The first National Lottery draw, 19 November 1994

The National Lottery's first draw took place on Saturday 19 November 1994. Noel Edmonds presented it live on BBC television. Camelot had been awarded the licence that May, and each line cost £1.

The balls came from a machine called Guinevere, using ball set 1. The numbers were drawn in the order 30, 3, 5, 44, 14 and 22, and the bonus ball was 10.

Seven tickets matched all six. Between them they shared £5,874,778, so each took home £839,254. In Barnsley, the town's central post office sold 1,400 tickets on the first day and stayed open until 7pm to keep up.

Across all tiers, 1,152,611 tickets won something from a prize fund of just over £22 million. Most of them, 1,073,695, were £10 prizes for three numbers. Camelot ran the lottery until Allwyn took over on 1 February 2024, and Guinevere is now on display at the Science Museum in London.

Sources

• Lottery.co.uk (lottery.co.uk)
• Barnsley Chronicle (barnsleychronicle.com)
• Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)