In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Savile told me he badgered the manager into letting him try out his record sessions idea. Although not hugely successful, they did manage to stimulate interest and business at a struggling provincial dancehall. Neither of which went unnoticed. Two hundred miles away, Mecca Ltd joint chairman Carl Heimann was made aware of the livewire young assistant manager working at one of his joints in the north.

  As a result, in the summer of 1955, Jimmy Savile was offered a promotion – and a major change of scene. Mecca Ltd asked him to take over the Ilford Palais-de-Danse, a struggling concern at the furthest reaches of London’s East End.

  His tenure as a rookie manager got off to a slow start. Business was sluggish, and Savile said that he was called into the company’s Dean Street offices for a meeting with Heimann, to do, as he described it, ‘some explaining’.4

  Heimann was a Dane who had moved to England at the age of 16, beginning his career at a waiter before becoming a catering manager with Ye Mecca Cafés. His chief skill had been in recognising the potential for public dancing during the 1920s and then persuading the company to invest in a string of ballrooms. By 1934, Heimann was general manager of Mecca Dancing, an offshoot from the café company. A year later, he joined forces with Alan Fairley, a Scot with interests in the leisure industry north of the border, to form the Mecca Agency, which by the end of the decade controlled virtually all aspects of the company’s dancehall business. In 1946, Heimann and Fairley became joint chairmen of the new Mecca Ltd, and under their stewardship, Mecca’s dancehalls became not only a place to foxtrot, waltz and tango, but social glue for communities across Britain.

  Eric Morley was variously Mecca’s publicity director, general manager of its dancing division and a director. During his long service with the company, he devised Come Dancing for the BBC and organised the first Miss World contest as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations. He witnessed first-hand what an astute judge Heimann was. ‘He could “read” a dance floor as could no other man in the country,’ said Morley. ‘He could tell within sixteen bars whether a dance orchestra was any good and he was right, with uncanny accuracy.’5

  Everything within the Mecca empire flowed downwards from Heimann and Fairley. The company’s ballrooms were all decorated in the same way. From the teacups and the light bulbs to the staff uniforms and dance bands that played, everything was organised and supplied centrally. The programme for the week was dominated by old-fashioned ballroom dancing, with two nights usually set aside for private hire functions that ranged from fund-raising whist drives of the type that Agnes and Vince Savile organised, to works social nights or local beauty pageants. Sunday was the only day off.

  On the way to the Mecca offices in Soho, Jimmy Savile mulled over new ideas for drumming up business. He wanted to suggest a record dance to Heimann but was wary due to the low-key response they had met with in Leeds. He recalled ‘the big man’ sitting at his impressive desk with his chin in his hands and saying something quite out of the blue: ‘What about a record session, Savile? All night for a shilling and we’ll call it “Off the Record”.’ The young manager was stunned. ‘The secret of pop success is starting the right craze at the right time,’ he later said, ‘and the genius of this principle is undoubtedly Carl Heimann.’6

  In his own words, Jimmy Savile was about to become ‘the man’. After the years of lugging his rudimentary contraptions around small venues in Yorkshire, he now had a ballroom and, most importantly, the blessing of a dancehall guru. On a more practical level, he was given access to Westrex, the company that supplied Mecca with the microphones for its dancehalls.

  Westrex also made turntables, so Savile called up and placed an order. A few days later, he said he walked into the Palais to find an electrician fitting a record deck in the box from which the lighting was operated. He told the man that he wanted two turntables, and for them to be installed on the stage, one next to the other. It was, he claimed, the first twin turntable system in history.

  Posters were put up advertising an ‘Off the Record’ disc dance night for the following week, with revellers invited to bring their own 78s for the simple reason the dancehall manager didn’t have any of his own. Savile also decided to deviate from Heimann’s plan in one significant detail: admission would be free.

  ‘The week before we’d had 24 people in, long leg dancing,’ he claimed. ‘But at about ten to eight we had 600 people turn up. It was like locusts. The bloody place was heaving. I was ankle deep in records on the stage. Didn’t know what the bloody hell they were. If anything worked I played it three times. From that day on I was the guvnor.’7

  The triumph of this first record session in Ilford put Jimmy Savile on the map with Mecca Ltd. But being a fast-talking Yorkshireman with ‘more front than Blackpool’, as he put it, meant that he needed backup, especially in an alien city like London. Partly for self-preservation and partly for what it would do for his image, he took to walking around his dancehall flanked by a team of large and mean-looking bouncers.

  It earned him a reputation as someone not to be messed with, even if he rarely if ever got his hands dirty. ‘One of our local lads was described to me in terms that would have got him a place in a mafia family,’ he wrote years later. ‘In the two years I enjoyed the area’s hospitality he never struck a blow or pulled a job but still enjoyed his Joe Bananas reputation to the day I left.’8

  Another plausible explanation for wanting protection is the attention he was by now attracting among the local teenagers who flocked to his Monday record nights, and the consternation this must have caused among some of their parents. As Kathy Kirby, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most successful singers in the Sixties, revealed, even back then, Jimmy Savile liked to get what he wanted.

  Kirby was just 16 when she began attending the Palais with her younger sister, Patricia. She said that Jimmy Savile, who was 28 at the time, pursued them both from the beginning, and that they both turned him down.

  In the summer of 1956, Kathy was still a virgin when she got up on stage at the Palais to perform a number with the famous bandleader Bert Ambrose. Ambrose was sufficiently impressed to invite her on tour with him. Kirby fell hard for the renowned taskmaster and ladies’ man, who was forty years her senior, but Ambrose rejected her advances, telling her she needed to ‘get some experience’.9

  On returning to the Ilford Palais for a singing engagement, Kathy Kirby decided to do just that. So, when Jimmy Savile came into her dressing room and began making his customary overtures, she locked the door behind him. According to her biographer, she said ‘Savile hemmed her in and then it happened.’10

  Seven years later, in 1963, Jimmy Savile recalled Kathy Kirby in his weekly newspaper column on pop music. He wrote, ‘She has a knockout family which includes a darling sister.’11

  In 1978, Savile gave a series of interviews that were collated in the book, God’ll Fix It. ‘In my early years I can tell you I did a lot of things that need a bit of forgiveness,’ he said. ‘I was in a business that was fraught with temptations. Temptations of the flesh are all about. So in my early days, I was a great “abuser” of things, and bodies, and people.’12

  He had only just begun.

  17. SCUMBAGS AND SLAGS

  The Plaza was located on the first floor of a squat, three-storey building next door to the Odeon on Oxford Street, the hub of Manchester’s burgeoning nightlife. Like many venues for dancing in the late 1950s, it was not licensed to sell alcohol. Beyond the cash booth, a café area selling cakes displayed on glass shelves, as well as tea, coffee and glasses of milk, led into a cavernous, low ceilinged arena with a small stage with red velvet curtains at one end. Members of the house trio would soon discover that their time on this stage would be limited, for the focal point was to shift decisively to the sprung wooden dance floor in the centre of the room.

  Across the country, teenagers were being swept up in the fast-running tide of rock and roll flowing out of America. In Manchester, about the only way young
people could hear this new music was by either hanging out in the coffee bars with jukeboxes that were springing up across the city, or by climbing the flight of stairs from the Plaza’s entrance before passing its manager, an odd-looking figure with pale skin, a long nose and dark hair Brylcreamed tight to his head. He was a man who seemed to possess an intuitive understanding of what it was they wanted, and the impression he made on them with his tight-fitting black trousers, black suede shoes and see-through shirt, was only enhanced by the suited heavies he had positioned at each elbow.

  Securing a move to Manchester, Jimmy Savile told me, was the next best thing to a return to his beloved Yorkshire. He’d been homesick in London’s East End and pleaded with his bosses at Mecca to be transferred back to the north.

  On Tuesday evenings, he began running a talent contest. ‘It was a golden age because everyone wanted to express themselves,’ he explained. ‘At three o’clock in the afternoon you could buy an acoustic guitar for £3 and by eight o’clock at night you could be on stage at the Plaza.’

  Lonnie Donegan’s 1956 hit ‘Rock Island Line’ had been responsible for an explosion in skiffle music. Scores of local outfits cut their teeth on cheap acoustic guitars, snare drums and a bass fashioned from old tea chests. ‘You could win the talent contest and become a superstar in the locality,’ Savile declared. ‘There was one duo that came in and I had to tell them that they could only enter once a month, because they would have won every week. They were called The Four-Tones and went on to become The Hollies.’

  John Mepham was a teenage member of The Four-Tones and recalls wistfully the impact the new sound made. ‘Up until then, there was no such thing as a teenager,’ he says. ‘You were just kids and then adults. You wore the same clothes as your father and the girls wore the same clothes as your mother. All of a sudden with skiffle, big blokes had open-necked shirts and didn’t wear ties or suits. Then they started wearing jeans, and that was it; every lad in this country got a guitar for their 16th or 17th birthday. We were very successful. We were only together 18 months, but everywhere we went there were girls screaming – like you see on the old films.’

  These talent nights became hugely popular, and before long the Plaza was pulling in the same numbers on a Tuesday as it did on a Saturday, traditionally the busiest night of the week. ‘It was amazing,’ Savile said. ‘Everything I touched turned to gold.’

  One teenage entrant to the Plaza’s weekly contest recalled winning and being presented with a five-pound note as his prize. ‘It blew my mind,’ he said. ‘At the end people clapped and went wild. It wasn’t about the fiver. It was … people liking me for doing something. And this guy, Jimmy Savile, was great.’

  The talent nights were just a starter. Savile’s subsequent decision to open the dancehall on weekday lunch-times not only transformed the fortunes of a failing venue that had previously been associated with trouble, it also radically changed the lives of young people in the city. Under his stewardship, the Plaza quickly became a magnet for teenagers who were soon to be found pouring out of local offices, shops and schools to dance, chat and flirt for an hour or two.

  Sixth-formers arrived in their uniforms, changed in the toilets and stashed their tunics or blazers in the cloakroom. Office secretaries and factory workers headed down in their lunch breaks with their sandwiches wrapped in brown paper. Even the city’s famed footballers caught the bus into town to stand around and gawp at the spectacle unfolding on the dance floor.

  The success of these lunchtime sessions was built on the manager’s novel record-only slots in the breaks between old-style ballroom dancing numbers performed by the house band. Using the twin turntable set-up he’d pioneered in Ilford, Jimmy Savile seamlessly blended slower swing records such as ‘Cinnamon Sinner’ by Tiddy Gibbs and The Beat Boys, ‘Fire Down Below’ by Peggy Lee, and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ by Vic Damone and The Diamonds with newer, uptempo discs coming out of the US from the likes of Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Bobby Darin and Little Richard.

  He devised a winning formula, part of which involved taking to the microphone at regular intervals to announce ‘smooch time’: ‘Now then,’ he’d bark, ‘it’s time for belly dancing. So put your belly against someone of the opposite sex.’ The tempo of the music suddenly dropped, the dance floor was plunged into darkness and a single arc light on the ceiling was directed at a giant spinning glitter ball sending a cascade of white stars onto everything and everyone below.

  ‘He was creating something that had never happened before,’ said one regular. ‘He was giving teenagers the chance to get together. [Smooch time] was separate from the jiving. Teenagers had the chance to hug each other and fall in love … It was a romantic, fantastic time: sandwich, cup of tea in the bar and a dance. It was the start of Jimmy Savile in Manchester.’

  As the cash register kept ringing so the buzz around the Plaza continued to build. Word quickly got around too about the venue’s outrageous new manager who took pride in the fact local headmasters complained bitterly about their pupils returning late to school. Businesses in the area weren’t too impressed either: ‘Bosses used to write to me telling me I was knackering them,’ Savile boasted to me. ‘But my bosses couldn’t argue because of the money we were taking and because I was a law unto myself.’

  He began to dress more flamboyantly, too. In the breast pocket of his favourite see-through shirt he kept what looked like a thick roll of banknotes. In fact, the bankroll was a couple of twenties wrapped around a tight ball of newspaper. When asked why he did this, Savile replied, ‘Because if anyone nicks it they only get the two twenty-pound notes.’

  The larger-than-life, oddball persona that Jimmy Savile became famous for was fast taking shape. He invested in a Rolls-Royce – or, more accurately, an old Bentley saloon to which he had welded a Rolls-Royce radiator grill and hubcaps bought from a scrap yard. This hybrid status symbol was parked outside the Plaza, much to the consternation of his bosses at Mecca, who felt sure he must be on the fiddle.

  Bruce Mitchell, a local musician at the time, remembered the rumours about Savile’s spell at the Plaza. As he told Dave Haslam, author of the excellent book Manchester, England, ‘the management couldn’t work out why this twenty pound a week club manager was driving about in a white Rolls Royce. It’s pretty certain that he was playing piano with the till to an outrageous degree … they [Mecca] suspected him, but they didn’t want to lose him.’1

  According to a man who worked at the Plaza for a short time, the fake rolls – both kinds – had the desired effect because girls were soon queuing up for ‘a chat with Jim’. In the manager’s walnut-clad office at the back of the dancehall was a large couch that Savile insisted was for resting on but saw frequent action in more energetic pursuits. ‘He always used to say, “I’m going to interview this young lady for a job.” That’s all he’d say. I don’t know what went on behind those doors but I do know he was a man.’

  Savile basked in the kudos that came with the success of the Plaza. Suddenly, he was known around town, not least among the seemingly inexhaustible supply of Manchester’s teenage girls.

  ‘In them days it was hard to say who was a paedophile,’ says Jimmy Donnelly, who was 16 when he first went to the Plaza. ‘We didn’t have the word paedophile in them days. We had the word weirdo, and [Savile] was a weirdo. He always had the bobby sox girls, the young girls, in his cars. He’d always pull up with the girls in his car, and going home he’d always have the girls in his car.’

  As important to Savile as the steady stream of girls coming through his doors were the piles of cash he now had access to. He spent some on clothes and on taking his ‘Mama’ out for lunches with her friends, but the secret to maintaining his newly acquired state of prosperity was to remain as frugal as he’d been when he’d worked as a miner or lived on an abandoned vessel on a Leeds canal while still adopting the trappings of a millionaire. For all the flash clothes and cars, Savile ate at cheap cafés frequented by taxi drivers, took
cheap lodgings with a German widow in Broughton and tried every trick he knew to avoid paying his minders and DJs.

  In surrounding himself with adoring teenagers, and specifically teenage girls, Jimmy Savile was also astute enough to recognise that he needed a tight circle of trusted, older allies. One of them was Jack Binks, his regional boss at Mecca, who was based at the Ritz, around the corner from the Plaza.

  When Savile began putting up posters locally advertising ‘Saturday night is crumpet night’ at the Plaza, Binks was furious. After a dressing-down, Savile simply changed the wording to ‘Saturday for Kife’, Yiddish slang for much the same thing. But if Binks occasionally despaired of his younger colleague’s antics, he was comforted by the knowledge that between them they were successfully carving up the business in the city. As the Plaza filled with jiving teenagers, the older crowd migrated to the Ritz, which stuck resolutely to the tried and tested format of ballroom dancing.

  Outside the dancehall, Inspector Lewis Harper of Manchester City Police served as Jimmy Savile’s eyes and ears. Known as ‘The Lion’, Harper was chief superintendent of A Division, which was responsible for the city centre, from 1950 to 1961. Harper understood the dynamics of his beat, its characters and their con tricks intimately. He was a regular visitor to Jimmy Savile’s office at the Plaza.

  Ian Skidmore, who was night editor of the Daily Mirror in Manchester at the time, recalls Harper, who was awarded an MBE in 1960, as being head of the Vice Squad. He also claims that when he died, Harper left more in his will than he earned during his entire service in the police force.2

  Whether Harper worked in vice or not, he would have certainly been familiar with Jimmy Savile’s best friend, a bearded behemoth by the name of Bill Benny. An 18-stone slab of a man, Benny made his name as a wrestler better known as ‘Man Mountain’. He was a particular favourite at Belle Vue’s Kings Hall where he roared at the top of his voice and incited the crowd.