by Dan Davies
‘The man asked me, “Where are you going?”. I recall that it was difficult for me to talk because my throat was sore. I said in a very croaky voice, “To the television room”. The man said, “I’ll show you” and he walked me down the corridor. I can’t recall what the man said but he was friendly and I felt comfortable in his company.
‘I recall that as we walked along the corridor the man opened a door which led to a room that contained a mop and bucket. Looking back, I realise that it must have been a cleaning cupboard. The man gave a short laugh and closed the door without going in. Almost immediately afterwards we arrived at the day room.
‘As we arrived at the day room an elderly man was leaving and I saw that he nodded an acknowledgement to the man who was accompanying me. The day room was a small room with a black and white television, which was stood on a low wooden table. There were a number of identical chairs in the room and an armchair. I went and sat on one of the chairs. The man said to me, “Have you got a boyfriend?” I didn’t answer because although I had boys who were friends, I didn’t understand the concept of a boyfriend.
‘The man then leant down in front of me and positioned his body so that he was between my legs. I remember that he had a distinctive muggy odour. The man was gentle, almost caring. As he pushed my legs apart I saw that he had pulled down his trousers, not all the way but sufficiently to expose his penis. I recall that his penis had a distasteful smell. He then manoeuvred himself forward and as I remained seated he inserted his penis into my vagina.
‘I didn’t feel threatened by what he was doing to the point that I recall touching his cheek with the palm of my right hand. His cheek felt very clammy. The man’s penis was only in me for a short time. He then made a groaning noise and ejaculated. He withdrew his penis and then pulled up his trousers. His semen had gone all over the seat I was sitting on and over the inside of my thighs. He then wiped me and the chair with the front of his white coat. Having done so, he stood up and without saying anything walked out of the room. The door to the room had been open throughout what had happened.
‘I have a distinct memory of getting off the chair and going to the doorway of the day room and watching the man as he walked down the corridor. I watched him until I lost sight of him when he went through some double doors at the end of the corridor.
‘What happened just seemed surreal. I was in shock and unable to put into context what had happened. I felt disorientated and walked back to the ward. I seem to remember initially I couldn’t find my way and went to a couple of other wards before I found mine. I hadn’t been gone very long. The whole thing happened very quickly, probably no more than 15 minutes.
‘As I went back to the ward I said to the nurse who had given me directions to the day room, “Your porter hurt me”. And the nurse said, “Where?” I couldn’t tell her so pointed to the area of my vagina. She said, “Don’t say anything, I’ll get into trouble.”
‘Having received this response I just went and sat on my bed. It was difficult to describe how I felt. I understood what had happened and that it was wrong and I felt strongly that I wanted people to know. I waited for the nurse who I had just told to become involved with a patient and I went over to her desk and got a pen. I tore out two pages of a bible, which was in my bedside unit. The pen I had taken didn’t work so I returned to the nurse’s station and got a pencil. I wrote on one of the torn out pages, “To the doctor. Your porter hurt me. Please ring my Dad.”
The woman said she then wrote down the address and telephone number for her father.
‘I then signed the page,’ she continued, ‘and I posted the sheet of paper in a letterbox that was situated in the corridor beyond my ward. I remember reading the word “letterbox”. The box was red and it was high up. I remember I had difficulty stretching up to post the page. I thought at the time I was posting the note to the doctors at the hospital.
‘The very same night of the rape I was in bed after the lights had been turned out. Although the ward was dark there was a partial light. I was half asleep when the same porter who had assaulted me earlier in the day came to my ward. This was the first time that I’d ever seen him on the ward. He was wearing the same clothes as he’d worn earlier.
‘I saw him walk straight to my bed as if he knew exactly where I was. I was frightened and I pulled the covers over my head. I could smell the same muggy odour that I’d smelled on him earlier in the day. The man stood to the left of my bed and without saying anything thrust one of his hands under the covers and positioned it between my legs. Although he didn’t insert his fingers he rubbed it on my vagina. I heard him make a sound as if he was enjoying what he was doing. He touched me in this way for only seconds; probably 10 to 20 seconds. I remember that his movements were rushed.
‘Again, I was really shocked by what was happening and didn’t know how to respond. I kept my head under the covers throughout. Just as suddenly as he had appeared he removed his hand and walked away from my bedside.
‘As he walked away I peeked my head out from under the covers and saw that he’d walked over to the bed of an elderly lady. As I watched him, I saw him literally jump on top of the woman so he was lying face down on top of her. As he did this, I heard a nurse shout, “You shouldn’t be in here, Jimmy.” I saw that he got off the lady and walked out of the ward. Nothing further was said.
‘The next day when I woke up, I noticed the woman who occupied the bed opposite me had gone and I didn’t see her again. As a result of being assaulted by the porter on a second occasion I decided I wanted to make sure that the doctors were aware of how the porter was behaving, so I wrote a second note, again on a page torn from the bible in my bedside unit. I wrote exactly the same message as I had done the day before and posted the note in the same letterbox.
‘Later during the course of that day I decided to try and find the porter. I don’t know what I intended to do. I left the ward and I made my way to the corridor, which led off the day room, the same corridor I’d watched the porter walk down after he’d raped me. I walked down the corridor myself and through the double doors I’d seen him go through.
‘I went into a bar where people were wearing white coats. I thought they were all doctors. They were sitting at tables, drinking and smoking. As I walked into the room one of the men said, “You shouldn’t be in here,” and he escorted me out. I couldn’t see if the porter who had assaulted me was in the bar or not. I went back to my ward and didn’t say anything further to the staff about either of the incidents, and I cannot remember anything more of my stay in hospital.
‘When I was about 14 years old I was watching television and I saw the porter who had assaulted me in hospital. I recognised his voice to begin with. The picture on our television was of poor quality and quite distorted. I was amazed to see the man was the porter from the hospital. I was sure of it because I recognised him visually and his mannerisms. His voice was very distinctive. I couldn’t understand why the porter from the hospital was on television.
‘In time I came to know that the porter was Jimmy Savile but I remained confused at that stage about the situation.’
*
Other than the utterly brazen and callous nature of Savile’s attack on the girl, the most shocking aspect of her account is the clear-eyed recollection of telling a nurse on the ward what had just been done to her, and her attempts to notify other members of the hospital staff.
Since Savile’s death and the dam wall breaking on his secret life of offending, it has become blindingly obvious it wasn’t such a secret life after all. At Stoke Mandeville, and at the other hospitals where he invested the bulk of his time, it seems that his behaviour was, if not well known, then at the very least discussed among members of staff.
In October 2012, in the immediate fallout from the scandal, Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust stated it was ‘shocked’ to hear of the allegations about Jimmy Savile, adding, ‘We are unaware of any record or reports of inappropriate behaviour of this nature durin
g Jimmy’s work with the trust.’1
In the late Seventies, John Lindsay was working as a detective constable with Thames Valley Police. He claimed it was then that a young female nurse at Stoke Mandeville told him staff were concerned about Jimmy Savile’s conduct during hospital visits.
‘[The nurse] said to me at the time they didn’t like Savile because he was touching little girls in hospital, not necessarily in a sexual way, but touching them and they were unhappy about the way he was going on,’ Lindsay said. ‘They told the little girls who were in hospital to stay in bed and give the impression they were asleep.’2
Lindsay reported the allegations to a senior colleague who brushed them off: ‘Jimmy Savile is a high-profile man,’ the senior officer is reported to have said. ‘He must be OK. He could not be doing anything irregular. Don’t worry about it.’ Nothing more was done and, Lindsay argued, there was little else he could do.
As a patient at Stoke Mandeville, Rebecca Owen recounts that she overheard nurses talking about how Jimmy Savile picked his targets: ‘It was an air of resignation that you had to put up with it,’ she said. ‘There was some sort of ironic chatter between the nurses about who would be the lucky one to go off to his room. And then, as one of the nurses was leaving or passing by my bed, she leant over and said the best thing you can do is stay in bed until he’s gone and pretend to be asleep.’3
Such assaults were taking place from the very start of Savile’s long association with Stoke Mandeville. A visitor to the hospital, who was nine at the time, claims Savile fondled him in his Rolls-Royce at a fund-raising event for the hospital in the very early 1970s. In 1971, Caroline Moore, who was paralysed from the chest down, was a 13-year-old patient at Stoke Mandeville when she says Savile attacked her in a corridor.
‘I was quite shy and lonely,’ recalled Moore. ‘I don’t remember him saying anything to me but he leant down and I was excited because I thought he was going to give me a wee peck on the cheek. But he took my face in his hands and rammed – and that is the only way I can describe it – he rammed his tongue right down the back of my throat, to the point where it almost made me gag … Afterwards he just walked off as if nothing had happened.’4
Another female patient reported a similar assault on her taking place in the late 1980s. She was in bed recovering from an operation at the time.
Like Liz Dux’s anonymous client, Caroline Moore tried telling people what had happened to her. ‘I told my family at the time: they didn’t take it seriously because he was such a high-profile character,’ she said.
In the same period that Detective Constable Lindsay informed his superior what he’d been told by a nurse at Stoke Mandeville, Samantha Dearan recounts how as an 11-year-old Savile repeatedly groped her during Catholic mass at the hospital’s chapel. The Dearan family worshipped at the chapel, and Samantha was regularly asked to carry round the collection plate.
‘Savile used to stand in the separate little room during mass,’ she explained, ‘and I had to go in there to get the offering plate while the service was going on. It was horrible; I used to hate it. I knew what was going to happen before I walked through the door. I just tried to get in and out as quickly as possible. It was so blatant it made you even more afraid to say anything. I thought it was my fault.’5
Samantha Dearan said the assaults continued for three or four years, and that Savile liked to keep the door open so he could see the priest. She believes he got a thrill out of it. ‘Eventually,’ she admits, ‘I stopped going to church because of him.’
It wasn’t only at Stoke Mandeville that Savile exploited his status as a famous benefactor to secure access to unsuspecting and largely defenceless patients. At Leeds General Infirmary, where he had hoodwinked the board of governors with his voluntary work and then bought the loyalty of the porters with his offers of free holidays in the caravans he kept dotted around the British coastline, he was acting with a similar level of impunity. And again, he was encouraged that nobody appeared to want to stop him.
In May 1972, June Thornton, a nurse from York, was admitted to the hospital for an operation on her spine. As she lay in bed, she recollects seeing Jimmy Savile approaching a young female patient on the same ward.
‘At the bottom of the ward, sat in a high-backed chair with arms, was a young woman,’ recounted Thornton. ‘It being a neuro ward, I think she had brain damage; she was sat there, not on this planet, bless her. Then Jimmy Savile came in and kissed her. I thought at the time he was a relative but then he kissed her neck and started rubbing his hands down her arms, and he started to molest her. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it because I was laid flat on my back.6
‘When a nurse eventually came in, I mentioned Jimmy Savile and pointed over to the girl and said, “If he comes anywhere near me I’ll scream the place down.”’ Thornton said the nurse merely shrugged her shoulders.7
Another former patient at the hospital claims Savile touched her inappropriately in a lift after she had undergone spinal surgery in 1973. ‘I felt too frightened to report it because everyone thought he was a saint,’ she said.8
In the same year, Beth, then a sixteen-year-old who lived at home with her parents in a village near York, was admitted to Leeds General Infirmary with a suspected nervous breakdown. She told me she was treated at the hospital for a period of three months. Towards the end of this period she recalled sitting on her bed in the middle of a ‘big, long ward’ when Jimmy Savile, who she had seen around from time to time, came over to chat.
‘Come with me,’ she remembers him saying, and he took her to a newsagent just outside the hospital whereupon he instructed the shopkeeper to give her whatever she wanted. ‘He swept his hand – magazines, sweets, everything,’ Beth said. Soon after she returned to her bed, a pile of items appeared. ‘I thought I was the chosen one,’ she reflected. ‘I now realise he was grooming me.’
The very next day, Beth was again sitting on her bed when she says Jimmy Savile sent for her. ‘A porter in a white coat came to pick me up from the ward. He took me through these corridors until we were in a sort of underpass under the LGI.’ Off a corridor leading from the service area was a small office. ‘The porter said nothing,’ she maintained, ‘he just knocked and opened the door.’ Inside, Jimmy Savile was stood, leaning on a wall.
‘He pulled me to him and started kissing me,’ explained Beth, who remembers wearing a cheesecloth dress she had made for her stay in hospital. ‘He had one hand on my right thigh and the other on my left breast. His tongue was in my mouth.’ She insisted Savile said nothing, other than asking her one question: ‘Are you on the pill?’ When Beth said no, she told me he put his hand over hers and forced her to masturbate him. She said he was wearing tracksuit-style trousers, which were down around his ankles by this point. He did not wear underwear.
‘It all happened so fast,’ Beth explained. ‘When he’d finished, he said, “You’ve got to go now,” and knocked on the door.’ Outside the office was waiting a different man, who was dressed in a white T-shirt rather than a white porter’s jacket. This second man took her back to the ward. Beth says that when she tried to tell a nurse what had happened, she only got as far as mentioning Jimmy Savile’s name before the group of nurses laughed and walked away.
‘It was tried and tested,’ she said of the manner in which she was groomed, taken from the ward and assaulted. ‘No words were spoken, the knock on the office door, the different men to take me there and back to the ward.’ She claims not to have seen Savile again before being discharged. When she told her parents, she said her father refused to believe her. Her mother said she felt most people would feel the same as her father.
But it wasn’t only patients Savile preyed on, it seems. An account posted to an online Leeds forum9 on the day his death was announced suggests that he had keys to nurses’ accommodation at Leeds General Infirmary.
The author claimed his ex-wife was a student nurse at the hospital in the early 1970s. As a volunteer porter, Savile
would enter ‘when the girls would be in various states of undress’ or regularly went ‘into the shower room at the end of the girls’ shifts to “clean”.’ According to the post, complaints were made to the board of the hospital but nothing was done.
‘The girls in my fiancées’ [sic] room were really getting scared of him, so one evening me and another of the girls’ boyfriends sneaked into their room after the girls came off duty. [Savile] used his master key to “accidentally” walk in – and me and the lad were in his face. He went white and ran out.’
The man recounted how Savile returned minutes later with security guards. He warned the girls that if anything was said, they would lose their jobs.
The same source claimed that six months later he and a friend got into a fight with Savile after he groped and then slapped the man’s girlfriend at the student nurse’s Christmas ball at Leeds Polytechnic. His account stated Savile had tried to press charges but there were too many witnesses. The incident was hushed up, as was Savile’s attempted rape of another student nurse.
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which has managed Leeds General Infirmary and St James’s University Hospital since 1998, has consistently denied having ‘any record of complaints about Jimmy Savile’s behaviour made during the time he was a volunteer and charity supporter at Leeds General Infirmary or at any of our other hospitals’.10 That said, it confirmed records dating back to the 1980s and beyond were difficult to search ‘due to the change in governance structures.’
Liz Dux, who represents 27 clients, both male and female, who were abused while in the care of the National Health Service, says Savile’s attacks on patients at hospitals in Leeds included forcing children to masturbate him and digital penetration. These offences took place from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s.
Beth told me that she saw Jimmy Savile at Leeds General Infirmary in the final years of his life. ‘He was walking quickly flanked by two police officers,’ she said. ‘He had the air of a very important man. I remember thinking how pretentious it looked.’
