Amble lottery winner shares her good fortune with the RNLI

Margaret Kelley, a 59-year-old cleaner, has donated £5,000 of her £300,000 win to help the Amble RNLI Shannon Appeal.

She said: "My son, Richard is a member of the crew at the Amble base, so it is fantastic that I will be in a position to make a difference to the fund from my winnings at a level that I just would not have been able to do previously.

"The winnings will make an awful lot of difference to my life and hopefully also really help the lifeboat appeal. If this donation helps bring forward the date on which we can get a new boat then we will really all be winners."

Margaret, who is also a member of a National Lottery syndicate at Amble Marina, where she works, bought her winning scratchcard at the Co-Op in Amble on January 5, and has been on a winning streak with The National Lottery this year.

"I bought two scratchcards that day and one gave me £3 winnings with the other £300,000. I also had a £100 win on a scratchcard the week before, so maybe that luck will rub off on the syndicate at the marina," she said.

"Money has been tight over the years, but I have just bought myself a new Ford Fiesta and the win will also mean I can pay off my mortgage which is a huge thing for someone at my age."

Amble’s current all-weather Mersey class lifeboat, The Four Boys, is due to be replaced in 2017 and campaigners are working hard to help raise the £200,000 needed for a replacement Shannon class boat.

Margaret said: "People in the area are working really hard to raise the money needed to get the new Shannon class lifeboat which will be 50 per cent faster than the existing vessel and will really make a difference in terms of helping anybody who might get into difficulty around the Northumberland coast."

National Lottery players raise, on average, more than £33million for National Lottery-funded projects every week. In the Northumberland postcode area alon, there have been 3,316 individual National Lottery grants made to date, funding projects across the arts, sports, heritage, health, education, environment, charity and voluntary sectors.