It could be bugle

The Sun: It Could Be Bugle: Lottery win allows chef to fulfil Last Post dream

LOTTERY winner Neil Baker checked the numbers again to be sure.
3.H.15, 14713. Not his winning ticket, but the plot details and service number for his great-grandfather's First World War grave.

Seeing the name of the 38-year-old infantryman neatly inscribed in the cold stone, he stepped forward to place a wreath of poppies.

Neil's £1.6million win in January could have bought him a new house, a flash car, maybe an exotic holiday or two. It hasn't. None of it.

The former chef, 36, is not most people's idea of a "spend, spend, spend" jackpot winner, but perhaps he has got what most of us would like from a Lottery windfall.

His cash has bought him the time to do all the simple things he hoped to do but never got round to while working all hours to pay the bills.

For seven years before his big win, Neil and mum Margaret had been planning to visit the Belgian war grave of Margaret's grandfather, Private Sydney Carver, killed, like so many, in the Great War.

And musician Neil wanted to play the Last Post at the graveside, in honour of the great-grandfather he never knew and also in remembrance of his dad John, a bugler in the Boys' Brigade, who had always planned to do the same but died in 2004 with his wish unfulfilled.

Now Neil stood beside the white limestone memorial, one of many in the immaculately kept Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in Tournai, Belgium, and his lips were suddenly dry.

His nerves were nothing like the butterflies he felt when he got round to checking his Lottery numbers on a Sunday night in January.

"It was Mum who checked the ticket and she said, 'We've got all of these,'" recalled Neil, from Bridgwater, Somerset.

"We always did four lines with family birthdays and the like, and one Lucky Dip line to make it up to a round fiver, and normally we would be lucky to get a tenner once in a blue moon."

The Lucky Dip numbers - 5, 20, 25, 30, 36 and 47 - had come up for Neil and a joint winner.

He said: "At 11.10pm on a Sunday there was no one to speak to at Lottery HQ, just an answering machine. I was shaking and talking gibberish and we checked the numbers again on the TV.

"I didn't sleep much and the next day, when Camelot rang back and I heard how much I'd won, I was running around shouting."

As head chef at the Tudor Hotel in Bridgwater, working up to 70 hours a week, Neil still could not pass on the amazing news because his boss was away for the day.

"I had to sit on the news until that night and work a normal shift," he said. "I cut the top of my finger because I could not concentrate."

When his boss returned, Neil could finally reveal his good fortune.

He said: "When I told him, he said, 'You'd better get me a whisky!'

"I had all sorts of lieu days owing but I could not leave them in the lurch so I gave them a week's notice.

"I did think at times in that week, 'What the hell am I doing here?' "

News soon got out but Neil was glad that another bigger Lottery win a week later took the heat off him.

Neil, who plays for Bridgwater amateur rugby side Morganians, said: "Lots of people know me, through the rugby club and the hotel and they all congratulated me, but no fair-weather friends suddenly appeared.

"The friends I had are the friends I have still got, which is great."

Neil insisted at the time that the win would not change him and he wasn't kidding. He is staying in his £100,000 childhood home so he can care for his wheelchair-bound mum, who has lived there for 50 years.

He is also happy to stick with his nine-year-old Jaguar X-Type car.

In fact his only extravagance has been to have the dents knocked out of his dad's old bugle and the silver on it replated at a cost of £300.

"The house has got everything we need, so why move?" he said. "You can't move your memories.

"I know it's a lot of money but you could blow it all in a month if you wanted to buy daft cars and a big house.

"That's just not me. I'm glad the jackpot was shared so someone else got a chance to enjoy the money too."

Even though Neil stopped work, he soon found himself busy helping to decorate a neighbour's house and repair his mum's shed.

He said: "I did think when I was covered in paint and dust, 'I could afford to pay someone else to do this,' but I just got on with it. We have lovely neighbours."

He treated himself and his mum to a few trips to steam train sites at York, Swindon and Minehead, and they are planning a holiday in Cornwall or Scotland or, at a push, maybe a cruise.

Neil said: "Why go abroad when Britain has some of the loveliest countryside in the world? It's just lovely to have the time to go and see it."

He has also realised the joy of having his own private bank manager: "Suddenly, instead of ringing and being held in a queue for three hours or having to go to see them, you ring up and they come round to see you! I can't get my head round it."

Neil received advice from Lotto chiefs and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission on how to realise his ambition and trace his great-grandfather's grave.

Sydney Carver was 34 and a river pilot when he enlisted in 1914, training with his new comrades at Surrey's Deepcut barracks with no uniforms or rifles.

But by 1915 he was in action in France, serving in the 7th Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, and somehow went on to live through the carnage and slaughter of major battles including the Somme and Ypres.

Neil believes that in June 1918, Sydney survived the shelling of a train on which the battalion were travelling but may have been in a patrol which suffered casualties fighting the Germans at Ablain Saint Nazaire, near Lens.

Sydney died the following month in hospital in Tournai, Belgium.

Unknown to his wife and family, who would not hear of his death until October that year, he was buried. But his body was later moved to the war graves extension to the civil cemetery in Tournai.

Now here Neil was in front of his great-grandfather's gravestone.

The night before, he and his mother had heard the haunting strains of the Last Post in a ceremony that unfolds every evening at the Menin Gate in Ypres.


As he stood over his forefather's last resting place, Neil pursed his lips, puffed out his cheeks and the first notes echoed from his bugle across the cemetery.

Margaret wiped a tear from her eye. Then, after Neil's moving rendition of the Last Post, she said: "His dad would have been so proud. I am so proud of Neil.

"He is the son I never thought I would have. The doctors said I could not conceive and I was eight and a half months pregnant before I realised. Perhaps that is why we are so close."



Wearing his great-grandfather's war medals, Neil said: "It has been very poignant; almost surreal - like not really being here. I had always wanted to come but never had the time because of work.

"Playing Dad's bugle at my great-grandfather's grave is very important to me and the Lottery win has made it possible.

"I wanted to pay my respects to someone who gave their life for his country so we could all grow up to do the things we want to do.

"I did not want to cry and I managed to hold it in, but you are very aware of being surrounded by the graves of 600 young men who never lived to do the things they wanted to do.

"The only shame is that Dad was not here beside me, blowing his bugle."