Punters who for the past 55 years have been trying their luck in the national lottery will hold their breath just in case Lady Luck smiles on them in the last edition of this game of chance next Sunday.

The first edition of the National Lottery, known popularly as 'il-kbira', was drawn on December 26, 1948.

The first prize of Lm10,000 would not seem much by today's standards, but it was a fortune then, even when one compares it with the first prize for the last edition, which is going to be Lm150,000.

The lottery became the victim of another game's success - sales of national lottery tickets nosedived after the introduction of the Super Five weekly lottery in 1990 and for the past several years, the lottery has been running at a loss.

Finance Minister John Dalli told parliament last week that the sale of National Lottery tickets dropped to 64,816 in April this year, from 95,754 in February, 2001.

In the lottery's heyday, the highest number of tickets sold, reached only twice, was close to 450,000.

Another factor leading to the lottery's demise was that at its most popular, over 50 per cent of punters were nationals of other countries, residing abroad.

Overseas sales in Nigeria and Ghana, among other countries, dried out when these countries organised their own lottery, in the case of Nigeria and Ghana with the help of Malta's own John Brennan, director of Public Lotto.

Moreover, other countries made it illegal for their citizens to take part in overseas lotteries, Carmelo Scicluna, acting director of the department of lotto explained in an interview.

A number of Maltese agents used to make good money selling tickets overseas.

"There were times when we used to get bags full of returned mail containing tickets from the UK post office. The lotto department used to pay for the postage for the mailing of tickets to foreign punters," Mr Scicluna said.

The first prize in the first edition was won by a Karmenu Mifsud of Qala.

Each ticket then cost 10 shillings, which would be today's 50 cents, but it was quite a substantial sum then. To get an idea of the value of 10 shillings, the monthly salary of a young civil servant in 1962 was about £21.

Originally, the lottery used to be held in Queen's Square in Valletta, by the National Library, and alternately on the Main Guard, opposite the Grand Master's Palace in Republic Street.

People used to crowd the venue where the lottery was drawn, owing maybe to the fact that there was not much to occupy their imagination so soon after the war and secondly because the prize money meant the turning of a new leaf in the life of the lucky winner.

The first director of lotto was John Mifsud, who was appointed in 1947 and retired in 1958. The minister of finance was Arthur Colombo - he played a lot with money, and for instance, also introduced income tax in Malta. No one will thank him for it.

Mr Scicluna said the lottery was most popular when people could write a nom de plume on the stub of the ticket. It was the nom de plume that was announced with the number of the winning ticket.

The nom de plume system and the issue of a receipt for each ticket sold was discontinued after 1981.

"The numbering on tickets was used merely to know how many tickets were printed.

"The department had to carry out a lot of laborious tasks to ensure that no one defrauded the department or the public in any way.

"The department used to issue a receipt for every ticket sold to ensure that no seller kept for himself the money collected from the sale of tickets."

Ticket sellers got as many tickets as they wanted from the lotto department and paid in the money for the tickets they sold, throwing away the unsold tickets.

In the early days, about 200 full-timers and another 200 part-timers used to be employed by the department of public lotto to run the national lottery.

The tickets were piled in packs of 100 each.

Each ticket had to be folded by hand and inserted into a metal capsule which consisted of two halves that were screwed on. Each capsule was sealed with tape to make doubly sure the two halves of the capsules did not come apart.

The diameter of each capsule was slightly smaller than a 25 cents piece.

The capsules were then grouped in wooden trays, each tray holding 100 capsules, and these trays in turn were placed in wooden chests to be transported to Valletta for the draw.

The earlier tickets used to contain a warning to consumers not to buy tickets from persons whom they were not acquainted with, and to check for the watermark on the tickets.

That laborious process could not be kept up, mainly because of the high cost of human resources and secondly, because one could not stick to such an archaic system and not move on to innovative systems that were more foolproof and faster.

Instead of the large drum that was placed at St James' Ditch just outside Valletta, which was made by Baileys at the Malta Drydocks in the mid-1950s, the department had a series of urns which used to be set up on a band stand.

A number of capsules were drawn from each urn by a lad from a church home for boys.

These capsules were in turn transferred by means of metal funnels into the 'main' urn from which the winning ticket was then drawn.

The scrapping of the dame of Maltese lotteries will fall on the spring festival of Mnarja.

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