**Alwen Hughes, Widow of Rolf Harris, Leaves Estate Worth £4 Million in Will**
Alwen Hughes, the widow of disgraced entertainer Rolf Harris, has left nearly £4 million in her will, official documents have revealed. Hughes, a respected Welsh sculptor and jeweller, passed away at the age of 92 in August 2024, just over a year after her husband’s death. Details of her estate have come to light this week, offering insight into her final wishes and the distribution of her significant assets.
Hughes, who lived in Maidenhead, Berkshire, had her estate valued at £3,975,950. After deductions, this figure stood at a net value of £3,840,532. Responsibility for the administration of her estate was assigned to Ian John Sydenham, representing the Manchester-based law firm DWF. Notably, her will was drafted back in July 2018, prior to Rolf Harris’ death, with initial provisions for him included in the document. After Harris’s passing, the primary beneficiary became their only daughter, Ava Reeves.
Alwen Hughes had a distinguished career in the arts, with her work as both a sculptor and a jeweller widely recognised and admired in Wales and beyond. She married Rolf Harris in 1958, and despite his conviction for sexual offences, remained with him until his death in May 2023. Harris died at the age of 93 from neck cancer and complications related to old age, marking the end of a career tainted by criminal convictions.
Hughes’s later years were increasingly impacted by ill health. She suffered from vascular dementia and ultimately died following a stroke in August last year. The Windsor and Maidenhead Register Office confirmed that her death took place in the borough and was properly registered. Her passing brought to a close another chapter in a family history that has, in recent years, been marked by public scandal and personal difficulty.
Rolf Harris was once one of the UK’s most recognisable entertainers, lauded for his television work and musical talents for decades. However, his reputation was destroyed when, in 2014 at age 84, he was convicted on twelve counts of indecent assault. The cases, which involved victims as young as seven or eight, led to a sentence of five years and nine months in prison. While Harris was released on licence in 2017 and cleared of four additional charges in the same year, one of his original twelve convictions was eventually quashed after an appeal.
Despite these serious criminal allegations and the subsequent conviction, news reports state that Alwen Hughes continued to stand by her husband. With both gone, attention within the family appears to have shifted towards their only daughter, Ava Reeves. Formerly known as Bindi Harris, Ava reportedly changed her name in an effort to distance herself from the legacy of her notorious father and to forge her own path within the art world.
Sources close to the family have indicated that the name change was also motivated by professional reasons, helping Ava to be taken seriously within creative circles. The story surrounding Harris’s downfall and Hughes’ death serves as a stark reminder of how public scandal can cast a long shadow over personal and family lives—often impacting those closest to the individuals involved most directly.
Hughes’s will is understood to feature a number of more distant relatives as secondary beneficiaries, but the primary recipient remains her daughter. Such arrangements demonstrate the complexity often involved in administering estates following high-profile deaths, particularly when the wider family has faced such challenging public scrutiny.
While the memory of Rolf Harris’s crimes continues to dominate headlines, Alwen Hughes’s own life and legacy as an artist have not entirely faded from public view. Her impressive estate points to both her personal talents and financial acumen. For Ava Reeves, inheriting this legacy marks both a significant responsibility and an opportunity, potentially providing the means for new beginnings away from the infamy that has surrounded her family’s name in recent years.