Following Hill’s funeral at Hollybrook Cemetery in Southampton, solicitors from his management firm entered his Teddington apartment to assess his assets. What they found astonished the British press. Behind his frugal habits lay an estate officially sworn for probate at £7,548,162 gross, with a net value of roughly £7.4 million after outstanding debts. In modern terms, that figure translates to roughly £18 million to £20 million when adjusted for inflation.
The issue was not the money; it was the paperwork. Hill was notoriously indecisive about formal commitments throughout his personal life, having proposed marriage twice in his youth only to back out both times. That same indecisiveness plagued his estate planning. Hill had written a formal will in 1961, leaving his modest assets to his father, mother, and brother and sister. By 1992, every named beneficiary in that document was dead.
Lawyers discovered a piece of paper in his apartment on which Hill had scribbled informal bequest amounts for his closest friends, including regular co-stars like Henry McGee, Bob Todd, and Sue Upton, alongside his longtime producer and several close companions who had run errands for him during his final illnesses. Crucially, the paper was unsigned, unwitnessed, and legally void. Because Hill had failed to sign a modern, valid will, the Crown declared him intestate.
