LONDON -- The publicity symbol for Britain's new national lottery is a giant celestial hand that sweeps down from the night sky, trailing Disneyesque stardust, to point through a bedroom window to a lucky winner.
It is meant to conjure up a miracle -- as easy as Cinderella's fairy godmother waving her magic wand.
But as in all fairy tales, there was a fear. After all the hype and hoopla aimed at turning the lottery into one of the world's largest, after a $60 million advertising campaign, what if the first big jackpot winner decided to remain anonymous?
That was the nightmare for Camelot, the operators of the lottery. And so, of course, four weeks after the lottery began in the fall and when its rollover jackpot hit $28 million, that is precisely what happened.
The winner's windfall abruptly shot him up to the level of the queen mother on Britain's list of the wealthiest. But the winner refused to have his identity revealed.
Britain is a nation of gamblers. Whether the money is lost at the races at Ascot, the casinos in Mayfair in London or the weekly football pools, it changes hands with the fluidity of the tides at Blackpool.
But it dropped its last state lottery in 1826, after a campaign by church officials and others who argued that "idleness, dissipation and poverty are increased, domestic comfort is destroyed, madness often created."
Now the hope is to generate almost $50 billion over seven years, with an estimated $14 billion to be split five ways: for charities, arts, heritage, sports and a fund to celebrate the millennium.
The lottery's organizers knew they had struck a rich vein in the nation's psyche as soon as they opened for business last month. In the first 12 hours, the 10,000 outlets sold more than 7 million tickets -- nearly three times as many as had been predicted.
What was needed next was the cathartic emotional bath that only a well-deserving, and well-publicized, big-time winner can provide. This was the costume that the multimillionaire winner refused to don.
To Britain's broadsheet newspapers, caught in a price war, and to the voracious tabloids, who had treated the lottery as if it were their own promotional scheme, the winner's insistence upon anonymity unleashed what the Daily Telegraph called "a media hunt of the kind usually reserved for errant royals and war criminals."
The Sun and the Daily Mirror offered bounties of 10,000 British pounds, about $15,600, to anyone who called in with the ID. One paper printed tips on what clues to look for among your neighbors ("watch for empty champagne bottles put out at night").
Four days after the Dec. 10 announcement, with camera crews crisscrossing the country to set up stakeouts in foyers and driveways on nothing more than hunches and overheard remarks, the Telegraph had narrowed the field: the winner was an Asian and a Muslim in his 40s who moved to Britain in the 1970s from East Africa; he worked in a factory in Blackburn, Lancashire; and he had been married for 14 years to a former machinist and had three children ages 6 to 13.
Some souls concluded unkindly that Camelot had been leaking information. Camelot denied doing any such thing and was backed up by newspaper editors, who said their phones were ringing off the hooks with tipsters.
An injunction was granted to prevent the news media from naming the winner. It was overturned by the high court, which ruled that the identity was "substantially in the public domain." The papers withdrew the bounty offers and said they would abide by an agreement to respect his right to privacy.
But a week after the drawing, three London dailies revealed the winner's name anyway. The earlier descriptions of the winner turned out to have been accurate in many particulars.
The winner, a 41-year-old man who worked in a factory in Blackburn, fled his home after making a public appeal to remain a private person. The news media reported that he had left with his wife and children for an indefinite vacation in his native India.