Many of us, if we won big in the lottery, would have one item at or near the top of our to-do list: never work again.

But when Camelot, operator of the UK National Lottery, polled 100 of its lottery millionaires, the results threw up a few surprises. Of those working before their win, a third chose to go on working, with half of them remaining full-time. (And of the two-thirds who have ceased the daily grind, half admitted to missing work.) With a million-plus jingling in your back pocket, why spurn the beach for the salt mine?

Elaine Thompson won £2.7m in December 1995, and quit her job as a payroll manager. But, having moved from Newcastle to Basingstoke in pursuit of the position he'd been working toward for 20 years, her husband Derek was not going to walk away from his sales directorship at Motorola. While Derek had 250 staff in his care, Elaine looked after their two children, but found she needed a sense of independent achievement. She volunteered to help patients at her local hospital, "but nurses would say, 'We don't need you. You're taking a paid job away.' I loved the work but after three months I couldn't take any more. The lottery win created that prejudice."

As for Derek, "two years after the win he was stuck on the M25 for eight-and-a-half hours and he had enough," Elaine recalls. "We'd always wanted to start our own business. Now was the time to do something with the money."

That something turned out to be By The Bay in Lyme Regis, a restaurant with an attached ice-cream parlor and fish-and-chip takeaway with 52 staff. Elaine: "If needs be, you'll find me doing the dishes or mopping the floors; there's not a job I ask my staff to do I haven't done myself.

"It's very stressful," she concedes, "and it never occurs to me I don't have to do this because of the money. I was brought up in the north-east as a hard worker. It's important that our children see us working; you can't tell them to work hard at their A-levels if all they see is you on holiday."

The call of duty is a powerful incentive to stay at work when your living does not depend on it.

Jenny Cooper won nearly £2.5m two years ago, and took precisely one day off her job as deputy head of Kemys Fawr Infants School in Pontypool "to pick up the check and do the press conference. But I wanted to get back to school; I felt guilty missing just one day. I've been a teacher for 27 years and I love it. I thought people might expect me to give up, but quite a few of the parents told me they wanted me to stay. And having the children around helped me to come to terms with the win and keep my feet on the ground. I don't know how long I'll carry on working for. But at the moment, I couldn't bear to leave the children."

Someone who was prepared to throw away years of vocational training when six lucky numbers changed her life was Rachel Bryan, from Swanwick in Derbyshire, who won £2.6m 18 months ago. She was in the final stages of qualifying as a solicitor, but she and her husband, then working in a food laboratory, decamped for a two-month holiday "to get our heads straight. If ever we won the lottery we thought all we'd do is enjoy ourselves, but we found we have to be doing something. It took 11 years for me to qualify but I decided I would rather go into property development than sit in an office all day. We'd always wanted to do this as a sideline but until the win didn't have the choice."

Shedding suit and lab-coat for paint-stained overalls challenged the couple to learn new skills. "I don't get stressed out; I enjoy it," says Bryan. "We're both perfectionists but we have the advantage of being able to say 'stuff it'. We have no financial worries and can now do work that fulfills us."