."

Neither of them watched the draw on television that night of 10 June, 1995. It was only the next day, as Gardiner was playing in a bowls match, that he looked at the lottery tickets and recognised some of the winning numbers he vaguely remembered being read out on the radio. At first he thought they might have won £100. He called Maddison, and asked him to get a newspaper. They realised they'd won.

"Then I did a really stupid thing. I gave the ticket to Paul, and he went to a shop to verify it - and there were people standing in the queue who knew him." While Maddison was being congratulated by the shop-keeper, someone nipped out and phoned the papers. The tabloids' crack troops were on their way.

Gardiner and his fourth wife Brenda and Maddison and his wife Ruth were holed up by Camelot in a smart hotel. As they waited, they worked out that they might just have won £1m each, possibly even up to £5m. When the rep turned up and told them it was more than £22m.

"We went to the bar, and it was, like, silence," says Gardiner. "I looked at Paul, and Paul looked at me, and we ordered two large brandies and for a couple of minutes we were just looking at each other, just speechless..." For the next three days they were moved from hotel to hotel, furtively ushered in and out through kitchens and fire-escapes. "It was almost like we were on the run; like we'd done a bank job, and we were the criminals." Finally Gardiner and his wife were set up in a secluded country cottage. "During the day I had to stay in the house," he recalls. "I was a bit like a bloody badger - I could only come out at night. You'd won all this money, but you felt like a prisoner. You couldn't go out and spend it, couldn't enjoy it."

Ten years on, Gardiner still gets the occasional comment on the street, but nothing like before. He says he's invested some £4m in his two businesses - The WorkPlace and Croft Glass (now "one of the biggest glazing firms in Hastings") - and still does all the measuring-up for the firm's windows and conservatories.

He knew he had to keep working to keep his sanity. "Otherwise, what do you do? Get up, brush your teeth, go on the golf course, watch Richard and Judy? It would almost have taken away the purpose to live."

He says he loves some of the things his wealth has brought him - the invitations to celebrity golf matches, invitations from friends in Barbados (he's had two houses there) - but says that wealth has robbed him of the pleasure of buying things; even Aston Martins. "I don't know if it would be different if I'd sweated my guts out to pay for these things, but it's the same with cars, the house, furniture - you're never satisfied, and always looking for the next thing. I don't know what it is, but it does your head in."

Something else he didn't expect is being constantly sued by ex-wives, former customers, former employees. He's lost count of the number of cases he's had to defend. He says the reason is simple: "They're all trying to sue me because I've got the money - and they want some of it."

And a spell as chief executive of his local football club in Hastings also turned sour. "When I arrived I think some of them thought they didn't need to do any more fundraising - it was like they thought I was from Russia, [like Roman Abramovich].

"But I'd be an absolute liar if I said I wish I hadn't won the money. But if I could have one wish, I'd get Dr Who's Tardis, and I'd go back to June 10, 1995.

"Knowing what I know now, I'd relive my life so differently. I would change so many things."