In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Newsnight’s editor Peter Rippon had been emailed extracts from the web memoir written by Keri. He had subsequently been told by Jones, who had been following chatter on the Duncroft pages of the Friends Reunited website, that there was more than one Duncroft girl involved in Jimmy Savile’s abuse. Also significant was the rumour the police had investigated Savile when he was alive. Rippon agreed that Jones should press ahead.

  On 3 November 2011, Rippon emailed MacKean to tell her that he wanted her to prioritise work on Meirion Jones’s story. Among her specialist areas were social affairs and domestic coverage, so she was an obvious candidate to work on the investigation.

  The first priority was to find Keri and get her to agree to an interview. It would form the central plank of Newsnight’s report, and Meirion Jones knew he was in a unique position to persuade her.

  ‘I thought I was probably the only person who could because of my knowledge of Duncroft,’ says Jones. ‘She was nervous and hostile at first but I told her how much I recognised from her account of Duncroft, which reassured her. I recognised the staff from her descriptions and I’d even seen Savile taking girls out on one occasion and I remembered Margaret [Jones, his aunt] telling us about trips to the BBC to see Savile.

  ‘She trusted me because I knew that the most unlikely elements of her story were true. The old manor house out of The Avengers, the celebrity parties, Jimmy Savile and the trips to the BBC would all have seemed improbable to most journalists but I knew that was so. The only further step I had to take was believe what she was saying about what Savile had done to her and the other girls.’ Jones reveals that although Keri had gradually opened up to him, she remained extremely sceptical that he would even interview her, let alone that it would be broadcast on the BBC.

  Jones was in America working on a separate report for the first half of November, so MacKean would be responsible for much of the initial leg work, supported by a Glasgow-based BBC trainee Hannah Livingston, who was on attachment to Newsnight at the time.

  They began by emailing the 60 or so ex-Duncroft girls active within the Friends Reunited online community, and Livingston was immediately contacted by one who said she had received a letter from Surrey Police asking her for information. As this exchange was taking place, Jimmy Savile’s nephew and niece were speaking to the press outside their late uncle’s flat in Leeds. They announced details of how he would be buried: holding his Marine Commando Green Beret and wearing his Help for Heroes bracelet and laid to rest at a 45-degree angle. ‘It was his last wish that he be buried like this,’ explained Amanda McKenna, ‘so he could see the sea.’ She added that his flat would be left untouched for the time being, even down to his last, unfinished cigar in the ashtray.

  A spokesman for the Catholic diocese of the city encouraged members of the public to go and pay their respects when the coffin went on display at the Queens Hotel, saying, ‘He is Our Jimmy, our main man in Leeds.’1 A bandwagon was also now rolling to erect a permanent tribute to Jimmy Savile in his hometown. The deputy leader of Leeds City Council, Judith Blake, was confident she was speaking for the local population when she said, ‘We want [any memorial] to be a tremendous celebration of his life and everything he contributed. He had that ability to reach people and connect with them.’2

  The connections Liz MacKean and Hannah Livingston were now making, however, produced a very different portrait to the one being admired by the nation at large. MacKean, in particular, had gone into the investigation needing to be convinced and felt strongly that Keri’s testimony was not enough on its own. Her opening pitch to the women who had been at Duncroft between the late 1960s and the late 1970s was that she was investigating a story about a celebrity visitor to the approved school. Jimmy Savile’s name wasn’t even mentioned.

  MacKean told me she believes the blanket coverage of Savile’s death and his impending funeral worked to her advantage. ‘Their motivation [for talking], and this includes [Keri], was they were so furious at the way [Savile] was being eulogised and admired. They knew the truth.

  ‘A lot of them had put it behind them. Some of them hadn’t told their families. With a couple of them, no one knew they had been at Duncroft, so it was a source of embarrassment. They were never in a position to raise their heads above the parapet. But they were being driven to distraction by what was being said about Savile, not least by the BBC, which made a huge song and dance about his funeral … People wanted to talk, they were willing to say, not on the record most of them, but they wanted it out there and they were willing to share what had happened to them on the basis of confidentiality.’

  Evidence began to point firmly to a police investigation into Jimmy Savile taking place not long before his death. Livingston heard various accounts of a letter from Surrey Police suggesting that no charges were pressed due to his age. Keri had made no mention of this in her online memoir, and professed no knowledge of the police looking into Savile, and therefore it represented an intriguing new strand to the story. Meirion Jones felt that Mark Williams-Thomas, as a former Surrey Police officer, might be able to help them get to the truth of what the police’s involvement had been, and emailed him stating that he was ‘very keen’ for him to be involved in the story as a consultant and expert.3

  MacKean and Livingston were in constant touch via telephone and email, exchanging information, impressions and questions for each other. Of the sixty women they contacted, ten had come back with useful information, of whom five claimed to have been sexually abused by Jimmy Savile during their time at Duncroft. One also reported that her sister had been abused during a visit to Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

  A pattern started to emerge, and with it MacKean’s doubts quickly evaporated. ‘There were certain things that made me believe they’re telling the truth,’ she says. ‘It was the fact there was a lot of commonality in the stories they told but their stories weren’t identical … Some of them said immediately, “It didn’t happen to me but we knew it happened to other girls. We basically knew that when Savile came some of them would cluster round him because they knew they would get things from him.”’ MacKean says girls such as these knew there might be a price for any transaction with their celebrity visitor, and some were willing to pay it.

  ‘Their accounts collectively seemed to tell me a lot about the institution they were in,’ she continues. ‘And explain a lot about why Savile targeted them, how he insinuated his way in and how, even by the standards of the time, he had what was most unusual access. Meirion, who was a bystander at the time, thought it was odd; his parents thought it was odd; but his aunt was bamboozled and charmed. That’s how he managed it.’

  Some of the women were terrified about being exposed. As was the case with many who had been at Duncroft, the lack of trust in authority figures represented a serious issue for the Newsnight investigators. ‘I had to persuade them that I wouldn’t reveal their names or give away any identifying features,’ explains MacKean.

  ‘Their stories fitted the trend. We were able to build up a pattern of Savile’s offending behaviour,’ she says. ‘At one end, the most extreme end, it was lifts in his car and blowjobs. And at the other end was this constant sticking his tongue down [their] throats, shoving his hands up skirts, pushing people up against the wall and groping them. He was very open and did it in front of the other girls. None of the abuse that was described to us fell outside those goalposts, if you like.

  ‘I believed it and I believed them,’ she continues. ‘I respected and understood their reasons for not wanting to be seen on camera, not wanting their names out there, but also their willingness and their desire that their quotes would be used to help.’

  Three of the women Liz MacKean, Meirion Jones and Hannah Livingston spoke to talked about abuse taking place on BBC premises. They described the opportunity to get out of Duncroft and be a part of one of his TV programmes as Savile’s ‘ultimate calling card’.

  *

  On 9 November, inside St Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds, P
rofessor Alistair Hall was revealing to those packed inside and out that a new hospital institute was to be created using a bequest from Jimmy Savile’s will. He said the Savile Institute in the city would help those with cardiovascular disease and pioneer research into heart disease.

  On the same day, a meeting took place in the Newsnight offices attended by Liz MacKean, Peter Rippon and Liz Gibbons, one of the programme’s deputy editors. At this meeting, Gibbons voiced her objection to the story ‘on grounds of taste’ and because of how recently Savile had died.4 In a subsequent email to a friend, she wrote, ‘Personally I wouldn’t have gone near it in the first place and I was very supportive of the decision to drop it, for a host of reasons.’ MacKean says she was able to talk her around, in light of the new line of inquiry on a possible police investigation, and because there was ‘a clear public interest’5 in exposing the fact that Jimmy Savile was a very different man to the one whose life was being celebrated in the media. She also says that both Gibbons and Rippon expressed concerns about the credibility of the witnesses.

  ‘It is always, as everyone knows, a real issue with these old cases,’ MacKean told the Pollard inquiry6, the independent review commissioned by the BBC into the management of the Newsnight investigation into the allegations of sexual abuse of children by Jimmy Savile. ‘Claims are generally made by people who don’t expect to be believed and tend not to be. Certainly in the case of these women … [they] had a chequered history, some of them very much so. But despite what Peter said [in a subsequent email], they didn’t all have criminal records. That’s why in my mind, from the get-go it was very important to talk to a lot of people.’

  In the days that followed, MacKean and Livingston continued to gather more evidence and pursue the twin strands of whether there had been a police investigation and whether the police had sent a letter saying no further action would be taken against Jimmy Savile because of his age. On the latter, both Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean were in firm agreement that proof of the letter’s existence was not essential to the story making it to air.

  News of the investigation was now spreading within the BBC. On 11 November, a day after Jimmy Savile was lowered into his grave, a member of the BBC’s ‘Impact Team’ emailed a colleague of Stephen Mitchell, the deputy head of news and Peter Rippon’s line manager, to say that he had heard about Newsnight’s ‘Jimmy Savile expose’.7 The Impact Team ensures big BBC news stories are covered across the network, and it was suggested the report might need to be on the Managed Risk Programme List (MRPL), a management tool that alerts senior figures within the organisation to upcoming controversial or potentially risky programmes. An email was sent back that same day confirming that the story was on Newsnight’s MRPL.8

  That evening, a tribute programme to Jimmy Savile aired on BBC Television. As It Happened opened with Chris Evans’s voiceover and footage of Jimmy Savile standing among gyrating teenagers in the Top of the Pops studios. ‘He was a pop pioneer …’ boomed Evans, ‘and a multi-million pound charity fund-raiser … For 60 years Jimmy Savile has been part of our lives, a great British eccentric.’ A host of British celebrities appeared as talking heads, offering up their views on his peculiar appeal. Nicky Campbell, who succeeded Savile on Radio 1, donated his £250 fee to the National Association of People Abused in Childhood when he found out about Savile’s offending.

  Keri’s teenage memories of Jimmy Savile were markedly different from the madcap capers depicted in the first of the BBC’s tributes. Three days later, on 14 November, Meirion Jones, Liz MacKean, Hannah Livingston and a cameraman travelled to Oswestry to interview Keri in her home. Liz MacKean conducted the interview and says that she was in no doubt that Keri was telling the truth. ‘We just knew,’ she says. ‘She wasn’t pretending to know more than she did. She wasn’t pretending that her memory was perfect. She was a woman telling the truth.’

  Keri was about to have major surgery for bowel cancer. She was doubtful about surviving the ordeal, which meant she was even more determined her story should be told. ‘She was weary, she was bloody cynical,’ recalls MacKean, ‘but by then I’d had so many conversations with people who’d been at this school, she fitted the type.’

  In the interview, Keri spoke at length about Jimmy Savile’s visits to Duncroft, and how the girls universally considered him to be ‘a creep’. She says they were not frightened of him as such, but recognised they could get things from him: cigarettes, perfume, records, better food on the days he visited, even trips away from Duncroft to see his television shows being recorded at Television Centre.

  ‘That was one of my striking impressions, and it really helped me get the bit between my teeth,’ says MacKean. ‘It is clear [the girls] were compromised and as such that was how he reeled them in and why it was so difficult for them ever to pipe up. A lot of them were difficult teenagers; that’s why they were there. Their parents couldn’t handle them, they had been in trouble with the police or mentally they were disturbed. But they were all highly intelligent and therefore I think they felt they were in control. Savile allowed them to feel in control and that is the subtlety of his grooming process as it applied to them … He hooked them so that they felt complicit, and they had to pay the price. They [felt they] deserved what came to them … He recruited them to be the agents of the abuse.’

  MacKean reveals that Keri spoke frankly about not feeling any sense of shame at the time about what she had to do to secure such treats from Savile. A few of the ex-Duncroft girls told MacKean that as they got older and had children themselves, their view of what went on had changed. ‘That is when they felt the anger,’ she confirms, ‘much more anger towards Jimmy Savile than what they appeared to feel at the time because of this subtle process that went on.’

  If Savile was regarded as a lecherous old man, albeit one who bestowed occasional benefits, Keri had very different recollections of Gary Glitter, who she met during a visit to the BBC Television Centre to watch an episode of Clunk Click being recorded in early 1974. A forerunner to Jim’ll Fix It, the show featured Jimmy Savile talking to a variety of studio guests, with filmed segments in between. Children from a number of institutions Jimmy Savile was involved with sat on beanbags on the set, including, on occasion, girls from Duncroft.

  Keri told MacKean that Glitter made them feel uncomfortable, and none of them wanted to be left alone in a room with him.

  In her evidence to the Pollard inquiry, MacKean also revealed that she had been told the singer had offered the girls ‘a safe house’9 if they were ever in trouble with the police or had run away from Duncroft. ‘They entirely mistrusted his motives,’ she said. They felt there was ‘something dangerous about him’.

  The filmed interview with Keri was a turning point in the Newsnight investigation. ‘By the end of it we were all convinced that [Keri] was genuine, that what she was saying was overwhelmingly true,’ says Meirion Jones. ‘As I left she told me that she didn’t believe the BBC would broadcast it – they’d cover it up. I assured her that once we found some corroboration – which we did with the Clunk Click footage and the other girls’ accounts – we would run with the story. There would be no cover-up.’

  On the drive back to London that evening, Jones, MacKean and Livingston were in buoyant mood. It was then that they heard the news that the BBC were planning to broadcast a Christmas Special of Jim’ll Fix It, to be presented by Shane Ritchie.

  ‘We were in the car, hearing it on the radio and almost giggling,’ recalls MacKean. ‘We were going, “Oh my God, they’re going to have to cancel [it]. That’s awkward; we’re making it awkward for the BBC.” It was perfectly obvious what had to be done,’ she says. ‘To us, it was always one or the other. And then it seemed that the whole weight was against us and for the tributes.’

  8. THE POWER OF ODDNESS

  In late October 1944, Jimmy Savile turned 18 and received his call-up papers. In his autobiography, he wrote about an interval in the war when for him ‘the question was, what to join’.1 He said
he couldn’t join the Royal Navy like his brothers because he couldn’t swim; he was unsuited to the army because he was too weak; and his hopes of joining the RAF were thwarted by failing a sight test. Instead, Ernest Bevin, the minister of labour and national service in Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition government, made the choice for him: the last digit on his national service papers corresponded with the number drawn out in the fortnightly ballot and, like one in 10 men aged between 18 and 25, he was ordered to report to the coalmines.

  During his time as a conscript miner, or ‘Bevin Boy’, Savile claimed to have realised that opportunities existed in being different, or as he liked to put it, he recognised ‘the power of oddness’. And like the hardships he endured as a ‘Not again child’ during the depression in Leeds, his experiences in the deep mines of the Yorkshire coalfields can only have contributed to the man he became. Unfortunately, the details remain equally elusive.

  As in other areas of his life, he steadfastly refused to allow a chronology to be established for this phase in his development. His standard response whenever I asked for clarification on the specifics of date or place was, ‘How the fuck should I know? 1642.’ It was a tactic he employed often: obfuscation – occasionally coupled with menace – that erected a dead end for channels of enquiry he didn’t much care for.

  Up until this point, the war hadn’t caused Jimmy Savile too much additional discomfort, and though he always protested that he loved mining and would have remained at the pit had he not been injured, the experience can only have been the most brutal introduction to the realities of physical labour. He preferred to describe the period as one in which he learned about himself and, ironically for one who was confined to dark, sweaty tunnels a mile underground, about the world beyond his native Yorkshire.