by Dan Davies
‘Okay,’ interjected the police officer, ‘so your expectation in handing the letters to them is that they’re going to investigate them?’
‘No, no, not investigate them, no. Not going to do anything with them, but if anything happens to me … ’
‘Store them on your behalf then?’
‘Well yeah, but they don’t keep them very long. They pass them round the office and everybody has a laugh just like the girls here did when we got the thing from the consultant.’
He was being quite open about the fact that he’d received threatening letters in the past. He claimed they had not been investigated, however. ‘If I got an instinct that it was a bit dodgy then the forensics are just round the corner at [Wetherby] and so I can get them looked at as a favour, cos I know the people in there.’
Finally – finally – Jimmy Savile returned to the ‘policy’, the phrase he had dropped so ominously at the beginning of the interview. ‘I take these things very seriously,’ he reiterated before recounting how he had successfully sued five newspapers. ‘Not one of them wanted to finish up in court with me,’ he warned, ‘so they all settled out of court.’
Buoyed by the ease with which he’d swatted away their questions, Savile decided it was now time to issue a threat. ‘Now this to me,’ he said, ‘is exactly one of those things, so I’ve already told my legal people that somebody were going to come and talk to me, and they’ve got a copy of your letter …’. He then added, ‘if it doesn’t disappear for any reason, then my policy will swing into action …
‘I have an LLD, that’s a Doctor of Laws,’ he boasted, ‘not an honorary one but a real one. That gives me friends. If I was going to sue anyone, we would not go to a local court, we would go to the Old Bailey cos my people can put time in the Old Bailey … So my legal people are ready and waiting. All we need is a name and an address and then the due process would start … obviously if I’m prepared to take somebody to court and put them in front of a judge then there can’t be much wrong with my policy of behaviour because I’ve never done anybody any harm in my entire life … I have no need to chase girls, there are thousands of them on Top of the Pops, thousands on Radio One. No need to take liberties with them.’
It was a tried and tested form of defence. ‘In fact, from a newspaper point of view I’m very boring … I don’t drink no booze, no drugs, no kinky carryings on, don’t go to brothels or anything like that. … But because I take everything seriously I’ve alerted my legal team and they may be doing business. And if we do, then you ladies,’ he said, motioning to the two Surrey Police officers, ‘will finish up at the Old Bailey as well because we will be wanting you there as witnesses.
‘Nobody ever seems to want to go that far,’ he warned. ‘I’m known in the trade as litigiousness [sic] which means to say I’m willing to pull people into court straight away, no messing thank you.’
And still he was allowed to go on, uninterrupted and undeterred by the two police officers in the room. He described how he brushed away women who tried to blackmail him like ‘midges’ before again underlining his status, and the ramifications of taking legal action against him. ‘I own this hospital,’ he said. ‘NHS run it, I own it … If I wasn’t here they wouldn’t get the quarter of a million pound a year that they need to keep it going. There’s nobody these days of that calibre that can do that.’
‘Okay,’ said one of the Surrey Police officers at last. ‘So Jimmy, is there anything you want to add …’
‘No, not at all,’ he snapped. ‘It’s complete fantasy, it really, really is … neither thing was at a place where you get away with what they said … and I wouldn’t want to in the first place anyway. Complete fantasy.’
It was 11.40 a.m. when the interview was called to a halt. It had been an utterly one-sided affair, one politely described by the statutory body responsible for inspecting the police forces of England and Wales, as ‘ineffective’.12
*
On 28 October 2009, three days before Jimmy Savile celebrated his 83rd birthday, the same female Detective Constable who had interviewed the victim and witness of the indecent assault in the television room at Duncroft, the victim of the indecent assault at Stoke Mandeville and the teenager who was propositioned at Norman Lodge at Duncroft sent letters to each informing them ‘the CPS has decided no further police action on this cases’.13
Not only were Savile’s assertions in the interview allowed to pass entirely uncontested, but no checks were subsequently made on his whereabouts at the relevant times or the number of occasions he had visited Duncroft. Neither were his revelations about the close relationships he enjoyed with police officers in Leeds relayed to senior officers at West Yorkshire Police.
The investigation had foundered due to serious and inherent flaws. As Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary concluded in 2013, ‘By regarding each victim in isolation, Surrey Police did not alert victims to the existence of each other – and therein presented themselves with an insurmountable obstacle.’14 The report by the Department of Public Prosecutions said much the same, although it did at least adopt a more sympathetic tone. ‘It would have been proper to give each (at least once she had given her initial account) the reassurance of knowing she was not alone.’15
62. PISS AND SHITE
Less than a month after Operation Ornament was wrapped up, and only six weeks after Jimmy Savile had faced down two Surrey police officers from his private rooms at Stoke Mandeville, I paid him a visit in Scarborough.
I had started the process of widening the search for the real man behind the façade, tracking down and speaking to people who had grown up in Leeds in the 1930s, finding former Bevin Boys, interviewing cyclists who remembered him from his days as Oscar ‘The Duke’ Savile and wrestlers who recalled his bizarre outings between the ropes. I wanted to demonstrate to him that I was no longer content with merely listening to the same old stories, often word for word, and was serious about trying to prise off the mask to see what, if anything, lay beneath. I figured that I had nothing to lose: if he was angered by my desire to explore beyond his clearly defined account of events, I would simply press on regardless.
I knew that Jimmy Savile was supremely controlling and accepted it would be necessary to work in wide concentric circles, picking off those who he was unlikely to still be in contact with but might still offer nuggets of information that would ring true. It was a relief that he seemed to be flattered by the lengths I had gone to, although there were of course the now customary admonishments for pulling him up on facts or quizzing about detail. At last, between the long tracts of familiar anecdote, there were glimpses of fresh insight.
On the Friday evening, we spent an hour or two talking about his cycling career, and touched also on the period he spent in the mines, a time that he seemed happy to leave enveloped in a fog of uncertainty.
The following morning was spent down on the Foreshore and then discussing his wrestling days in a café around the corner from the flat on the Esplanade. I knew the reasons he gave for taking up wrestling, and was conscious of the fact he would never admit it was part of a wider longing to be acknowledged as a formidable physical specimen. What I didn’t know was why he decided to quit after what he insisted was a career spanning 107 fights.
‘Perfectly logical,’ he snapped. ‘I stopped because I started trying to get hold of 20 million quid for Stoke Mandeville Hospital. I couldn’t afford to be damaged. You know what I said about quitting while you’re ahead; well I stopped fighting there and then. Quit while you’re ahead.’
It did not quite tally with what the flamboyant, blond-haired wrestler Adrian Street had told me. He’d said he’d given Savile such a hiding in his last bout that he never wanted to return. ‘Wrestlers in general resented Savile being allowed in the business, especially those who were told to lose to him by stupid, greedy promoters who thought that his celebrity would fill their arenas,’ Street explained. ‘It wasn’t that he was ever capable of stealing their thunder
. He wanted to wrestle as a publicity stunt and to try to prove he was a tough guy – which I proved him not to be.’
There was no way Jimmy Savile would ever admit to weakness or tell a story against himself, so I steered the conversation onto Broadmoor. I began to ask him about being appointed to the task force by Edwina Currie, junior health minister at the time.
‘No,’ he interrupted, before I had even finished my question. ‘I was appointed by someone far more powerful than that. It was the top civil service boss. They ran Broadmoor and that will reflect on these real hierarchies. I started off with a collection of very senior civil servants and they all wanted Broadmoor out of trouble. ‘I’ll get it out of trouble for you,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is leave me alone.’
I put it to him that he must have been very highly thought of in the NHS at that time. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said, and began spluttering with laughter. ‘Highly feared more like.’
He went on to outline his thoughts on mental health; that the Broadmoor patients, for that’s what they were, could not be blamed for their crimes. They required treatment not punishment. That was not something that would ever be recognised, I suggested, while it continued to be a place that was demonised by the tabloids.
‘That’s their game,’ he spat. ‘You can’t blame a lion for jumping on something and eating ’em. You can’t blame a tabloid for demonising something, because it’s what it does. All you hope is they don’t want to demonise you. They demonise anybody they decide to demonise. Like, what’s his name … The comedian kid where the kid got pegged in his pool … ’
Michael Barrymore?
‘They demonised him. Michael said to me one day, “The papers will never be happy until I’m dead. They’re trying to kill me now. They’re nearly succeeding, I tell you.” Michael never committed any crime in his whole life. Alright, he was associated with something but nobody could say you’ve done this or you’ve done that.’
He then went on to talk about Gary Glitter.
‘Now Gary, all that he’s done is taken his computer into PC World to get it repaired. They went into his hard drive and found all these dodgy pictures and they told the police and the police think, “A famous person? Oh my goodness, we’ll have them.” But Gary has not tried to sell ’em or show them in public. They were for his own gratification and whether that’s right or wrong is of course up to him as a person. They didn’t do anything wrong but they are then demonised. And of course, if you were to say to a couple, “Gary Glitter, what’s he done wrong?” They would say, “Oh, nothing, he’s just sat at home watching these dodgy films.”’
I was stunned and immediately challenged him, reminding Savile that Gary Glitter had faced child sex offences in south-east Asia.
‘And are you telling me that some evil person didn’t stick two little birds into him?’ he retorted. ‘He was like that but he wasn’t public with it and he didn’t do anything. I’m not trying to defend him but the facts are the facts. A person can get demonised and do nothing because the papers will decide to demonise them.’
He told me about how in the 1950s, two policeman came into his dancehall and informed him that he had been reported going in and out of public toilets in Leeds: ‘I said, “Is that right? Well now then,” I said, “How long have you been checking toilets? That must be a terrific job. Do you have to have a bath when you get home because you stink of piss and shite? Do you have to do an eight-hour shift in a toilet?”
‘And when they realised they weren’t getting anywhere they got up and left. They were trying to demonise me, do you understand? Me particularly, I can’t remember the last time I used a public toilet. Years and years and years ago. It doesn’t do for someone looking like me to be seen coming out of a public toilet. Someone might come out and say, “I’ve just had a piss next to Jimmy Savile” and in a week that will have turned into something else. What I do is open toilets. I’ve opened a toilet at the Flying Pizza in Leeds. There’s a big plaque on the wall that says “Opened by Jimmy Savile”. I do odd things like that but people are always ready to demonise you and it first started in my case in the Fifties.
And still he wasn’t finished: ‘I know traffic wardens who delight in getting a result. I know clampers who delight in seeing something they can clamp. They quite like the idea of making somebody’s life awkward. Jobs like that attract a certain type of person. I’ve got my Broadmoor hat on because I know people do strange things. The world is full of some quite odd people. I understand them because it’s my business.’
In light of the startling defence he had just offered on behalf of Gary Glitter, I asked him whether he thought the conviction of Jonathan King was an example of the demonisation that he talked of.
‘Yes, yes, perfect example,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t as vicious in Jonathan King’s days as it was with Barrymore and Gary Glitter. The world is more vicious now and the tabloids have got a list of people that they think they might have a chance of shafting. So there’s always somebody on the lookout for something.’ In a typical non sequitur he began rambling on about Richard Nixon trying to find dirt on a political opponent. Nothing was found: ‘So Nixon said, “Oh well, we’ll just have to give him something to deny.” That’s just as good as shooting somebody between the eyes.’
On the QE2, he had made a throwaway comment that the two people the tabloids wanted more than anyone else were Jimmy Savile and Cliff Richard. ‘Even now the tabloids would pay a fortune for something on Cliff or on me,’ he said, ‘albeit we are not as frontline as we were. His choice is to spend his life in the sunshine. My choice is to spend my life at Leeds Infirmary or Stoke Mandeville. We are not frontline entertainers but we’re still a name. Cliff? He’s single, he’s successful, he’s got a few quid, he’s got a clean, wholesome image, there’s nothing on him.’
He stared into the middle distance. The record button on my tape machine clicked up to signify the cassette had finished. We sat in silence.
63. MISTAKES WERE MADE
Anecdotally at least, Jimmy Savile was well known to police officers in Leeds for a very long time. He’d alluded to as much in his autobiography when referencing the female police officer ‘dissuaded’ from bringing charges against him for harbouring a teenage runaway. She had done so, he wrote, because ‘it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me’.
This claim tallies with Tony Calder’s accounts of Savile actively cultivating relationships with senior officers in the 1960s, and sitting at a restaurant table while one warned Savile to ‘cut it out’ – whatever ‘it’ might have been. There were also the stories that Savile himself told about his various brushes with his local police force: sending officers packing when they had questioned him over hanging around public toilets in Leeds; getting his knuckles rapped for being over-zealous with troublemakers at the Mecca dancehall; warning them their teenage daughters were better off with him than the other ‘slags and scumbags’. ‘We’ve always had a relationship with [the police],’ Savile told me in Scarborough in 2006, ‘and that still goes on.’
In October 2012, soon after the revelations about his offending first came to light, stories began to emerge about his connections with the police, particularly those in Leeds. A spokesman for the West Yorkshire Police countered by stating the force had not conducted any historic investigations into Jimmy Savile, and of the many calls being received from his victims in the West Yorkshire area, ‘none … alleged any failure by police to investigate previously’.
The only intelligence the West Yorkshire Police held on Savile concerned a report on his ‘mugging’ following a gala awards night in the Queens Hotel in Leeds in 2008. An inebriated young woman had pinched his favourite round-framed, pink spectacles from his nose as a joke. Sensing some coverage, Savile reported the theft to the papers and local television news, giving the same quote to all: ‘If she is caught I will ask the bench to give 100 hours community service – as a carer in my flat.’ He got the glasses b
ack but the home help was not forthcoming.
The police spokesman went on to say that Savile had supported some West Yorkshire police campaigns in the past, but none in recent years, and the force had no knowledge of its officers attending Savile’s flat in a social capacity although they were free to do what they wished when off duty.1
Both of these latter statements were misleading at best. As recently as 2008, West Yorkshire Police had launched a campaign encouraging the public to supply information about handlers of stolen property. It was organised in conjunction with the Leeds District Community Safety Partnership, a multi-agency public, private and voluntary partnership focused on reducing crime and disorder, and the decision was made to use a local celebrity in the media launch. Jimmy Savile was chosen. In the same year, the same partnership used a recording of Savile’s voice for its ‘talking street signs’ campaign, which gave residents advice about crime prevention.
Furthermore, for more than 20 years, serving and retired police officers had been among those attending Savile’s so-called Friday Morning Club meetings at his penthouse flat.
Those who regularly gathered on the leatherette sofas in Savile’s front room included local businessmen, a retired doctor, a wealthy pharmacist, a local hairdresser, a café owner and pals from his dancehall and marathon days.
Joe Baker knew Jimmy Savile longer than any of these men, having first met him at St Anne’s Elementary School in the 1930s. As a founder member of the club, Baker recalled how Savile would ‘hold court’ and enjoy the admiring glances when the phone rang and he could announce it was Princess Diana calling for a chat. ‘We always thought he saw himself as one of the mafia,’ Baker told The Times in October 2012. ‘Any problem that arose, he used to say, “My people will take care of it.” Now we are wondering who “my people” were.’2
