In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Despite being tissue thin on detail, the Rampton report does reveal a little about Jimmy Savile’s access at the hospital. ‘Two retired members of staff have confirmed JS did enter the secure area at least on three occasions and gave assurance that JS was escorted by staff at all times, had no keys and was not left alone with any patients,’ stated the two-page document instigated by Dr Mike Harris, Rampton’s executive director of Forensic Services and chief officer for High Security Care, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. ‘They re-iterated that during these visits JS was treated like any other professional visitor.’

  Of course, Jimmy Savile – or JS, as the report insisted on calling him throughout – was not any other professional visitor. In fact, he wasn’t a professional visitor at all.

  The report concluded, ‘JS had contact with some patients at Rampton Hospital’ but ‘no evidence has been found in any documents reviewed or during discussions with retired staff that anything untoward took place involving patients.’

  No mention was made of the period in which he had his motor caravan parked in the hospital’s grounds, or the fact he was seen heading to and from the vehicle with a number of different females.

  As for the level of access he was given at Broadmoor, in October 2012 a spokesman for West London NHS Trust, which has managed the hospital since 2001, stated the allegations relating to Jimmy Savile were from ‘a time when Broadmoor was a separate, somewhat isolated organisation’.8 The very next day, the Guardian reported a Department of Health spokesman as saying, ‘it is far from clear why any such role [at Broadmoor] would have required possession … of a set of keys. We need to establish how he came to have them and on what basis.’9 Both questions were among the terms of reference for the investigation launched by the Secretary of State for Health and overseen by Kate Lampard. It remains to be seen whether the report includes details of the 1977 outing from Broadmoor he led to Bournemouth, which included lunch at his nightclub, the Maison Royale.

  *

  On the Sunday his account of the Rampton trips to Scarborough was published in the Sunday People, Jimmy Savile was to be found in the resort town on the south coast. He had just done a deal to take over a nightclub complex in Bournemouth and was staying in the flat he had secured as part of the package. He told me his plan was to move the Duchess into it so that he could keep an eye on her. It never came to fruition: a telephone call from a friend informed him that his mother had died quite suddenly while staying the night at his sister’s house in Filey. Agnes Savile was less than a month short of her 86th birthday.

  In the following day’s Yorkshire Evening Post, Savile paid tribute to his ‘beloved Duchess’: ‘She was entirely trustful of me in my showbiz life, and I have never known her to reprimand me,’ he explained. ‘If I took some dolly-bird home she would give her the “hard eye” look-over before accepting her and making a real friend of her. But I think she was glad I did not marry. We were so close. She never even hinted to me about getting married, and I had no inclinations. Ours was a complete association.’10

  After a post-mortem, the Duchess’s body was placed in a coffin in the front room of her daughter Christina’s house on Welford Road in Filey. Jimmy Savile sat in a chair next to the casket and hardly moved, later describing the period as ‘the best five days of my life’.11

  ‘We hadn’t put her away yet and there she was lying around, so to me they were good times,’ he told Anthony Clare twenty years later. ‘Once upon a time I had to share her with other people. We had marvellous times. But when she was dead she was all mine, for me.’12 When Agnes Savile’s body was transferred to Leeds, and the house belonging to her daughter, Joan, Jimmy Savile rode in the front of the hearse.

  A requiem mass was arranged for the following Monday at St Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds, followed by a funeral service at Killingbeck Cemetery. In his autobiography, Savile wrote, ‘as I fixed things for the final personal appearance of the Duchess it gave me the exact feeling that I was actually fixing to bury my own body. In some ways I was.’13

  On the day before the funeral, Savile wrote in his newspaper column about how his mother stuck ‘like a warm thought in the minds of 50 million people’. He claimed that a ‘big business house’ was planning to use her for a TV commercial because audience research had demonstrated she had 88 per cent ‘instant name recognition without a picture’.14

  When Vince Savile had died, Agnes gave their youngest son his wedding ring. Jimmy Savile was now desperate to add his mother’s ring to his little finger. His older sister Christina claimed the ring but after being awoken one night by a burning sensation on the finger she was wearing the ring, she conceded that their mother wanted him to have it.

  Dozens of floral tributes were arranged on the steps of the cathedral to greet the cortège of six vehicles transporting members of the Savile family. Jimmy Savile again decided to travel in the hearse with the coffin, dressed in a black fur coat and dark rimmed spectacles. Vince and Johnnie Savile, along with two of their brothers-in-law, carried the tiny casket to the high altar, where Jimmy Savile knelt down alone before it.

  Four hundred people heard the requiem mass celebrated by Father William Kilgallon and Father Dennis O’Connell, who had befriended Agnes through the Margaret Sinclair Centre. Later, Jimmy Savile’s colleagues on the night ambulance shift at Leeds General Infirmary volunteered as a guard of honour at the cemetery. Savile later claimed that ‘official groups’ were also sent to the funeral by the ‘Irish government and Scotland Yard’,15 which, if true, further reveals the degree to which his influence now spread.

  Having dominated the funeral with his antics, Jimmy Savile also dictated the appearance of his mother’s final resting place. The marble tomb he had designed was huge and costly, with the words ‘The Duchess’ in big letters and her real name below. He was the only beneficiary of her will, being left £106.

  The divisions within the Savile family were hinted at a week later, when Johnnie Savile was pictured in a newspaper picking rotting wallpaper from the damp-infested walls of his basement flat in Clapham, south London. The headline above the story read ‘Life with the Other Savile’. ‘I refuse to ask Jimmy for help,’ explained the 53-year-old rep of a printing firm and father of two, who revealed that he had joined a local squatters’ group.16

  ‘[Johnnie Savile] could play my uncle Jimmy like nobody,’ Guy Marsden told me. ‘[He’d say,] “I’m your brother and you don’t give me owt and all I’m going to do is go on t’radio and tell everyone.” And my uncle Jimmy would cough up … he couldn’t beat him.’ Sure enough, the newspaper report mentioned that Jimmy Savile had agreed to give a donation to the squatters’ group when his brother was offered a house.

  39. PIED PIPER

  Jimmy Savile climbed the ladder of a scaffold tower and on reaching the platform at the top, spread his arms wide and soaked up the acclaim. Below, 20,000 sun-baked teenagers from all across Ulster cheered their approval. A chain-link fence shimmered in the distance. It had been erected by the Royal Marines and marked a different sort of dividing line to the one these young people were used to, enclosing the makeshift arena laid out on the disused airfield at Nutts Corner.

  Beyond the fence stood hundred of officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, backed by troops of the British army. The forces of law and order, or oppression and fear depending on which side of the sectarian divide you came from, maintained a watchful if twitchy presence. At this moment in time, however, the temporary fence represented a line between young and old. Youngsters from opposite sides of an increasingly bitter sectarian divide had come together to walk and to witness a pop festival, and now they were in the hands of a higher authority; a man describing himself as the ‘Pied Piper of Peace’.

  As the cheers eventually subsided, Savile addressed his captive audience from his high vantage point beside the stage. ‘You have proved that the teenagers of Northern Ireland see more then violence in life,’1 he blared, as a sea of clapping hands ripple
d before him. ‘This is the greatest day of my life so far.’

  Fifty-one bombs had exploded across Northern Ireland and the British mainland in the previous year alone, killing 29 people and injuring hundreds more. In February 1972, the IRA claimed responsibility for an explosive device that went off at Aldershot Barracks, killing six female ancillary workers and a Roman Catholic padre. It was thought to have been planted as retaliation for the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 civilians, seven of them teenagers, carried out by British troops in the Bogside area of Derry just a month before. On 14 April, 24 separate Provisional IRA bombs went off at points across the province, and gunfire was exchanged between gunmen and the security forces. On one single Friday in July, ‘Bloody Friday’, 22 bombs exploded in a 74-minute period, killing nine and injuring 130.

  In the summer of 1973, the Northern Ireland Association of Youth Clubs, the only interdenominational youth organisation for both sexes in Ulster, decided to contact Jimmy Savile. As vice-president of the National Association of Youth Clubs in Britain and a regular visitor to Ireland through his work with the Central Remedial Clinic, he was deemed the perfect choice to lead an eight-mile sponsored walk to raise money for a new youth centre in Belfast. Security forces advised Savile that he could be a target for IRA snipers but he was having none of it. The chain-link fence he said, would keep him safe, ‘not from bullets but from birds’.2

  The walk began in the village of Mullusk, with Savile dressed in a bright yellow tracksuit and setting a brisk jogging pace from the front. Three helicopters whirred overhead, while soldiers and police officers mingled with the crowds that lined the route. ‘It was most moving to see women weeping as we passed,’ recalled Savile, who explained his grandparents had been born in Belfast, so this was like ‘coming home’.3

  Afterwards, reporters jostled to get a word from the colourful emissary from the mainland. He told them there were times when ‘a man has to stand up and be counted’4 before offering his blueprint for peace. ‘The growing generation in Ulster have to ask themselves whether they want to appreciate the beauty of life, or smash their surroundings, shoot one another and plant bombs then run away like cowards,’ he said. ‘If that’s really their idea of a good time, then we’ve got no hope.

  ‘I feel I’ve succeeded if the kids here have had a better time with me than among the troubles clamouring for their attention. Maybe at the end they will decide they have been wasting their lives fighting instead of having a ball.’5 There were no more IRA bombs in 1973.

  Jimmy Savile was still a good decade away from being at the height of his powers, and the apex of his influence, yet here he was remodelling himself as a platinum-haired peace envoy. There was now no limit in his mind to what he could achieve.

  Since his mother’s death, he had been the subject of another BBC documentary, The Life of Jimmy Savile, which he had narrated himself. It was presented as a montage of a fast-moving life: cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats, volunteering his services at Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville, and talking seriously about his charity work and religion. Amid his cod philosophising, he’d also revealed things about himself: ‘I’m not homosexual,’ he said, ‘I like girls – but I’ve never got around to marrying anyone.’6

  He enjoyed keeping the press guessing, and relished deceiving them over the prospect this marital status might be about to change thanks to a fabricated affair with Polly James, the 25-year-old former singer from Pickettywitch. ‘I’m a normal sort of chap. I’ve fancied her for three years. It’s just taken me this long to make up her mind that I mean it,’7 he said. Six weeks later, Polly James, who was in the process of launching her solo career, announced that Jimmy Savile was too old and she’d gone back to her ex-boyfriend. Former band members have since claimed that there was no relationship, and it was a ‘a set up for publicity’8 designed to promote the band’s new single.

  In late December, at a gala evening attended by captains of industry at London’s Talk of the Town club, the Variety Club of Great Britain named Jimmy Savile its Showbusiness Personality of the Year. After accepting the award and basking in the acclaim of his peers, he left for Broadmoor to do an overnight shift.

  Jimmy Savile was now seen as a man who could communicate with the population at large. The Department of Environment hired him to front a £750,000 campaign on the importance of wearing car seatbelts. Its slogan, ‘Clunk Click’, became the title of his new Saturday evening chat show on BBC1.

  Clunk Click started its eight-week run in May, with Jimmy Savile promising anything but the usual format. ‘It will be about people and places with which the average TV viewer would not normally have any contact,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that there are so many people doing such valuable jobs who have never been heard of. Why not give them a chance to speak?’

  He insisted that nothing on the show would contravene what he described as ‘the social code’, before adding, ‘Say what you like about the pop scene but I have never done anything which I believe would corrupt anyone.’9

  The show’s producer was Roger Ordish, who first met Jimmy Savile when he was employed as an occasional director on Top of the Pops. Ordish’s first impressions had not been particularly favourable: ‘[It was] his unapproachability,’ he recalled soon after the slew of stories about Jimmy Savile’s offending behaviour began to emerge. ‘We weren’t actually communicating.’

  There was nevertheless something about Ordish that Bill Cotton instinctively felt made him ‘the right man for Savile’, and he despatched the producer to Broadcasting House to meet him. Ordish would end up working with for the next 21 years.

  The reviews of the new show were not unanimously positive. ‘The candid serenity of [Savile’s] face rebukes the cynical but does not prevent us from feeling like hospitalised invalids who are being visited against their will,’ wrote Peter Black in the Daily Mail.10

  As this suggests, Jimmy Savile was now as famous nationally for his charity work as he was for his TV and radio appearances. He spoke regularly of his role at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, and launched a scheme to build an £8,000 luxury recreation lounge at its National Spinal Injuries Centre, housed in a series of antiquated Nissen huts.

  He also revealed why he so enjoyed working in the hospital’s mortuary department. ‘I find I’ve got an aptitude for dead people,’ he said. ‘When I’m holding somebody that has just died I’m filled with a tremendous love and envy. They’ve left behind their problems, they’ve made the journey. If somebody were to tell me tonight I wouldn’t wake up in the morning it would fill me with tremendous joy. Sometimes I can’t wait.’11

  *

  In September 1973, soon after his triumphant march through Belfast, Jimmy Savile was offered an improved two-year contract with BBC Radio 1. Savile’s Travels would be extended to two hours and he would be paid around £15,000 a year for his two shows. By delivering big audiences for a station that was still regarded as an upstart organisation by higher powers at the BBC, Savile was deemed to be more than worth his pay rise.

  Before putting the deal on the table, however, Douglas Muggeridge, the controller of Radio 1 and 2, first needed to put his mind at ease. He’d heard rumours about Jimmy Savile, and specifically what went on during the making of Savile’s Travels.

  Rodney Collins was 23 years old at the time, and had been employed as the network’s publicity officer since April 1971. He had got to know and like Muggeridge during his stints on music papers, and his job involved advising the controller on the public image of the networks and the people it employed. Collins described his boss as being ‘open to ideas, open to challenges and open to accepting new broadcasters’.

  Of the DJs on Radio 1, Collins stated that Jimmy Savile stood out, describing him as ‘a different animal to everyone else’. Unlike those who had come over from the old Light Program or those recruited from the pirate stations, Savile had already made his name, which meant, in his words, that Savile’s Travels and Speakeasy were ‘very much moulded around what [he] be
lieved he could bring to Radio 1’. In fact, Collins doubted whether the programmes ‘would have continued with any other presenter’.

  Collins said Jimmy Savile differed from his colleagues in other ways, too. ‘I had a home number for absolutely everybody apart from Jimmy Savile,’ he reported. ‘If I wanted [him], I either had to leave a message for the producer’s office or it was Leeds Infirmary. Savile was his own man.’

  He admitted that ‘rumours about disc jockeys came through all the time’, although they were not exclusively about sex. It was, therefore, fairly routine for Muggeridge to ask him to inspect what was being heard on the grapevine. On this occasion, and as the fallout from payola and Claire McAlpine’s death saw Radio 1 ‘zigzagging all over the place’, Muggeridge asked Collins to make inquiries with a number of leading newspaper editors about whether they had heard the rumours about Jimmy Savile ‘entertaining’ young girls in the Savile’s Travels motor caravan. More importantly, he was to ascertain whether they were planning to pursue them in print.

  ‘I spoke to four journalists,’ Collins explained. What they told him was yes, they had heard the stories but they were not planning to run with them. This was due, they said, to Jimmy Savile’s exceptional popularity and the work he did for charity. Two days later, Collins verbally reported the news back to Muggeridge.