Shane MacGowan was with Victoria Mary Clarke for more than 40 years, tying the knot in 2018, but surprisingly, the Irish writer wasn’t the primary beneficiary in his will
The late Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan made a fortune thanks to his much-loved 1988 festive hit Fairytale of New York.
The singer, who had well-documented problems with drugs and alcohol, died from pneumonia following a battle with encephalitis on November 30 last year, at the age of 65.
Shane had been with his wife Victoria Mary Clarke for decades, marrying in a lavish fairy tale wedding in Copenhagen in 2018 after 32 years together. Their intimate nuptials featured guests including Hollywood A lister Johnny Depp.
Shane and Victoria lived in a home in Dublin’s swanky Ballsbridge suburb and he named his wife as an executor in his will. But while the frontman was said to have made £200,000 to £250,000 in royalties from his Christmas song each year according to Business Plus, Victoria did not inherit his whole estate, worth an estimated £4.3 million.
Shane’s will said that if Victoria died ‘predeceasing me/or dying simultaneously’, he wanted his sister Siobhan Hayes to inherit his estate ‘for her own absolute use and benefit’. His wife was left £710,000.
Speaking after her husband’s passing, Victoria said Shane ‘will always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love of my life and the most beautiful soul and beautiful angel and the sun and the moon and the start and end of everything that I hold dear’.
The couple didn’t have children, with Victoria telling the What A Woman Podcast: “It wasn’t part of our story. I don’t think children would have really survived.”
“It’s nothing that you could ever really prepare for, I don’t think,” the widow continued. “I’m sure there are people that have had a similar situation but until it’s happened to you, you don’t know how you’ll react. It was something that I would have been afraid of for a very long time, because very soon after me and Shane got together people started telling me that he didn’t have very long to live. That would have been in 1986.”
Shane was treated at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin after he was diagnosed with encephalitis, a condition which causes the brain to become inflamed or swollen. The singer had a long struggle with alcoholism, stating he had his first drink at just five years old.
Born in 1957, when the singer was just 17 he spent months in a psychiatric unit after his drug and alcohol use led to situational anxiety. He went onto binge drink, use LSD and develop an addiction to heroin, suffering from stomach ulcers and alcoholic hepatitis in the 1990s.
Shane’s health deteriorated further in his later years, falling and fracturing his pelvis when leaving a Dublin studio in 2015 and continuing to use a wheelchair until his death.
