The last thing Malcolm Disson ever won was a dead goldfish at a fair when he was 12. His next win is a £4 million mansion in Yorkshire — a Grade II-listed six-bedroom home with its own lake, tennis court, library, pizza oven, potting shed and a separate two-bedroom cottage, plus £250,000 cash and £155,000 of furnishings.
Disson, 58, a father of two from Newbury, won the Omaze Million Pound House Draw for Yorkshire on a £30 entry, part of his Omaze subscription. The home, in Little Ouseburn near Linton-on-Ouse, North Yorkshire, comes mortgage-free with stamp duty and legal fees covered. The £250,000 cash is paid in instalments under Omaze rules, not as a lump sum.
The goldfish, revisited
Disson says the last thing he won before this was a dead goldfish at Hampstead Heath fair when he was 12 — won by bouncing ping-pong balls into goldfish bowls, and already dead when he opened the bag. Two weeks before the mansion win, he won £8 on a lottery and thought his “luck was finally starting to turn”. He was right, by several orders of magnitude.
He co-founded The British Shop, a fine art and antiques packing and shipping business near Heathrow, in 2004, and has daughters Lilly, 22, and Daisy, 18. He had never been to Yorkshire before winning a house there.
A win with a cause attached
The draw raised £1 million for Blood Cancer UK, plus a £3.5 million multi-year Omaze grant for clinical trials. Disson had been grieving his father, who died two weeks earlier, when he learned of the win — a detail that makes the story less about luck and more about timing.
From a dead goldfish at 12 to a £4 million house at 58, via a £30 entry and an £8 lottery win two weeks earlier: Disson’s luck did not so much turn as arrive all at once. The house has a lake, a tennis court and a pizza oven. The goldfish, mercifully, is not part of the prize.
The win also carries a weight that the headlines miss. Disson learned of it while grieving his father, who had died two weeks earlier, and the house in Yorkshire is now tied to that loss as much as to the luck. He had never been to Yorkshire before. He has a reason to go now, and a home waiting when he gets there.
