From beloved entertainer with royal honours, to convicted paedophile
From beloved entertainer with royal honours, to convicted paedophile living as a recluse before his death: Rolf Harris’s stunning fall from grace, a shamed TV star who was jailed in 2014 after using his celebrity status to sexually abuse children
- Rolf Harris dead at 93: Paedophile TV host ‘is killed by neck cancer’
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On the 11th day of his trial for sexual offences against children as young as eight, Rolf Harris took the witness stand and sang a chorus of his hit Jake The Peg.
Showing off to the jury some of the talents that had made him one of British television’s favourite family entertainers for 60 years, he also imitated a wobble board and a didgeridoo – two instruments he was famous for playing.
His demeanour during the month-long trial was so bizarre that the prosecuting barrister at one point reminded him it was ‘not a talent show’.
Harris, who died aged 93, also enjoyed a novelty pop career that included a No 1 hit with Two Little Boys in 1969 – a success that showcased just a fragment of his skills as a performer.
And he was a portrait artist who painted the Queen, a old-fashioned music hall act with his own primetime variety show, a crowd pleaser who stole the show at Glastonbury and the 2012 Jubilee concert, and a TV presenter who pioneered tearjerking vet-and-pet shows.
After being released from prison in May 2017, Harris (pictured walking his dog Bumble during lockdown) largely stayed out of public view
His demeanour during the month-long trial was so bizarre that the prosecuting barrister at one point reminded him it was ‘not a talent show’
The 93-year-old paedophile worked as a musician, singer-songwriter, composer, comedian, actor, painter and television personality
The Australian-born entertainer was a family favourite in the UK for decades, playing a range of unusual instruments such as the accordion
Years before his conviction in 2014, Harris was given the honour of painting a portrait of the late Queen to mark her 80th birthday
When he was arrested in 2013 over historic sex offences as part of Operation Yewtree, the public reaction was sheer disbelief. Rolf Harris was Britain’s best-loved clown, the nation’s soppy uncle.
But his public facade hid a toxic personality, with a perverted sexual nature that he indulged whenever he was able. Harris used his celebrity status to entice and then intimidate children, and inflicted appalling abuse on them, sometimes over years.
He was jailed for five years and nine months on 12 counts of indecent assault in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. One of the victims was a close friend of his daughter: he groomed her from the age of 13, plying her with presents and charming her parents.
Others included a girl of eight, groped when she asked him for an autograph, and a teenage waitress. After he was sent to prison for five years and nine months, numerous other allegations surfaced.
Rolf Harris arrives with his wife Alwen Hughes (second right) and daughter Bindi (L) at Southwark Crown Court in central London on June 30, 2014
Rolf Harris poses with the Officer of the Order of Australia, presented by the High Commissioner John Dauth, beside his wife Alwen at Australia House on November 7, 2012 in London
The conviction of abuse against the youngest girl was dismissed as unsafe, and a later trial, and subsequent retrial, on seven further charges of indecent assault both collapsed.
Two well-known female TV presenters revealed he had groped them, leaving them afraid to speak out against one of the most powerful figures in the industry.
Vanessa Feltz said Harris assaulted her, unseen by the camera, during a live TV interview, while singer Linda Nolan said she was just 15 when she was molested, during a tour of South Africa.
In court Harris vehemently contested all the charges, employing a mixture of denial, pleading and carefully worded confession. He refused to admit he had ever assaulted under-age girls, even as two of them testified in court that his sexual abuse had blighted their lives.
Harris was born in 1930, the son of a Cardiff man named Cromwell Harris who emigrated aged 15 with his younger brother Carl to Perth, Western Australia before World War I
He admitted an ‘affair’ with his daughter’s friend but insisted it was consensual. His wife of 56 years, Alwen, stood by him – as did his daughter, Bindi, who accompanied him to court each day holding his hand.
It was only once he was behind bars that the mask slipped away. He wrote a song, describing the women who accused him as moneygrabbers who aimed to ‘sink your claws right up to the hilt’ and ‘slimy little woodworms’ who ‘climb up out of the woodwork from 40 years ago’.
In one verse, he sneered, ‘Perhaps you think you’re pretty still, some perfumed sultry wench?’
He intended to record the song, he said, ‘the moment I get out’ and added: ‘Prison is no hardship really. I’m in the art room as an assistant to the tutor and basically I’m doing what I like.’
Disgraced paedophile Rolf Harris has died at the age of 93
Harris had been unable to talk or eat for months after being diagnosed with neck cancer and required around-the-clock care in his final days
After serving three years, he was released, and returned to the Berkshire home he shared with Alwen. The song was never recorded.
Throughout the trial, there were glimpses of his conflicted relationship with his wife. On one occasion, after a distressing bout of evidence, he approached Alwen and kissed her affectionately. But she was not present to give her support for the verdict or the sentencing.
The pair had married in 1958, when Harris was already a rising star in Australia. Alwen brought her pet poodle to the wedding as a bridesmaid, and Harris said he had to shoo the dog off their bridal bed.
Obsessed with his showbiz career, Harris left his wife on her own for days and weeks at a time. Within a year of their marriage, she was so lonely that she wrote in her diary that she was thinking of suicide.
Their daughter was born in 1964. Hours later, Harris left his wife’s bedside for a tour of America. ‘I should have just said “I can’t come, I can’t leave my wife,”’ he said, and then excused himself: ‘In those days, you thought a contract was engraved in stone with your blood.’
When Alwen flew out with the baby to join him, he went to meet them at the airport but failed to recognise her. He blamed her, saying she had dyed her hair.
Harris told these stories in a 2001 autobiography called Can You Tell What it Is Yet? (after his catch phrase) and for most of his 70s wove a thread of self-loathing into his interviews.
During a confessional with Piers Morgan on TV in 2011, he wept as he accused himself of neglecting his wife and daughter.
‘They didn’t know who I was. They said I was a total stranger,’ he sobbed.
As a cynical ploy to win public approval, it worked. Few people could believe that the laughing man who created brilliant cartoons with a few splashes of paint, and choked up when a poorly pet needed an operation on his hit TV show, Animal Hospital, might be a cruel and manipulative husband in his private life.
Alwen never revealed, for instance, that Harris not only had a mistress 20 years his junior, their housekeeper Andrea, but had installed her in an outhouse at the bottom of their Thameside garden in Bray.
Harris was born in 1930, the son of a Cardiff man named Cromwell Harris who emigrated aged 15 with his younger brother Carl to Perth, Western Australia before World War I. Still in their teens, both brothers enlisted to fight in France, where Carl was killed.
After the war, Cromwell wrote to his childhood sweetheart, Marjorie, asking her to come to Australia and marry him.
Marjorie was a strict Methodist and teetotaller who regarded any man who touched a drop as a drunkard. Harris never went against her wishes. ‘I don’t drink,’ he said, ‘it just gives me headaches. I wonder whether a lot of the headaches are me imagining that my mother is still watching me.’
One of his earliest memories was of his mother beating him, after he showed her a drawing of a naked man urinating. She was so prudish that, playing tennis, she would only hit the ball underarm, so as not to expose her armpit.
Years later, she slapped his face when he made a joke about pubic hair. ‘I was 30 years old when that happened,’ he said.
One of his Sixties songs was called I’ve Lost My Mummy, the story of a four-year-old who wanders off in a shop and starts bawling. The song was an ear-splitter, where the chorus was one long wail: ‘Aaarrrghhhh…’ve lost my mummy!’
In the last verse, the mother finds her child and gives him ‘a hefty whack’. The boy starts screaming, ‘Aaarrrghhhh…’ve found my mummy!’
All his life, on and off stage, Harris’s performances consisted largely of extraordinary noises. He groaned, grunted, huffed and bellowed, declaring that these were the traditional sounds of aboriginal Australian music.
Aged ten, he learned to yodel. ‘I never heard that child make a pleasant sound,’ complained his grandmother. Decades later, Alwen confided, ‘Rolf has always made strange noises.’
The strange noises brought his first big success, a No 1 hit in Australia with a nonsense song called Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport. He accompanied himself with the wobbleboard – a sheet of thin plywood that boomed as he flexed it.
In 1962 he re-recorded the song in Britain with George Martin, who introduced him to the Beatles the following year. Harris acted as their compere for a series of Christmas shows.
He almost came to blows with Lennon who mocked his introductions on stage: ‘I got very ratty. He mucked up my concentration. I came storming off stage, and they said, ‘Ooh, Rolfie’s lost his rag.’
The rift was mended, and the Beatles were Harris’s backing band for a live version of Kangaroo on one of their radio specials. By this time, he had his own BBC variety show, Hi There! It’s Rolf Harris. Becoming first Hey Presto! It’s Rolf and then simply The Rolf Harris Show, it ran for eight years.
Often featuring a high-kicking row of chorus dancers in sequined dresses, it was known behind the scenes as The Twinkling Crotch Show. Harris joked that he ‘tried not to watch – or be seen watching’ the girls as they changed backstage.
As the star, he did quickdraw paintings on vast paper canvases, and coined his catchphrase: ‘Can You Tell What it Is Yet? ’ as he added a couple of lines that turned apparently random squiggles into a recognisable picture.
He also performed songs including Jake The Peg, for which he wore a mackintosh and a false third limb: ‘I’m Jake the Peg, with the extra leg.’
His biggest hit, however, was with Two Little Boys, about childhood friends who met on the battlefield, when one was dying. He had no idea, he said decades later, how close the song was to his own family’s story, with the death of his uncle.
As a special guest on children’s programmes from Crackerjack! to Playschool, and the presenter of Bank Holiday cartoon specials, he was rarely off the TV for long throughout the 1970s.
When public awareness of child abuse began to spread in the 1980s, he made an educational video called Kids Can Say No!
Filmed on Hampstead Heath, it featured Harris warning primary school children about paedophiles and included a song: ‘My body’s nobody’s body but mine.’
A career dip in the late 1980s ended when he performed a version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven on Australian TV with a wobbleboard. A generation that remembered him as a cheesy children’s entertainer adopted him as a groovy grandad, and the song became an unlikely UK hit in 1993, reaching No 7.
He followed it with his take on Bohemian Rhapsody, playing the Glastonbury festival four times. In 2000 he recorded a wobbleboard version of The Divinyls song about masturbation, I Touch Myself. Like his friend Jimmy Savile, Harris sometimes liked to flash his sexual perversities, confident that his image as a children’s favourite would enable him to get away with it.
And he did. Not only was he now taken seriously as a musician, contributing didgeridoo and vocals to Kate Bush’s album Aerial, but he enjoyed a comeback with Animal Hospital.
Another show, Rolf On Art saw him learning the techniques of old masters such as Van Gogh. One survey named him as Britain’s best-known artist, an accolade given the royal stamp of approval when he was invited to paint the Queen’s portrait.
The result was a purple-haired monstrosity that looked more like Dame Edna than Her Majesty. It was tactfully returned to the artist, but not before it spent a year on display in the Queen’s Gallery in Buckingham Palace.
Harris boasted that the Queen was grinning in his picture because he had made her laugh and ‘revealed the real woman’. One story he told her during their two sittings was how in 1953, while waiting to see the royal coach drive up the Mall, he entertained the Coronation Day crowds by playing Waltzing Matilda on his accordion.
A year later, he was awarded the CBE. That honour was rescinded following his conviction – one of countless humiliations, including the cancelation of his BAFTA Fellowship and his removal from Australian pop’s hall of fame.
Harris was stripped of his two university doctorates. He was even digitally removed from a DVD released by an Australian children’s band, the Wiggles – a trivial and meaningless rejection yet one that emphasised how utterly the world despised him.
It was a pathetic fall from grace, and a punishment more complete than prison could ever be.
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