In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  ‘I know exactly what I can do and what I can’t do,’ Savile said of his royal associations over breakfast at Ossie’s Café in Marylebone. ‘What I did with [Matthews] was give him an out. I said to him, if you come across anybody that can help us or get involved, let me know. I left his office and phoned the palace. I got the Duke of Edinburgh’s secretary to write a letter to him saying, “I understand you are going to help Jimmy Savile build Stoke Mandeville Hospital. This is a wonderful thing and will be much appreciated by the country. Philip.”

  ‘When I went round … to see the Duke of Edinburgh, he said, “The letter: it’s gone.” He said to me, “Do you know the geezer?” And I said, “No, never met him before in my life.”’

  Savile told me he’d received a telephone call the very next day. Matthews told him that he’d got the letter and realised Savile had ‘put an arm up his back’. Matthews put it to Savile that he had dictated the letter. It was an accusation he didn’t deny. As he recalled, Matthews then asked him, ‘Why are you so honest?’ To which he replied: ‘I’m always honest with the people I deal with.’ He claimed Matthews then said, ‘Who says you’ve got a deal?’ Savile replied, ‘Prince Philip.’

  Matthews knew he’d been manipulated and asked Savile what it was that he wanted. ‘Your building company, the Daily Express and the London Evening Standard [also owned by Matthews],’ came the reply. The deal was struck.

  ‘What was in it for him?’ Savile asked rhetorically, having polished off his eggs on toast. ‘Well, he was still a mister at the time. I’m not saying what I did was get him a title or anything like that but he finished up in the House of Lords.’ A dedicated Thatcherite, Matthews was indeed awarded a peerage by the prime minister towards the end of 1980. The fact he also owned the Cunard Line, and therefore the QE2, was an added bonus for Jimmy Savile, given that he was now persona non grata with P&O.

  On 6 March, Gerard Vaughan updated the prime minister on the progress of the fund-raising campaign: ‘Jimmy Savile has made an excellent start,’ he wrote. ‘The fund is approaching £300,000, largely from small donations which are coming in well. He and I, with the Department, have also established a number of potential sources of more major finance; and (though he is keeping this confidential at this stage) Victor Matthews has promised him full involvement – of the Express newspapers and, even more important, of the building components of the Trafalgar Group (Trollope and Colls and Cementation).’

  The extent of Savile’s blossoming relationship with Prince Charles became clearer in the same note sent by Gerard Vaughan to the prime minister: ‘Even more encouraging, though again confidential at this stage, Jimmy Savile tells me that the Prince of Wales has agreed to be Patron of the Appeal.’9

  The relationship with Prince Charles was sanctioned and fostered by the Duke of Edinburgh who viewed Jimmy Savile as someone who might be useful for his eldest son when it came to the common touch. Savile had met Charles and talked with him at various events but now he joined a circle of unofficial advisers to the heir to the throne, chiefly because of their shared interest in disabled charities. Charles had visited Stoke Mandeville in 1977, where he met and talked with the Spinal Injuries Centre founder, Dr Ludwig Guttman. His relationship with Savile blossomed over the following years, to the point where Princess Diana would describe the disc jockey and fund-raiser as her husband’s ‘mentor’.

  Donations to Jimmy Savile’s Stoke Mandeville Appeal topped the £1 million mark within eight weeks. Readers of the Daily Express, which threw its weight behind the campaign, received an ‘I Fixed It for Jim’ lapel badge and car sticker when they filled out and returned a donation coupon in the newspaper. From teenage schoolgirls doing a sponsored swim to nurses donating their lunch money, penniless housewives sending in Green Shield stamps to Borstal boys walking from London to Nottingham, it was a campaign that seemed to capture the imagination within every strata of society. And there on the news and in the papers, on the nation’s lapels and in its car windows, was the face of Jimmy Savile.

  The enthusiasm for the Stoke Mandeville campaign marked the opening of an era of national charity appeals.

  ‘People who are disabled are not like us,’ Savile pointed out as the money kept pouring in. ‘They can enrich our lives far more than we enrich theirs. I might be doing something for them – but they do an even better thing for me.’ They most certainly were, for inadvertently they were making him bulletproof.

  *

  The drive to rebuild the spinal unit at Stoke Mandeville was not the only multi-million pound campaign that Jimmy Savile lent his face to in the early part of 1980. He was also the man chosen to front the most lucrative account in British advertising.

  After 30 years of steady decline, British Rail had become a national joke, and a bad one at that. Blighted by a series of industrial disputes and offering a service lampooned for late or cancelled trains, not to mention famously terrible sandwiches, BR was responsible for the sour taste familiar to the millions that used it. Under the leadership of Peter Parker, who was made chairman in 1976, a plan was hatched to revive Britain’s love affair with high-speed trains. The first step was the introduction of the Inter-City 125, with the first sets going into service in the autumn of that year.

  The battle to win the BR account was fiercely fought, with six of the country’s leading advertising agencies in the running. Peter Marsh of Allen, Brady & Marsh understood that he needed to make an impact with his initial pitch. His answer was to keep a delegation of British Rail officials waiting in a deliberately filthy waiting room at his company’s offices. Only at the point when they were ready to walk out did Marsh, dressed in full BR uniform, put his head round the door and remind them that this was what their customers experienced on a daily basis.

  If Marsh had grabbed their attention, he still needed to nail the final stage of the pitch to secure the account. Recognising that an experienced presenter would be required to effectively relay the mass of information he wanted to get across, he set his researchers to work on producing a statement that underlined the personality chosen believed in an integrated, publicly owned rail service that offered customer value and was committed to modernisation. A number of presenters were called in to do a filmed audition, including Terry Wogan and Jimmy Savile, who claimed to travel in excess of 30,000 miles each year by train. The taped candidate statements were then played to members of the public who were asked for their reactions. ‘Everybody endorsed [the one] with Jimmy Savile,’10 said Marsh.

  But when the results were fed to Peter Parker, BR’s chairman was unconvinced. He said that he wanted more research done. ‘We’re a bit like a doctor, Peter,’ Marsh replied. ‘We don’t have to love our patients to give them the correct advice. Because of the robustness of the results we cannot other than recommend [Jimmy Savile] without any reservation.’

  The decision was made. Marsh was hired and Britain’s national rail network was about to be rebranded via the exhortations of a man the public seemed to trust above all others.

  ‘I sort it all out myself,’ bragged Savile when asked how much he was earning from the TV and billboard adverts that became ubiquitous from March 1980. ‘British Rail come and say, “Will you do the job for £x?” “Ridiculous, I answer, make it £3x, and go away and think about it.” They go away, cogitate and usually we sort out a figure that is closer to my idea than theirs.’11

  ‘I didn’t like him very much,’ admitted Marsh, ‘but I didn’t have to. When he delivered his words he was brilliant. When you are a professional, you have to deal with people you wouldn’t choose to go to the opera with.’

  The Jimmy Savile seen in the ads was a new and unfamiliar one; Allen, Brady & Marsh briefed him meticulously on his clothes and hair, two components of his image that had never previously been up for discussion. The result was a suited, freshly shorn figure that looked like he meant business. And that business, all £6 million of it, was proclaiming ‘This is the age of the train.’ It was a slogan, like the man wh
o delivered it, which became a part of the fabric of British life.

  *

  It seems inconceivable at a time when vast swathes of the public regarded Jimmy Savile as the one of the most trusted and admired men in Britain; a time when he had the ear of senior members of the royal family and the nation’s most powerful political figures; a time when he was the mouthpiece of national concerns; when the Jim’ll Fix It Christmas special drew 22 million viewers, that he should also be the subject of serious allegations reported to police forces at opposite ends of England.

  The first related to Detective Constable John Lindsay’s conversation with a more senior officer at Thames Valley Police. More shocking still is the revelation that in 1980, as Jimmy Savile was being feted by the prime minister and calling in favours from the Duke of Edinburgh, he was summoned by West Yorkshire Police to provide a cast of his teeth.

  Bite marks had been found on the bodies of two victims of the Yorkshire Ripper, the serial killer then believed to be responsible for the murders of 11 women. The third victim, Irene Richardson, a prostitute from the Leeds suburb of Chapeltown, had been found near the Roundhay Park flat Jimmy Savile had only recently moved into.

  Former detective John Stainthorpe spent 40 years with the West Yorkshire Police and was involved in the massive manhunt to bring the killer to justice. ‘When the Ripper was really active one of the suspects put forward by members of the public was Jimmy Savile,’12 he confirmed. He remembers the tip-off being supplied anonymously.

  Dr Mace Joffe, a Harley Street dentist, was contacted to take the mould. Dr Joffe is now dead, although a friend insisted he’d revealed that the police said Jimmy Savile was a suspect because he was known for using prostitutes in and around Leeds.

  And yet the public face remained as inscrutable and as blemish-free as ever. His policy on what made it into Jim’ll Fix It bordered on the puritanical: ‘I was very firm in telling the BBC what I didn’t want,’ he explained. ‘Violence, lavatory jokes, sex and such like can go in all the other shows that want them.’13

  48. ALL SORTS OF TROUBLE

  ‘Ah ha, is that the fearless reporter, he who wields the sword of truth? The famous journalist scourge of all wrong-doers?’ It was how Jimmy Savile liked to open our telephone conversations. He had called to tell me there were reporters wanting to speak to him about the feature I had written in the June 2008 edition of Esquire magazine. It was a long and detailed piece, based on three lengthy interviews, two in London and one overnighter hosted at his flat in Leeds.

  ‘Jim the Fixer’, as the feature was headlined, was my third big Jimmy Savile story to be published in five years. In that time, he’d accommodated me, pricked my curiosity and seemingly accepted that I was one of the only journalists who wanted to know more. I was also a source of publicity, the oxygen of which he had found to be in short supply in his old age.

  On my previous visits to Leeds and Scarborough, Savile had told me all about his six-decade reign of brilliance. He was not kidding when he referred to himself as ‘the Godfather’ and his observance of the code of omertà was anything but a joke. He had spent a lifetime drawing attention to himself without ever really revealing who, or what he really was. At our first meeting he told me, ‘I am the man what knows everything but says nothing. I get things done but I work deep cover.’ On that occasion, he was referring to his peculiar relationship with the royal family.

  For the Esquire story, he again enjoyed the challenge of saying a lot but revealing little. What he gave me, though, was revelatory enough for the Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday to devote column inches to exploring the veracity of his claims. Could Sir Jimmy Savile, octogenarian celebrity relic, really be one of the best-connected men in Britain? Neither paper could find anyone to disprove my findings, although Paul Merton and Ian Hislop still had fun at his expense on the following week’s Have I Got News For You?

  ‘Now then, you’ve got me in all sorts of trouble,’ announced Savile flatly from the other end of the line. He hadn’t seen a copy of the magazine yet and I wasn’t sure whether he had caught the previous Friday’s episode of the show. For a split second I was wrong-footed. A low, tobacco-coated cackle confirmed he was as laid back about life as he always claimed to be. For the time being, Jimmy Savile was news again and that was just fine by him.

  He asked me how I’d been and I told him I had split up with a girlfriend. I was knee deep in boxes and self-pity, and about to temporarily move out of the flat we had bought together and into a concrete shed at the bottom of a friend’s garden. ‘It could be worse,’ snapped Savile. ‘You could be with me at Stoke Mandeville, looking at a knockout teenage girl who’s just been told she’s never going to walk again.’

  This was typical, I thought: no-nonsense Yorkshire logic deployed to obliterate all emotional obstacles in its path. He was obviously at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire, doing his rounds at the National Spinal Injuries Centre, a facility part funded and still owned by his charitable trust. I knew he spent a couple of nights at the hospital most weeks and tried to imagine what he’d been doing that day. I wanted to see him in his Stoke Mandeville environment.

  ‘Or you could have the Sun knocking on your door because you’ve been carrying on with underage girls.’

  This conversational sucker punch caught me unawares, and by the time I had properly absorbed what he’d just said, Savile had performed another of his deft sidesteps. He announced he was about to embark on a 16-day cruise of the Mediterranean on board the QE2, a liner he’d boasted about travelling on more than 30 times. I heard a rustling of paper before he reeled off a list of dates and scheduled shore visits. And then, in his staccato for emphasis way, he added, ‘So, why-don’t-you-phone-my-man-at-Cunard-and-say … you-are-coming-to-interview-me?’

  And with that, he fixed it.

  *

  I woke with a dry mouth and a pulsing headache from too much to drink the night before. I had spent the evening alone in a beachfront bar in Cadiz, wondering what the hell I was doing there and why I was about to embark on a short cruise with a man I’d spent so much of my life obsessing over.

  A feeling of dread had settled in the pit of my stomach. There was no magazine commission this time, only his promise of a ‘nice break’ and ‘a bit of fun’. A bit of fun, in this case, that would involve four days at sea with an aged bachelor in a shell suit. After all this time carrying him around in my head, all the time wondering about him and trying to find out who he was, this, I felt sure, was the beginning of the end.

  Light poured through the window of my budget hotel room. I showered, got dressed and headed downstairs where the duty manager called me a taxi. As we reached the port nestling beneath the ramparts of the historic old town, Cunard’s iconic flagship reflected the morning sunlight. Viewed from a distance, the ship seemed to dwarf the cranes and the brightly coloured containers stacked in the depot alongside. Up close, the long shadow cast by her vast hull offered shade to the column of OAPs waddling back along the quayside.

  Cadiz was the last overseas stop on the ship’s farewell cruise of the Mediterranean. Six months from now the QE2’s 39-year, globe-crossing story would end in Dubai, where £200 million of Saudi money was waiting to be spent on transforming her into a luxury, floating hotel.

  I paid the taxi driver and pulled my travel bag to the bottom of the gangplank where a white uniformed ship’s officer ticked my name off a list. On stepping aboard, I was led through a series of red-carpeted corridors to cabin 1077 on 1 Deck. ‘So you’re the famous journalist,’ said the woman officer as she opened the door and handed me the keys. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’ The words had come straight from the lips of Jimmy Savile.

  Inside, the decor reminded me of his flats in Leeds and Scarborough: familiar deep reds and purples in the carpet, bedspread and curtains, offset by dark wood in the cabinets and wardrobes. It even had a similar aroma, the cabins of the QE2 being among the last indoor areas in the English-speaking world where it was pe
rmissible to smoke. Savile, I’d been told, was in cabin 2044 so I picked up the phone and called. There was no answer.

  Lying on the bed was a printed programme of the day. Afternoon activities included ‘low impact aerobics on 7 Deck, C stairway’, ‘darts competition with Cruise Staff in The Golden Lion Pub’, ‘Afternoon Tea with Pianist Frankie in the Queens Room’ and, at 5 p.m., a ‘Sailaway Party!’ where passengers could enjoy the ‘live sounds of our Caribbean Band ChangeZ’ at the Funnel Bar on the sun deck. Tonight’s dress code was ‘semi formal – jacket and tie for gentlemen, cocktail dress or trouser suit for ladies’. I unpacked my bag and went for a wander.

  By lunchtime, I had still not found him. On the pool deck, the early afternoon sun had begun baking the bald heads and bingo wings resident in the deckchairs. Up a flight of metal stairs, a metal balcony afforded a view onto a gently perspiring congregation of mahogany-tanned torsos and food-filled bellies below. Inside, snaking lines of silver-haired passengers pushed trays between food stations offering cold meats, salads, and a whole rotunda of desserts at the Lido Restaurant’s all-day buffet. I kept on searching, climbing another set of stairs to the boat deck and heading back inside, past the Royal Promenade shopping area with its Harrods concession.

  Further on and down another flight of stairs, a large rectangular display case dominated the wall at one end of an expansive landing. Inside it were scores of photographs, suspended at different distances from the glass. Black and white and colour pictures captured the great, the good and the glamorous enjoying what looked like glitzy nights and lazy days at sea. I stopped for a while and looked at them until my eyes relaxed and the faces dissolved into a gently vibrating blur: Nelson Mandela, David Niven, Princess Margaret, Paul Newman, Bing Crosby, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Margaret, a platinum-wigged Mr Punch. My vision snapped back into focus and inevitably, he was there: Jimmy Savile, gurning at me from bottom right of the cabinet. And there again, middle left, just along from Les Dawson. And again, top right. And there, through a doorway to my left, he was again, only this time it really was him.