In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Given that Jimmy Savile regularly entertained police officers and plied them with teenage girls, it is perhaps not surprising that he felt empowered enough to advertise to a journalist that he was having sex with teenagers, albeit a young journalist who he knew and felt confident was too overawed to say anything. But the fact that Savile then exhibited the contempt he felt for these girls by washing his penis in the kitchen sink in front of that journalist speaks volumes about how he viewed sex as a cold, emotionless act. It also demonstrates his technique for avoiding censure, one that worked by making those who witnessed his behaviour feel a sense of complicity in it.

  The girl, Leeke says, eventually came back into the sitting room. ‘I thought to myself, “He’s not going to want me here.” So I made my excuses and said to him that I’d see him on Sunday at the Top Ten Club when we’d sort out arranging to take some photos of the cars. And that was it.’

  Alan Leeke says he subsequently went out with three girls who had all had sexual relationships with Jimmy Savile. They were aged between 16 and 17 at the time, and each said the sex was always quick, and took place in his car or in his flat.

  ‘One or two of the girls told me [washing himself off] was something he did [after sex],’ Leeke adds. ‘But the more I think about it now, I wonder whether that was all set up, what with me being a member of the press. Just to set it up to show a member of the press that he could do that.’

  In October 2012, Mary (not her real name), a grandmother of four, recounted how Jimmy Savile had taken her virginity in 1966. She was 15 at the time, flat chested and just entering puberty. She said that she’d developed a crush on the DJ after attending the Top Ten Club, and sent him a drawing she had done of him. When she didn’t get a reply, she approached him in person one Sunday evening at Belle Vue.

  ‘I said I was the girl who sent the picture and was sorry not to hear from him,’ Mary said. ‘He looked me up and down and said, “I didn’t know what you looked like then.” We exchanged telephone numbers and he started to call me. He invited me to his flat in Higher Broughton, on the border of Manchester and Salford.’ She maintained her parents thought little of their 15-year-old daughter being dated by a man approaching 40.

  On the day he took her virginity, Mary recalled going to Piccadilly station in Manchester to change out of her school uniform before catching a bus to his flat. ‘He was lying in bed, with his clothes on, waiting for me,’ she said. ‘He was disappointed I’d changed out of my uniform and asked me to put it back on, so I did.

  ‘He beckoned me to the bed. I was still clothed, but he was all over me. When he got on top and I felt him start to slip his penis in, I said “No, no”, but he said it was OK, it was only his thumb. He said we wouldn’t go all the way until I was 16, but he was having sex with me. I thought I loved him and I wanted to please him.’

  On two occasions, Mary claimed Savile’s friends watched while he had sex with her. Another time, he took a call from his mother while he was having sex with her. ‘He kept on talking to her for quite a few minutes, but never stopped having sex,’ she said. ‘Even as a naive girl, I felt humiliated.’

  She claimed to have visited Savile’s flat frequently, and on each occasion they had sex. Afterwards, he might occasionally offer her a cup of tea before giving her the bus fare home.

  Mary said her parents were taken in and charmed by Jimmy Savile. One evening she recalled he drove her home for dinner. ‘We arrived in his Rolls-Royce, having just had sex at his flat. My dad was thrilled, guiding the Rolls into the driveway, enjoying the looks from the neighbours. Jimmy leapt out and kissed my mother’s hand. But as we stepped through the dining-room door, he couldn’t resist touching me between the legs.’

  On another occasion, she wrote to a friend to tell her how Jimmy Savile had taken her to bed. The girl’s mother intercepted the letter and contacted Mary’s parents. Mary said her father refused to believe that Jimmy Savile would behave in such a manner. She also said that Jimmy Savile dumped her when she turned 18.

  So, far from being a dirty secret that Jimmy Savile strove to conceal, his desire to have sex with teenage girls, and the frequency with which he was able to satisfy this desire, had mutated into an expression of power.

  Alan Leeke says he discovered one of the girls he knew had fallen pregnant and given birth to Savile’s child in 1967. ‘She had the child adopted,’ he explains. ‘She got over it, they always do. I haven’t seen that girl for 30-odd years now and I would imagine it’s something that would still remain in her memory.’

  He says Savile had dumped the girl on finding out, telling her he couldn’t possibly have made her pregnant because he was sterile. ‘I knew the girl and I knew that what she was telling me was true,’ Leeke insists. ‘She wasn’t the type to make these things up.’ He says the girl’s father went looking for Jimmy Savile on two occasions. Both times he was armed with a shotgun.

  Dave Eager was in his late teens when he first encountered Jimmy Savile. He was studying to become a teacher and playing part-time in a band when Savile offered him part-time employment, first as a DJ at the Top Ten Club and then as his de facto assistant.

  I met Dave Eager for the first time in London, shortly after the first stories about the shelved Newsnight investigation had appeared in the newspapers. Jimmy Savile’s exposure as a prolific sex offender was still some months off. Eager was, and has remained, adamant that he saw nothing in Savile’s behaviour that gave him cause for concern.

  In our first conversation he told me how in the late 1960s, Savile paid him the handsome sum of £10 a week to sift through the hundreds of letters he received. ‘I used to come back to Manchester every Saturday to collect his mail,’ Eager said. ‘It got to the stage where, I can’t remember how much it was, but I could sign cheques up to a certain amount.’

  I put it to Eager that Jimmy Savile must have trusted him to give him access not only to his mail but his chequebook, and that trust was something that went against Savile’s very nature. In a convoluted manner, Eager then seemed to inadvertently suggest that evidence of his behaviour was beginning to emerge, even then: ‘He said, “What it is Dave, is I love my women, but if you ever fall out with somebody you’re never quite sure if it’s going to be a problem. So, with a guy, I’ve got no problems.”’

  Because he was taking care of much of Savile’s administration, Eager knew that he stayed in the Adrian Hotel on Hunter Street when he was in London. He also knew that when girls came to visit him at the hotel, Savile insisted they were taken home afterwards in a car. ‘He used the same firm,’ said Eager.

  At the end of each month, Eager said he would see the bill listing the times that the cars had been sent. ‘I said, “Jim, you’ve had a lot—” “Shut up and sign the bill,” [said Savile]. We used to have a joke about it but it proved to me that he always looked after the ladies to make sure they went home safely … Everything was done with absolute courtesy.’

  When I referred to the allegations that had begun to surface in the reporting of the axed Newsnight investigation, Eager said that Savile was always wary of being ‘set up’ by a newspaper, but was not surprised that stories were now coming out about him. ‘If somebody 25 years later says, “Jimmy came to my house and Jimmy stayed the night and, by the way, I was only 14,” Jim would say, “Well I did know her but that was in 1976 when she was 18” … How do you start proving something 30 years later? I think Jim was always concerned. I don’t believe he did anything wrong but he was always concerned that someone might be prepared to say something for money.’

  Ten months later, and in the full glare of the unfolding scandal, Dave Eager restated that he’d seen and heard nothing, and expressed his horror at the lurid revelations in the press. Among other things, he also admitted to me that he was privy to Jimmy Savile’s pathological fear of sexually transmitted diseases. ‘The one thing Jimmy always did, and told me he did, was he had a routine with TCP,’ he explained. ‘Everyone who knew him would know that. He wouldn’t
say, “I’ve had a girl.” He’d say, “TCP tonight!” You don’t know if he was joking or serious. It was always TCP. He was absolutely fastidious about that; it was his code word.’

  *

  According to ‘Giving Victims a Voice’, the joint Metropolitan Police Service and NSPCC report into allegations of sexual abuse made against Jimmy Savile to officers working on Operation Yewtree, the peak years of his offending took place in the 10 years from 1966. And in the year that England’s place at the centre of the universe was sealed with victory in the World Cup final at Wembley, Jimmy Savile was everywhere, it seemed.

  Rolling in cash thanks to his Radio Luxembourg shows, Top of the Pops appearances and DJ gigs up and down the country, he took to generating further publicity via various madcap stunts. He ran from London to Brighton to win a £100 bet, and donated the money to the Little Sisters of the Poor. He worked a seven-hour shift in a Welsh coalmine with his brother Vince to raise money to buy a guide dog. He competed in the Latrigg Fell Race, continued to wrestle professionally at halls across Britain and completed a Royal Marines endurance march across Dartmoor. After the latter, Savile remarked that he hoped it would encourage teenagers to walk long distances to help charities.

  Jimmy Savile’s relationship with the Royal Marines extended to his final act, when his coffin was carried into St Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds on the shoulders of a regimental guard of honour. It was through the Royal Marines that he established a rapport with Lord Louis Mountbatten that in turn established the bridgehead for his long and close affiliation with the royal family. The association with one of Britain’s crack fighting forces began with his desire to physically prove himself and then developed as he resolved to complete every element of Royal Marine training, earning himself in the process an honorary Green Beret.

  ‘I invited three Marine Commando N.C.O.s to Top of the Pops last week, two of them photographers,’ he wrote in his newspaper column after completing his first run, in which he beat his brother Vince, a serving naval officer at the time. ‘And seeing as they’re used to snapshots of strong men doing strong things, to see them taking pictures of all those miniskirts was a good laugh. They didn’t even mind lying on the floor in their best suits for the best pictures.’2

  On other occasions, he wrote about how teenagers should spend a compulsory four weeks working in a hospital so they could see another side of life, and about the Manchester taxi run to Blackpool with his ‘family of 200 blind or crippled children’. Savile and his other brother, Johnnie, organised a fund-raising concert at the Royal Albert Hall for the victims of the Aberfan disaster in Wales, the proceeds from which they planned to hand out from his car. It was not to pass without incident, however: ‘I refuse to hand over the money to the Mayor of Merthyr Tydfil,’ Johnnie Savile told one newspaper. ‘There has been so much arguing about it.’3

  Meanwhile Jimmy Savile, further embellishing his standing as a philanthropist, was using his newspaper column to publicise the talks he gave to gatherings of Catholic priests and nuns. He spoke on the topic of teenagers.

  On one occasion, he was invited to speak to a group of nuns who taught at schools in Lancashire. The event was organised by a Jesuit priest, Father George Giarchi, who Savile had worked with on a series of ‘pop missions for teenagers’.4

  ‘Children want the chance to respect people,’ Savile told the sisters. ‘They know they’ve got to have authority, and that there must be a penalty when they do wrong.’ He explained that teenagers were ‘80 per cent don’t knows, 10 per cent “right” people and 10 per cent hard cases’, and advised the nuns to concentrate on the 80 per cent because ‘It’s better to save a load of the could-be’s, than waste time on the ones born to be double villains.’ As a parting shot he said that he would pray for them, adding ‘and I hope you’ll pray for me’. He naturally failed to mention his own special focus on those teenagers that could not be saved.

  Dave Eager told me he remembered accompanying Savile to some of Father Giarchi’s ‘preach-in’ events, which were aimed squarely at the young. ‘He was a character,’ Eager said of the priest. ‘It was all anti-drugs, anti-underage sex, live the Catholic life, that sort of thing.’ I tried on more than one occasion to contact George Giarchi, who left the clergy in the 1970s, for comment, but got no reply.

  ‘[The clergy] had never heard anything like it,’ Savile said after their first appearance together. ‘I was honest with them. I told them all about sex and drugs and the dangers. I didn’t mince words. And they believed me.’5

  So did Guy Marsden, Jimmy Savile’s nephew. One of 14 children raised by Savile’s older sister Marjory, Marsden is now a father of four and grandfather of ten. He works as a roofer in Leeds.

  Marsden told me that he decided to run away in his early teens having been ‘in and out of trouble with the law’. He hitchhiked to London with three friends where, he explained, they stayed for around five weeks. It was the first of a number of such trips that took place over an 18-month period.

  On their first trip in 1967, Marsden recalled they were hanging around Euston Station. ‘Unbeknown to us then … it’s like a pick-up point,’ he said. A man approached them, asked what they were doing and offered to buy them food. Marsden said he and his friends accompanied the man to a nearby flat.

  After a few days at the stranger’s flat, Guy Marsden’s uncle mysteriously appeared. ‘I half hid, I half ran because I thought, “I’m properly going to get bashed,”’ he said of seeing Jimmy Savile walk into the room. ‘But it weren’t. It were a more casual thing – “You better come with me.” And then I thought I were probably still in trouble. We all went; we stuck together.’

  Marsden claimed that ‘Uncle Jimmy’ moved the runaways into a house. Over the ensuing weeks, he also took the boys to a number of parties. There were no women at these soirees, only men and children. Marsden maintained that he realised immediately what sort of parties they were.

  One of the houses, he described as being particularly memorable: ‘The big feature of it were, when you went in, the swimming pool …’ he explained. ‘It were a room with a big swimming pool and it were so inviting. Everybody used it and were diving into it. It had lights in it; it was lit up. It was unbelievable … All you wanted to do was stay there for ever.’ Marsden said he believes the house belonged to a famous pop impresario of the time.

  ‘What happened were if the parties run through, at some time you’d fall asleep through [the] night or early morning. And then, next day when you woke up, you still had the run of wherever you were.’ If another party was being held, he said, the boys would be put in the car and taken there. He claimed some parties would continue for days and across a number of locations.

  Marsden told me that he remembered the children in attendance. He said they were aged between six and ten, and from time to time they were led into rooms with adult males. Noises could be heard coming from inside, he said. ‘None of these kids were stressed. It was as though they were really, really enjoying what they were doing. That’s the sad part really.’

  He went on to name a number of celebrities that he encountered at these events but insisted he never saw his uncle Jimmy go into a room with any of the children.

  Marsden is adamant he wasn’t abused and that only one of his three friends ‘went behind the door’ with a man. He now thinks he knows why they were there: ‘Someone must have had an idea that we would [be] a good intermediary for these kids. We were all young and slapping each other and messing about … and kids relate to things like that, so they’d come to us. It might have stressed them if there were only adult men.’

  He went on to tell me their stay in London came to an end when one of his friends was caught stealing money. It was at this point that Marsden said he first met ‘Uncle John’: ‘I hated him because he were taking us away from all we loved down in London. But … we were getting the boot anyway. We couldn’t be trusted.’ He maintained it was Johnnie, Jimmy Savile’s older brother, who ordered them back to Leed
s.

  Guy Marsden and his friends made further trips to London and he says that each time they fell back into the same scene. Known to the police in Leeds, he claims he told them about what he’d experienced in the capital. ‘I might have said it three times in all the times I was picked up,’ he told me. The response? ‘Shut up yer knob.’

  Marjory Marsden, Guy’s mother, idolised her youngest brother, thanks in no small part to the fact he would occasionally turn up at the Seacroft estate in Leeds carrying a colour television or a new telephone under his arm. As a result, the Marsdens were one of the first families on the estate to own either. But according to Guy, his father, Herbert Marsden, ‘couldn’t stand [Jimmy Savile], he absolutely hated him … hated him with a vengeance’.

  When I asked him whether he ever discussed with his uncle what had gone on in London, Marsden insisted there was an unspoken agreement that nothing would ever be said. He also told me he was sent to Borstal at the age 16, and believes Jimmy Savile was responsible. ‘Apparently one of the people who were meant to be defending me … it turned out they were quite good friends. And [Jimmy Savile] said to the judge, “I think [a custodial sentence] will do him the world of good” … He made it seem like the reason I were in prison was because of him.’

  In later life, Jimmy Savile would boast about the calibre of his contacts within the legal profession to police officers investigating allegations against him regarding historic sex offences.

  31. GOOD ENOUGH TO EAT

  Otley had been largely untouched by the decade of change. The hills that enclosed this sleepy market town at the gateway to the Yorkshire Dales seemed to act as a buffer to the seismic activity going on beyond. But as chairman of the town’s urban district council in 1967, Mayor Ronnie Duncan was determined to bring a flavour of the Swinging Sixties to town.