In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  One question remains: where did Douglas Muggeridge hear the rumour? ‘He never told me and I never asked,’ Collins replied.

  Andy Kershaw maintains rumours about Jimmy Savile were still rife by the time he joined Radio 1 in 1985: ‘At the end of one appearance, one of Savile’s producers – so went the legend – was sitting on the rear step of the vehicle while Savile had his way with a young member of the audience within. Then a little old lady came up the road. “Where’s Jimmy?” she asked. “Er. He’s gone already, I’m afraid,” the producer lied. The vehicle by this stage was bouncing on its axles. “Oh dear. Well, please will you give him this from me?” And she handed over a jar of marmalade. “I made it myself,” she explained. “It’s for Jimmy. To thank him for everything he’s doing for the young people.”’12

  What else he was doing was, of course, becoming apparent to the young people at Duncroft Approved School in Staines. There, his favourite girls would be taken for a drive in his Rolls-Royce and soon enough, he’d have their hands down his trousers, his tongue in their mouths and his fingers in their knickers. He told them he’d be able to tell if they were virgins.

  Jimmy Savile’s modus operandi was to test the girls out in order to convince himself they wouldn’t say anything. He’d offer them money in a post office account, jobs at his nightclub complex in Bournemouth or trips to the BBC. In return he’d demand oral sex – ‘Jimmy specials’ as he’d call them. If they looked like being sick, he’d fling open the car door and make sure they vomited outside.

  He’d remind them that if they refused to cooperate they would ruin things for the other girls; there would be no more visits, no more free cigarettes and no more minibus trips to the BBC where they got to mingle with his famous ‘friends’. Worse, he’d tell them he’d ensure everyone knew who was responsible.

  Jimmy Savile knew exactly what he was doing, as one former Duncroft girl explained: ‘[He] did it in such a way that he always covered himself. You knew it was your word against his and you would never be believed … he manipulated situations … we were vulnerable and in need of love and attention.’13

  40. THE ONLY THING YOU CAN EXPECT FROM PIGS

  Over the course of the four years I had been interviewing Jimmy Savile, we had established an unlikely rapport; unlikely, given he was adamant he didn’t need or have friends, and I had spent a large chunk of my teens and twenties warning anyone who would listen that Jimmy Savile was an ‘Agent of Satan’.

  If we were at one of his various homes he would inevitably ease himself into a reclining chair and a fresh Cuban cigar would be lit as a symbolic cutting of the ribbon on the talks. Talks is probably the wrong word, because I would be expected to initiate a line of questioning before listening in respectful silence as he laid the brick of one anecdote on top of another, gradually disappearing behind the wall of his own mythology. He selected stories as I imagined he picked records during the Fifties and early Sixties.

  By 2008, he was but an occasional presence in the papers. There had been a recent story about the West Yorkshire Police using his voice on ‘talking signs’ that were being trialled on lamp posts in the Hyde Park, Headingley and Woodhouse areas of Leeds. The signs were designed to warn students about the risks of burglary. There had not been much else.

  Publicity of a different kind was on his mind during this particular meeting in Leeds, specifically the Sun’s coverage of an abuse scandal that had broken over the Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey. Jimmy Savile had first visited the home in the early 1970s to open a fete. It was the period in which the worst offences were alleged to have taken place.

  A black and white photograph had emerged of Savile at the home. In it, he was wearing a tight-fitting tracksuit with large, square-framed sunglasses that looked like they were on upside down. He was on his haunches, surrounded by a big group of children. At the edge of the group a boy of about eight was holding up a giant badge saying ‘Jim Fixed It for Us’. Jim’ll Fix It did not begin until 1975, which therefore suggests he was a visitor to Haut de la Garenne over a number of years.

  When confronted by a reporter about the picture, Savile’s kneejerk reaction was to deny he had ever visited Haut de la Garenne. Two days later, though, he admitted he’d made a mistake. While there was a shortage of new facts to report, the Sun kept using the picture of Jimmy Savile with those poor, unfortunate children as a motif for a case without leads; an emblem of an island’s assumed shame.

  The phone rang suddenly and Savile picked up. ‘Morning … Have we heard from our friends? … Really? … Right. Right … You tell me what you want to do and I’ll do it,’ he chortled, before his face settled into a grim smile.

  ‘I see … Right, now then, does your pal think we’ve got a good chance if we go for this or what? … Yeah … Yes … No … Right … Yeah … Right … Yes. Is that possible or not? … Good, send that off … You’ll need your counsel fella to tell me in the morning whether we’ve got a chance … Right, so the bottom line is that you’ve got a press release there and he’ll tell me in the morning whether we have a go and if we do have a go, you release that in the morning and we’ll have a go … Right … So you’ll let me know in the morning … Good … Ta ra.’

  Savile put the phone down. ‘That’s the lawyers,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a reply from the Sun saying they don’t think they’ve hurt me at all. They’re going to put a press release out but the counsel are going to tell me in the morning what chance of success we have. If it’s 70 per cent or over, we’ll have a go; if it’s less than 70 per cent we’ll just go to the press complaints and it’s just a slap on the wrist. That’s our plan for tomorrow morning.’

  He showed me a copy of the letter his lawyers had been instructed to send to the paper and reiterated how much money he had made over the years by taking or threatening legal action against tabloids. And yet, by this point, I had not found a single story that implicated Jimmy Savile in a scandal, let alone one that had resulted in a legal windfall.

  I asked him how he was meant to remember where he had been on any given day thirty-five years ago. ‘Thirty-eight years ago,’ he snapped. ‘I was there for half an hour.’

  Perhaps realising that he had revealed how much he did remember, he softened. ‘A load of bollocks. Anyway, the thing is, they know what they’re doing. They want to get away without a slap and if goes to the press complaints they’ll see that as a victory.’ Thirty-eight years ago would have put his visit at 1970. The photograph, which featured a Jim’ll Fix It badge, could not have been taken before 1975. It appears that Jimmy Savile, who was a regular visitor to Jersey, was calling on the children of Haut de la Garenne for five years at least.

  Savile remarked that it was easy to write about a murder or a rape. ‘The difficult stories are good news stories … With a murder or a rape all you’ve got to do is get a name, a date, a time and a place. Then you speak to someone next door and you can be done in half an hour. You’re home and dry.’

  I put it to him that he had spent the best part of 50 years in the media spotlight and yet had never been the victim of so much as a kiss and tell. Why, given this apparently spotless record, were the tabloids now hunting him?

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ he grunted. ‘The only thing you can expect from pigs is shit.’

  41. WE ALWAYS LINE OUR ARTISTS UP

  Despite the lukewarm reviews, a second 13-week run of Clunk Click was commissioned, beginning in February 1974. The show was a product of its time and it allowed Jimmy Savile to embellish his reputation as an incorrigible flirt. Nothing was thought of the fact he walked onto the set at the top of one programme and regaled the audience with how one group of ‘young ladies’ on the beanbags had tried to rip his trousers off. Or that later in the same show, after interviewing Pan’s People, the scantily clad, all-female dance troupe from Top of the Pops, he introduced a video sequence in which he chased them around a tree like a grotesque, groping Benny Hill.

  In another episode, girls f
rom Duncroft Approved School were to be found sitting on the beanbags. The star guest that week was Gary Glitter. ‘Do young ladies go to great lengths to get next to you, as it were?’ Savile asked the glam rocker.

  ‘Yeah, and I go to great lengths to get next to them,’ leered Glitter, real name Paul Gadd. He then peered into the darkness: ‘I’m having a look round the audience now to see if there’s anyone I fancy.’

  Savile guffawed and pointed over to the teenagers on the beanbags. ‘We always line our artists up,’ he said. It was after this episode of Clunk Click that Keri claims she encountered Gary Glitter in Jimmy Savile’s dressing room.1

  Another former Duncroft girl alleges that Savile offered cash incentives to sit on the beanbags at Clunk Click. BBC files released following a Freedom of Information Act request contain evidence that if he did bribe his victims, he made sure to claim the money back. The following passage is taken from a letter to Jimmy Savile from the BBC’s Contracts and Finance department, dated 18 April 1974: ‘We understand from London that during the above programme [Clunk Click] you dispersed £10 each to the following young people’.2 The three names are redacted; the money was reimbursed.

  Roger Ordish, the show’s producer, admitted he had heard the rumours that Jimmy Savile ‘was interested in young females’ but remains adamant that he never witnessed anything that made him suspicious or gave him cause for concern. ‘How this could have happened in a dressing room, I don’t quite know,’ he protested. ‘There wasn’t time for that sort of thing. He turned up at two and if he wasn’t in his dressing room he’d be in the studio rehearsing. If he was in his dressing room, he’d be with me or a researcher or with wardrobe or with people from the press.’

  The newspaper columnist Jean Rook was one of Jimmy Savile’s more regular and vocal critics, which might explain why he made a point of inviting her on to the show. In the article she wrote about the experience, Rook painted a rather different picture of scenes in his dressing room at Clunk Click: ‘He moves everywhere in a throng of worshipping spastics, and for all I know, even lepers. His dressing room at the Beeb is crammed with every sick, lame, down-at-heel youngster who wants to get near enough to The Master to touch the hem of his long blond hair.’

  Rook pressed Savile on his constant publicity seeking, to which he responded: ‘What good would it do these handicapped kids? Why should I need to see another picture of myself in the papers, except that it could raise another £2,000 for charity?’ He maintained nothing mattered ‘as long as I’m trying to do the right thing by these kids and The Governor Upstairs’.

  Rook concluded by reporting being up close and personal with Jimmy Savile left her feeling ‘slightly sick’. She likened it to being ‘too close for too long to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel’.3 It is clear from reading a letter Rook wrote to Savile in 1984, however, that her opinion of him changed over time. Describing herself as ‘your loving and ill organised friend’, she explained how ‘overwhelmed’ she was by his ‘royal doings at Stoke Mandeville and the Royal Variety Show’, before adding, ‘nobody in the world but you could have got away with it and yet made it look so easy and natural that the royals were bound to go along with you.’

  I put it to Roger Ordish that Jimmy Savile had developed a Messiah complex. ‘He did, you’re absolutely right,’ Ordish responded. ‘We used to laugh at him a bit, particularly when [we went to see him] in the radio studio. He’d bring along these rather pathetic hangers-on – they’d be disabled or blind or emotionally disturbed. I used to say that these people just wanted to touch the hem of his raiment. It was like that.’

  Savile’s popularity continued to grow. He was someone the major political parties clearly viewed as a potential vote-winner, and in the run-up to the snap election called for late February 1974, he appeared in party political broadcasts by both the Conservatives and the Liberals.

  When pressed about where his allegiance lay, Savile replied: ‘I’m an individual, you see, so for an individual really there’s only the Conservative Party, because that’s the freedom touch, isn’t it?’4 He revealed he’d only spoken out for the Liberals because his brother Johnnie was standing as the party’s candidate in Battersea North.

  It is remarkable to reflect on the fact that the endorsement of a long-haired disc jockey represented currency in political circles of the time. A confidential Whitehall report commented on his appointment as honorary assistant entertainments officer at Broadmoor, while among a series of recommendations sent to ministers by civil servants within the Hospital Advisory Service, mentions were made of the work Jimmy Savile was doing at the maximum-security institution. They included his fund-raising for a new minibus and disco equipment for his Thursday evening sessions with patients.

  ‘Apart from the undoubted pleasure the hospital gains from having him around, he has pioneered outings for patients and has overcome opposition from outside and inside the hospital to these ventures,’ stated the report. ‘His energy, enthusiasm, sincerity and devotion to Broadmoor and its patients and staff are infectious and he performs the function of an unofficial but very successful public-relations officer outside the hospital, which can only be of great benefit for Broadmoor as a whole.’ Health Minister David Owen and Secretary of State for Health Barbara Castle were among the recipients.5

  Jimmy Savile was happy to put his name to just about anything, as long as the terms were agreeable. He was the well-paid and familiar face of the government’s seat belt campaign, the next phase of which was designed to shock the public by showing him talking to a brain-damaged victim of a road accident. He persuaded a construction firm to build a patients’ lounge at Stoke Mandeville in return for a 10-minute personal appearance at the Ideal Home Show at Olympia, and made £10,000 for charity while advertising Daz and Fairy Liquid. He was also awarded the Commando Medal for his fund-raising for the Royal Marine Museum, found time to devote four days to doing a series of sponsored walks in Dublin and Belfast, and began writing his autobiography in a series of exercise books, a task that earned him a handsome advance of £15,000. For every penny he made for charity, though, there was some form of personal remuneration: publicity, payment in kind or kickbacks via sponsorship deals.

  It was a peculiar form of alchemy. Joan Bakewell identified it in August 1974, in one of the first heavyweight newspaper profiles to be published about Jimmy Savile. ‘Today [he] is famous simply for being famous’,6 she wrote. ‘[He] seems to have created a fantasy life. The reality of his own life is the acting out and living out of that fantasy.’

  As part of her research, Bakewell spoke to some of the people who worked with Savile. ‘He certainly likes the hero worship he gets from young girls,’ commented one.

  The piece went on to reveal some of the questions being asked about Jimmy Savile at the time. One concerned his insatiable hunger for publicity. Bakewell reported that he worked hard ‘at keeping his fame bright with a series of publicity stunts. These things are never done entirely for their own sake: each feat is sponsored for some good cause, usually, and with full media fanfare.’

  Bakewell chaired a religious quiz show that Savile appeared on, and commented on how he had been in a rush to get away afterwards. ‘I should make the hospital by one a.m.,’ he told her. ‘They don’t start dying till two.’

  When she inquired whether anyone had ever tried to take him for a ride, Savile replied that if they had, it had taught him a valuable lesson: ‘If you help people in a little way they will thank you. In a big way, they won’t. And if you set out to help people in bulk they’ll kill you. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, John Kennedy and the good one of them all, Jesus Christ. You must never look for a reward. There isn’t any.’

  If Jimmy Savile now bracketed himself alongside some of the greatest figures in history, he also alluded to his basest instincts. ‘I’m no saint. I want it to be known I’m a great crumpet man,’ he told a reporter from the News of the World. He reckoned wealth no longer guaranteed success when it came to seducing g
irls: ‘I’ll be out on a charity walk and I’ll say to a girl, “I’ll call tomorrow and take you out in the Rolls! Often that will make her run up the nearest tree in fright.”’7

  Like so many others who knew and worked with him, Dave Eager claimed that he never witnessed Jimmy doing ‘anything untoward’. But when I outlined the allegations made by former Duncroft girls, Eager did recall a comment Savile once made: ‘He [said] to me, “You’ve always got to be careful with your image. I’ve been going to a school and I’ve been taking kids for a ride in my Rolls-Royce, and I’ve got to be careful not to do that again.”’

  Such discretion was in short supply in Savile’s autobiography, which was published in the autumn of 1974. The headline splashed across two pages of the People as part of a major serialisation blared, ‘Why I Never Married – I can have my pick of 25 dollies any night’. Below, Savile regaled readers with how ‘in my game the girls abound like summer flowers’.

  He talked about one lucky escape when an attractive teenage girl knocked on the door of his flat in Manchester. ‘Normally such manna would be consumed,’ he confirmed before explaining that on this occasion, and by sheer luck, he had gone out and left the girl on the step. A short distance from his flat, he was pulled over by a police car. The officer told him the girl who had just gone into his block was an absconder. Savile denied all knowledge of her. ‘Lucky boy’,8 replied the officer before driving off to collect the runaway.

  The reference to ‘his block’ suggests the girl had gone to his 10th-floor flat in Ascot Court on Bury New Road, while the ‘Lucky boy’ remark from the police officer indicates that he was known for keeping such company. That he was confident enough to play the situation for laughs not only in his autobiography but also in a national newspaper only confirms that Jimmy Savile felt untouchable.