In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  The attempts by Savile’s victims to report him are a recurring theme, Dux confirms. ‘We had a body of people saying, “Yes, I did tell someone and they didn’t believe me so what was I supposed to do?”’

  45. AM I SAVED?

  British society rose as one to salute the saint in its midst. In June 1978, Bob Brooksby chauffeured Jimmy Savile to the Dorchester Hotel where members of the royal family and stars of show business rose to give a standing ovation as he walked into the banqueting hall for a special Variety Club luncheon.

  Angus Ogilvy, husband of Princess Alexandra and president of the National Association of Youth Clubs, which Jimmy Savile had raised funds for, was the first to get up to speak: ‘He has done more than perhaps anyone else to make the lives of unfortunate people happier than they might ever have been,’1 said Ogilvy.

  Savile talked of how he had felt ‘great friendship from the off’ with Ogilvy and his wife, socialising with them at the NAYC headquarters on Devonshire Street in London and at any number of gala events. Princess Alexandra was a patron of a hostel for girls in care: ‘At this place I’m a cross between a term-time boyfriend and a fixer of special trips out,’ he added.2

  It sounds uncannily like the role he created for himself at Duncroft, where their paths certainly crossed at a garden party in May 1974. The Queen’s cousin was a patron of the mental health charity MIND, and on that occasion she greeted Jimmy Savile with a level of enthusiasm and familiarity that is said to have shocked the school’s main governor, Lady Montagu Norman.

  Bill Cotton, by then controller of BBC1, was the next to pay tribute in the Dorchester’s banqueting hall: ‘Jim Callaghan might be Prime Minister and Jimmy Carter President of the United States, but when you say Jim’ll Fix It everybody knows who you mean.’3 Jimmy Savile nodded and waved, drinking in the acclaim. He was seated between Lord Louis Mountbatten and Sir Billy Butlin, two men representative of the social poles he now spanned.

  The Christmas cards from members of the royal family and the ease with which Savile was able to get a 13-year-old girl inside Buckingham Palace during a royal reception – something he boasted about on Michael Parkinson’s chat show – underlined how, through Mountbatten’s patronage, he had become a firm favourite in royal circles.

  ‘Royalty are surrounded by people who don’t know how to deal with it,’ he explained of the fascination he seemed to hold for them. ‘I have a freshness of approach which they obviously find to their liking … I have a natural good fun way of going on and we have a laugh. They don’t get too many laughs. Some people have said I’m a court jester. I know I have freak value.’4

  ‘He was terribly pleased to know famous people, particularly the royal family,’ Roger Ordish recounted. ‘I remember we once did something with Angus Ogilvy, who was toe in the water with royalty. We were filming and he didn’t even introduce me. I thought that was a bit strange. It was almost as though he was jealous: “They’re going to know me, they’re not going to know you, sunshine.”’

  With viewing figures of over 16 million and thousands of letters arriving each week, Jim’ll Fix It was causing its star to make some uncomfortable readjustments. ‘He said it’s the worst thing he ever did,’ recalled a friend. ‘He said it ruined him … He said, “Wherever I go in the world anyone under 20 calls me Jim’ll … Jimmy Savile is dead.” He never got to be Jimmy Savile again.’

  Ordish confirmed the reality was someway removed from the popular perception of Jimmy Savile as the nation’s Santa Claus. ‘For someone who was so calculating about his own image, and so ambitious for himself, he occasionally said things that jarred and were, frankly, out of order,’ he said. ‘He sort of hoped no one was listening.’

  When I asked Jim’ll Fix It’s producer to give me an example of the odd comments Jimmy Savile sometimes made, he recounted a conversation with Gill Stribling-Wright, one of the researchers on the show. ‘Jim was talking about some very beautiful woman on the programme and Gill said to him, “Do you fancy her?” He said, “Oh no, much too old.” [The woman] was only 25, or something like that. He then said, “Walnut, walnut.”’

  Ordish explained ‘walnut’ was Jimmy Savile’s reference to the woman’s clitoris. It’s no surprise to learn members of the production team described Jim’ll Fix It’s host as ‘weird’.

  And yet despite making such remarks to young women working on the show, he was strangely puritanical when it came to what he allowed on Jim’ll Fix It. ‘We did an air-sea rescue thing that involved some girls,’ Ordish explained. ‘These girls pushed their teacher into the sea, obviously knowing that the air-sea rescue was coming, but I remember Jim asking me how I was going to do it. He didn’t want it to be disrespectful.’

  Ordish believes the incredible viewing figures for the show – it even topped ITV’s Coronation Street in some weeks – forced Savile to look at himself and make some tough choices: ‘I suppose [he] was thinking, “I better go straight here.”’

  Just not quite yet, it seemed. Jimmy Savile’s mutually beneficial relationship with P&O came to an end that summer when he was thrown off the company’s flagship, the luxury liner SS Canberra, after complaints from the parents of a 14-year-old girl. The girl in question was not the only teenager he attempted to lure into his cabin on that cruise, as Jane (not her real name), then 16, testified.

  The star approached Jane and a friend and promised them autographs if they followed him back to his first-class quarters. They were taken inside whereupon he immediately began taking off his trousers. Jane said he begged her for a cuddle before pulling her onto his bed.

  ‘He was very forceful and wrapped himself right around me,’ she recounted. ‘It was quite frightening. At one point he slipped out of his pants and started rubbing himself up against me. I could feel that he was excited.’ Jane now believes that if her friend, who took photographs of the incident, had not been present she would have been forced to have sex with Jimmy Savile.

  A few days later, Jimmy Savile was summoned to the captain’s day room. Complaints had been made to a ship’s officer before the Canberra’s captain heard as the parents of a 14-year-old girl described how the 51-year-old celebrity had pursued their daughter around the ship.

  Savile denied everything. ‘But the more I quizzed him,’ said the captain, who refuses to be named, ‘the more convinced I became that he was lying. He was a shifty sort of chap whose eyes darted all over the place. The parents, who were not travelling first class, were very decent, ordinary people who were scandalised by Savile’s unwanted attention to their daughter.

  ‘I told him he disgusted me and I wanted him off my ship when we reached Gibraltar. I detailed an officer to make sure he remained in his cabin until we reached the Rock. He was to take all his meals in his cabin and was not allowed to leave it under any circumstances short of shipwreck.’5

  Brian Hitchen, the former newspaper editor, confirmed that he heard the story about Jimmy Savile’s expulsion from the Canberra all those years ago. So why did he not report it? ‘Two reasons,’ he replied. ‘In those days newspapers did not write “nasty” stories about celebrities unless the famous had been handsomely paid for their often fairly tame revelations. The second reason is because Britain’s libel laws too often help make those like Savile untouchable.’6

  *

  Having escaped public condemnation for his shocking behaviour at sea, the next stage in Jimmy Savile’s unlikely metamorphosis took place a year later with the publication of God’ll Fix It, a slim volume that outlined his views on faith. In his preface to the series of interviews contained within, Reverend Colin Semper had some interesting things to say about the man he produced on Speakeasy for four years.

  He described him as a ‘mystery man’ and ‘difficult to know’, and asked, ‘Who is this blond-haired eccentric who can help a prostitute with a problem on the same day as he introduces Songs of Praise?’ Semper had no answers, as such, but was convinced Savile was genuine. Why? ‘Because however clever you are, if you ar
e not genuine, you will be found out.’

  Semper likened Savile to a wizard: ‘You never know what kind of answer you’re going to get. Usually the answers are off-beat, they can sound crazy but I have come to think that it could be a brave and glorious madness.’7

  The book itself is extraordinary, and as close as Jimmy Savile ever came to a mea culpa. As well as illuminating his twisted view of the world, it also revealed how he justified his actions.

  In the chapter titled ‘How Do I See Jesus of Nazareth?’, he talked about how every human body was unique. ‘Nature makes one body of a woman, say, into that of a nymphomaniac, or that of a man into a very hot sex outfit. You can’t expect all of these to behave in the same way. God’s suggestions, the suggestions of Jesus, are therefore different for different people.’8

  In the very next chapter, he again bracketed himself alongside Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ himself for the way he was occasionally vilified for his very public good works. He said he was aware that the more he did, the more likely it was that he would find that someone would want to kill him.

  In the chapter ‘What Happens When I Die?’ he discussed his work in the mortuaries of Stoke Mandeville and Leeds General Infirmary, and how ‘the imperfect chemical envelope’ of the body changes in death. He stated his belief that those who had ‘surrendered’ themselves to evil in life would be ‘surrendered to the forces of evil’ in the afterlife, and said death was something he was looking forward to ‘with quite considerable excitement’.9

  The most significant confessions, however, came towards the end of the book. In ‘Am I Saved?’ he admitted being an ‘abuser of things, and bodies, and people’ and recounted how he took troublemakers in his dancehall downstairs to the boiler room whereupon they’d be tied up and gagged. After everyone else had gone home, his minders would beat them.

  He also acknowledged that he took advantage of women: ‘That shows you that the forces of evil are causing me to do something which, on reflection, I would rather not have done,’ he argued. ‘I am frail like everyone else.’

  It was but a minor concession before he outlined how he weighed his actions. ‘I often wonder if [God] works a debit side and a credit side, or whether a debit is a debit full stop. I think I’m in credit but I would hate to think that I could commit all sorts of sins just because I might have a credit balance.’10

  ‘He saw the fund-raising as part of his credit side,’ agreed Semper. ‘The more he could get, the more bonus points he’d have in the Kingdom of God.’

  Jimmy Savile expanded on the theme of credit and debit in the chapter ‘What Shall I Say at the Pearly Gates and at the Judgement Table?’ He explained how he would argue with St Peter if he pointed out all the sins he had committed, and argue that it was the machine of [his] body’ that had caused him to do such things.11

  ‘It could be that the person arriving at the judgement seat had been given a body prone to excesses because the glands dictated that he should be more than was really normal,’ he said. ‘The temptation could also be towards sexual excess in a girl – and I have known many – who has been born a nymphomaniac. She can’t resist a man who runs his finger down her arm … She might not really want to be possessed by that man, but her body – and this is a medical fact – finds great difficulty in resisting.’12

  It is a telling passage, and one that for once affords a view beyond the high walls of Jimmy Savile’s assiduously constructed façade. It also suggests that his access to the psychiatrists at Broadmoor had helped him to arrive at some kind of understanding of, and explanation for, that which he believed his own glands ‘dictated’. Conveniently, he decided that such people should be forgiven because they were more ‘unlucky than bad’.

  And yet, in a discussion on how he coped with sex, he once again demonstrated his unerring ability to reference the very core of his depravity, even in the process of delivering his lessons on life: ‘Sex at its worst is corruption,’ he said, ‘as when young people might be corrupted to provide sex.’13 Sex, was fine, he maintained, as long as it didn’t ‘cause distress’.

  ‘That awful book,’ sighed Reverend Colin Semper when I asked him for his reflections on a specific line he’d written in the preface to God’ll Fix It: ‘[Jimmy] worked at being a character, almost as if to say, “They’ll never catch me out.”’ Semper agreed it has taken on a very different complexion in light of what we now know.

  ‘[Savile] liked to be outlandish and then he’d sort of cover it up,’ he said. ‘He was a kind of chameleon, really. He flitted from place to place and took on the foliage of the place. It was a strange, strange business really.’

  Thirty-five years on, he acknowledged that Jimmy Savile was trying to balance out what he had done; that he was mitigating for it in some way before moving forward and, in his mind at least, trying to atone for his sins. I put it to Semper that what Jimmy wrote indicates he could have been in no doubt that what he was doing was wrong. ‘I think he did too,’ Semper said quietly. ‘I think he definitely knew.’

  *

  Despite rising public fears about children being at risk from predatory adults and a shift in emphasis in childcare away from solving and containing the problem of delinquency and towards the protection of the most vulnerable members of society, in April 1978, the National Council for Civil Liberties stated that two of its affiliated groups, the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, should be allowed to campaign for an abolition of the age of consent.

  Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was planning to reform the law at the time and the Protection of Children Bill proposed to tighten the rules on child pornography by outlawing indecent images of children under the age of 16. The NCCL’s response was to advocate reducing the age of consent to 14, arguing ‘childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage’. It claimed children would suffer more from having to recount their experiences in court.

  In 1976, the NCCL had filed a submission to a parliamentary committee arguing that the new law could lead to ‘damaging and absurd prosecutions’. Two years later a letter written by the NCCL’s legal officer, a young lawyer named Harriet Harman, in official response to the bill, argued that pornographic photos or films of children should not be classified as ‘indecent’ unless it could be proven that the child had suffered. The NCCL’s suggested amendment placed the onus of proof on the prosecution.

  In its official submission, the NCCL stated, ‘Although this harm may be of a somewhat speculative nature, where participation falls short of physical assault, it is none-the-less justifiable to restrain activities by photographers which involve placing children under the age of 14 (or, arguably, 16) in sexual situations.

  ‘We suggest that the term “indecent” be qualified as follows: A photograph or film shall not for this purpose be considered indecent (a) by reason only that the model is in a state of undress (whether complete or partial); (b) unless it is proved or is to be inferred from the photograph or film that the making of the photograph or film might reasonably be expected to have caused the model physical harm or pronounced psychological or emotional disorder.’

  The Protection of Children Act was passed on 20 July 1978. It was the last major child protection legislation for eleven years.

  PART FIVE

  46. REWRITING HISTORY

  Mark Williams-Thomas had five of Jimmy Savile’s victims on film, as well as others who had witnessed his offending behaviour. What he did not have, though, was a final part to his hour-long documentary. He needed expert, independent analysis of the evidence and it came with the contribution of Ian Glenn QC. After watching the filmed interviews, Glenn said it was his opinion that Williams-Thomas had enough for Jimmy Savile to be arrested were he still alive.

  The next step, Williams-Thomas decided, was to show the material to Esther Rantzen, the television presenter and founder of Childline, the child protection charity. Rantzen held her head in he
r hands when she saw it. ‘I think it was incredibly powerful,’ says Williams-Thomas. ‘Rantzen’s was a very genuine response. The evidence, when you looked at it all together, was compelling.’

  Executive producer Alex Gardiner, commissioning editor Ian Squires and ITV’s director of television Peter Fincham were all well aware of the risks involved in the exposé of a national hero and stayed closely involved throughout the process, reviewing new interviews as they were completed. Williams-Thomas maintains that while they remained supportive throughout, there was no input in terms of how the investigation was managed: ‘I was left with Lesley [Gardiner] and between the two of us we built it and put it together.’

  On 7 September, a three-page letter from Williams-Thomas and Gardiner arrived at the office of George Entwistle, who was about to take over as director general of the BBC. The letter set out the allegations against Jimmy Savile made in ITV’s forthcoming Exposure documentary as they related to the BBC, and posed a number of questions.

  Paul Mylrea, the BBC’s director of Public Affairs, told the Pollard inquiry that the legal team initially drove the corporation’s response to the letter. ‘They were beginning to examine what there was on record, whether there was anything – any knowledge of Savile,’ he said. What is apparent, though, is that lines of communication within the BBC had already started to break down. Panic was setting in.1

  Four days later, Stephen Mitchell, the deputy director of BBC News, collared Meirion Jones and raised the Savile issue. Mitchell said there had been no management interference in the decision not to proceed with the Newsnight story. When Jones began to outline why he believed pulling the story would have grave consequences for the BBC he recalls Mitchell shutting him down.