This charming woman: why Morrissey and the Smiths loved Viv Nicholson

The earliest pictures show her in London in 1961, fresh off the train from West Yorkshire, high-kicking in a bowler hat and cane. Beside her – gleeful, bright-eyed, full of wonder – the newspapers printed her legendary quote, announcing her intention to: “Spend, spend, spend!”

Viv Nicholson, who died last weekend aged 79 after a long struggle with dementia, was often held up as a cautionary tale of how vast wealth can soon be frittered. Her image and that headline summed up the story of how she won the Littlewoods football pools with her husband Keith – £152,300, 18 shillings and eight pence – and ran through it all in just four years.

But for many music fans, Nicholson’s image meant something more. In 1984, long after the money had all gone, she appeared on the cover of the Smiths’ single Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now, standing in a deserted terraced street, grim-faced in a pale coat, her hair wildly backcombed.

The picture, and Nicholson’s associations, echoed the sentiments of the song – the misery of the working life, the valuable time wasted on those we dislike, the brief, happy haze of a drunken hour – but it was soon reinterpreted and swept up in tabloid scandal.

Keith and Viv Nicholson with their winning cheque in 1961. Photograph: Alamy

The Smiths had chosen as the single’s B-side Suffer Little Children, a song about the Moors murders. Upon its release several newspapers whipped themselves into a fury, suggesting that the song glorified the murderers, even positing that Nicholson had been cast as the record’s cover star because, with her bleach-blond hair and early 60s style, she bore some resemblance to Myra Hindley. Woolworths and Boots duly withdrew the single from sale.

It was not in fact Morrissey’s first tribute to Nicholson – on the Smiths’ debut album he had borrowed the line “Under the iron bridge we kissed, and although I ended up with sore lips …” from her autobiography for the lyrics of the song Still Ill. There was more to come: the following year, the Smiths featured Nicholson on a record sleeve again – this time the German release of Barbarism Begins at Home. The picture had appeared in her autobiography and was titled Viv at the Pithead. It showed her in a crocheted minidress and knee-high boots, standing beside Castleford pit with a suitcase at her feet, and was taken just before she relocated, briefly, to Malta.

The same image would be used on the Meat is Murder tour programme, and it was on that tour, in Blackpool, that Nicholson first met Morrissey. Several years ago she recounted in the Observer the oddity of that first meeting – how surreal it was to walk up to the venue, surrounded by huge promotional pictures of herself. “I was quite astounded,” she said

Viv Nicholson on the cover of Barbarism Begins at Home by the Smiths.

“I was asked to go up on stage,” she recalled. “There was this young man wearing a hearing aid and thick-rimmed spectacles with a tree hanging out of his backside, and I thought: ‘My goodness, who is that?’ It was Morrissey. Wow, I thought, here’s two weirdos together.” There are still pictures of them together, both short-haired and bespectacled, a strange distorted echo of one another.

In 1987, the Smiths cast Nicholson again for a reissue of The Headmaster Ritual, but this time Nicholson objected to the use of her image – a black and white picture showing her painting at an easel. The problem, apparently, was that as a Jehovah’s Witness, she took issue with the expletive in the line: “Belligerent ghouls/Run Manchester schools/Spineless bastards all …” Nicholson’s friendship with Morrissey promptly soured.

You can place Nicholson beside many other female stars of the Smiths’ record sleeves, among them Rita Tushingham in A Taste of Honey, Patricia Phoenix as Elsie Tanner, Yootha Joyce in a still from Catch Us if You Can, Billie Whitelaw in Charlie Bubbles, the screenwriter Shelagh Delaney, Avril Angers in The Family Way, Alexandra Bastedo, Sandie Shaw, Diana Dors in Yield to the Night, and see the thread that draws them together. They are strong women, working-class sirens, women whose lives have often been touched by tragedy or dragged down by feckless men. Many of them appear to have been trapped in some way, but they have dreamed of escape, and all of them, no matter their circumstance, have clung to their dignity.

Viv Nicholson on the cover of What She Said by the Smiths.

Dignity was not something that was often afforded to Nicholson. Even that early picture had the lick of mockery about it – here is the daft northern factory girl, about to blow her fortune. And ever since, the story of her life seems to have been told merely as a series of numbers and objects: the winning ticket found in Keith’s trouser pocket, the £7 a week she earned at a cake factory, the borrowed tights she wore to collect her winnings, how the first thing she bought was a watch, followed by furs, fancy hats and a fleet of cars in which she unfailingly knocked over the neighbours’ plant pots. There were the three children, the four husbands, the failed boutique and the job in a perfume shop, and above them all, the sense that all of these things added up to nought.

If there is a story that sums up the way the world has regarded Nicholson, it might perhaps be the tale of her failed stint as a stripper in a Manchester nightclub, paid £50 a night to undress to the tune of Big Spender. The job ended abruptly when she dropped her dress but failed to remove her bra and knickers. “I couldn’t do it,” she said. “I just wasn’t a stripper.”

What I like about this story is the fact that Nicholson refused to be reduced to nothing, and in its telling lies a gleam of the woman we see on those Smiths covers: jaw set, steady-gazed and dignified.