GRANDMOTHER Jean Kiernan was looking forward excitedly to attending her grand-daughter's wedding dress fitting yesterday - after making a detour to collect a TWO THOUSAND POUNDS windfall from Wirral's newest weekly lottery.

Jean, who has lived in Woodchurch, Birkenhead, for the last 47 years, is the latest Wirral resident to scoop the jackpot in the St John's Hospice in Wirral Weekly Lottery - and there could hardly be a more deserving winner.

For Jean's life has been littered with more personal tragedy than most of us, mercifully, are ever likely to experience, having lost, over a 16 month spell, her husband, a son and her sister to cancer.

Since then, Jean has suffered the loss of her second son and, last year, lost her mother at the age of 95.

Despite all of this, the ever cheerful senior citizen remains clearly focused. "I am very keen to help St John's Hospice and Clatterbridge Hospital," she told me. "I am a cancer patient myself and I am very indebted to both of them. "That is why I am in the St John's lottery - I sent £26 at the beginning of the year and I thought they were ringing me on Friday to say that my membership needed renewing!"

Jean added: "My grand-daughter, Gillian Peace, is getting married in August and on Tuesday (yesterday) I was going with her for the wedding dress fitting - now we are making a detour to collect my two thousand pounds windfall!"

Jean, who has two daughters and four grandchildren, has no doubts about how she will spend the money. "I intend spreading it around my family. I like to do things for them and you can't do it when you are dead, can you?"

Each week throughout the year, the St John's Hospice lottery computer selects at random the 54 numbers which share the three thousand pounds weekly prizemoney - a top prize of two thousand pounds, second prize of five hundred pounds, third prize of one hundred pounds, fourth prize of fifty pounds, 20 ten pounds winners and 30 five pounds winners.

The winning numbers are published each week in the Wirral Globe.

Membership of the lottery is open to people aged 16 or over. One pound per week buys one ticket which gives the holder a unique number selected by computer.

Officials at St John's, a registered charity, decided to launch their own local lottery following refusal of an application for National Lottery funds to help meet the one million pounds annual running costs of the hospice, which provides invaluable care for the terminally ill and their families.

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