In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  The journalist, novelist and playwright Andrew O’Hagan believes to an extent we were all complicit; that we get the celebrities we deserve. In a memorable essay in the London Review of Books,7 he identified the period in which Savile acquired his fame as a time when the cult of personality suddenly eclipsed all other considerations, and the power of celebrity, as we know it today, was unleashed.

  ‘And so,’ wrote O’Hagan, ‘you open Pandora’s box to find the seedy ingredients of British populism. It’s not just names, or performers and acts, it’s an ethos. Why is British light entertainment so often based on the sexualisation of people too young to cope? And why is it that we have a press so keen to feed off it? Is it to cover the fact, via some kind of willed outrage, that the culture itself is largely paedophile in its commercial and entertainment excitements?

  ‘The public made Jimmy Savile,’ he concluded. ‘It loved him. It knighted him. The Prince of Wales accorded him special rights and the authorities at Broadmoor gave him his own set of keys. A whole entertainment structure was built to house him and make him feel secure. That’s no one’s fault: entertainment, like literature, thrives on weirdos, and Savile entered a culture made not only to tolerate his oddness but to find it refreshing.’

  Here was a man, after all, who blithely put his hand up the skirts of teenage girls as they jostled and smiled coyly for the cameras during the links on Top of the Pops, and who asked for, and got, six local ‘dolly birds’ as payment for a personal appearance at a provincial ball. This was a man whose idea of a treat for young hospital patients was to take them to the motor caravan he was allowed to park in the grounds, and who laid on girls for visiting police officers. And he was doing it in an era when children were being murdered and buried on the Moors around Manchester, The Rolling Stones were writing lyrics telling a fifteen-year-old girl they didn’t want to see her ID,8 and Gary Puckett & The Union Gap were warning, ‘Better run girl, you’re much too young girl’.9

  By the time his lustre as a teenage idol began to fade, Savile had remade himself as a trusted if unlikely establishment figure. He was feted by administrators, aristocrats and royalty, and viewed as a vote winner by politicians looking to connect with the young or bask in the glow he acquired from his charity works. Prime Minister Thatcher, whose blushes he spared by rebuilding the nation’s leading specialist spinal injuries unit, recognised in this outsider something of herself. She later described him as a shining example of the ‘enterprise Britain’ she envisaged when she took office. Prince Charles, who sought his common touch and counsel, and Princess Diana, who valued his advice and soothing words, were similarly charmed and enthralled.

  There are those who recall the Jimmy Savile of the late 1950s, and remember even then that he ‘liked them young’. In that world, they argue, it was nothing out of the ordinary. By the time societal attitudes began to change, however, and systems were put in place to ensure regional police forces could more effectively share information with each other, Savile’s offending had all but stopped. By then, of course, he was Sir Jimmy Savile, safely entrenched at the centre of concentric, defensive rings of influence. And instead of walking round ballrooms flanked by heavies, calculating how many girls he would be able to pick from, he was free to stroll through ministry corridors and hospitals, confident in the knowledge that he had too much power, too much sway, to be challenged.

  He engineered opportunity through an act of mass deception, one that saw him create a seemingly virtuous circle in which his fame and connections were harnessed to help those in need. In return, he accepted society’s gratitude and the kudos that came with it. It was a mechanism of the most venal kind. A cunning calibration of his celebrity, popularity and good works for the nation being enough to blind even those close enough to see through it.

  ‘These people couldn’t have coped, couldn’t have spoken out, because their whole lives would have been totally collapsed at the time,’ says Caroline Moore of his victims. She was one of them; he abused her while she sat in a wheelchair at Stoke Mandeville.

  His was the perfect cover. His victims were generally young, vulnerable and unsuspecting. Some were on the margins of society, meaning their testimonies would never breach the ramparts of a reputation that was national in scale. It was so preposterously easy, so matter of fact, that it never seemed to occur to anyone that despite his weird appearance and the sinister things he said and did, Jimmy Savile might possibly be up to no good.

  The endless drip of salacious headlines and the spiralling numbers of alleged victims have had a desensitising effect, but the scale of his deceit and depths of his depravity have lost none of their power to shock. ‘It was just so opportunistic, and it was so prolific, it’s like it happened every single day of his life,’ remarks Liz Dux, who has specialised in abuse cases for more than fifteen years. ‘I’ve never seen abuse like this where every opportunity he had to be with someone, he would assault them. He didn’t even try to hide anything. It was just so blatant that you just cannot believe he got away with it for so long.’

  Over a period of forty years, police forces up and down the country dismissed or buried reports about Jimmy Savile, while his willingness to engage lawyers and the popularity he enjoyed persuaded newspapers from going to print with the information they had. Even in death he seemed to exert this same power, as the BBC, which had failed to act on reports and rumours about him in the past, spiked the Newsnight story that would have exposed him, and avoided much of the internecine chaos that followed.

  It is also true that Jimmy Savile led a life designed to avoid detection. He travelled constantly, living on the road for much of the period in which his offending was at its most prolific. Many of the people who counted themselves as his friends knew very little about what he did or the ‘teams’ he kept in other towns. He never let anyone get close enough to see what really lay beneath, not even the women who claimed to be his girlfriends in later years. As the curator of his own myth, his stories were woven into a tapestry so elaborate I’m sure he even believed what he’d created by the end.

  The cost of his unmasking has not only been reckoned in financial terms. The £2 million spent on concluding the part of Operation Yewtree that related to Savile, and the £5.3 million spent by the BBC on its three different inquiries up until March 2013,10 pale into insignificance when weighed against the toll his abuse has taken on the individuals he deemed to be helpless.

  There are others who suffered indirectly. From those who acted in good faith in assisting his fund-raising efforts, and who must now wonder what they inadvertently helped him to do, through to those like his nephew Vivian, who hero-worshipped him and died of a broken heart less than two weeks after the revelations about his uncle emerged; to his horrified friends, some of whom have received counselling10, through to the three men who committed suicide in the wake of the revelations, the collateral damage has been widespread and indiscriminate.

  Of those who took their own lives, one had Jimmy Savile to thank for landing a job as DJ in the 1960s, and attended both his funeral in Leeds and burial in Scarborough. The police claimed they were not investigating the man, although a newspaper had made enquiries. His body lay undiscovered in his Doncaster flat for two weeks.11

  Another was a clergyman said to be so anxious about the police investigation spreading to Cornwall he left a suicide note in his home before throwing himself into the sea at Trevone.12 The third was the least lamented: David Smith, a convicted paedophile who was employed by the BBC as a chauffeur and who is thought to have driven Savile in the 1980s. He was found dead in his Lewisham home on the morning he was due to stand trial on two counts of indecent assault, two of indecency and a fifth charge of rape involving a 12-year-old boy, crimes that were reported as part of the Savile inquiry.

  Alan Collins, a solicitor with a Manchester law firm representing scores of Savile’s victims, spoke of his clients’ anger at being denied the chance to see Smith face justice. ‘Victims often take a great deal of time
to psychologically prepare themselves to come forward and confront their abusers,’ he said. ‘They have a desire to be vindicated.’13

  Of course, there is no hope of that with the victims of Jimmy Savile’s abuse. ‘The scars of those attacks are deep, and they do remain,’ confirms Dee Coles, who was a teenager when she was attacked by Savile in his motor caravan in Jersey.14 Of those who gave evidence to Kate Lampard’s NHS Inquiry, and were asked to do so at the hospitals where they were abused, some are now reported to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

  ‘We are definitely making life better for victims of abuse,’ maintains Liz Dux, ‘but it has come at a cost to some of these victims and that’s why I feel so passionately about the [compensation cases against the Savile estate, the BBC, the NHS, and other organisations].’ Dux explains that her clients fall into two camps: those who have been emotionally destroyed and those who have managed to channel their anger and are now campaigning for something to be done. ‘Until their own cases are resolved they are just not going to get closure. A lot of them had parked it away, then opened it out and got no help once they had. They now need to be able to deal with it and move on.’

  Keir Starmer, who stepped down as director of public prosecutions on 1 November 2013, is clear on what should be done. ‘The time has come to change the law and close a gap that’s been there for a very long time,’ he told Panorama. ‘I think there should be a mandatory reporting provision … a clear, direct law that everybody understands … Since the Savile scandal some steps have been taken to assist victims through the difficult process of reporting abuse and the criminal trial process, but now the government needs to act in a more positive way to make sure the silence that surrounded Savile and allowed his horrific abuse to go unreported can never happen again. We are now calling on the government to introduce legislation whereby those in regulated activities who have direct knowledge of abuse and fail to do the right thing and report it will face prosecution.’

  He had just watched the recorded testimony of one of Savile’s victims, the girl who was raped as a 12-year-old after being led to the television room at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. ‘If there had been a compulsion to report the abuse at the time victims may have been spared their ordeals,’ Starmer said. The recently established National Crime Agency has asked the government to consider the proposals.

  Such a law might have protected that girl in 1977, and her life might have turned out differently. As she said in her interview with the child protection expert retained by Slater & Gordon, ‘Being raped by Savile whilst in hospital has had a profound effect on my life. It has reinforced the feeling with me that I am a victim. I have come to see myself as someone who was born to be abused. Subsequently I have felt that I was responsible for Savile’s attack because I had not struggled or resisted in any way. I felt even worse because I had put my hand on his cheek as he was raping me, something I couldn’t explain to myself. The rape left me feeling ashamed and dirty, as though I was different and less deserving than my peers.

  Throughout her adult life she says she has felt like she has ‘some kind of label’ that identifies her as a victim to men with whom she has come into contact. ‘This has led me to being abused and mistreated by men over and over again,’ she said. ‘I have never had a healthy loving relationship. Every man I have been with has either abused me emotionally or physically and I can’t help but feel that I was conditioned to expect that sort of treatment.

  ‘I have not wanted to be a victim and have fought very hard to move forward … I have struggled with depression and feel that my capacity to deal with life has been undermined by my past. I have no resilience and have hit rock bottom every time I have to deal with one of life’s blows. I have made several suicide attempts in my life.’

  *

  The man responsible for such carnage never faced trial. He is the same man I spent years interviewing, dining out with and accompanying across oceans; and many more years before that talking about and becoming convinced of the sickness at his core. I had nothing more than his self-proclaimed oddness, his bizarre appearance and his warped philosophy on which to base those assumptions. And yet somehow, he managed to throw me off balance. Then, as with others, he disarmed me and charmed me with his kaleidoscopic account of what seemed to have been an extraordinary life.

  Now, in the unforgiving light of his exposure, the claims I once made about him now don’t seem so wild after all.

  Was he sexually abused as a child, as many abusers were? It’s impossible to say, although it was something that seemed to run in his family: his older brother Johnnie lost his job over claims he sexually assaulted a patient in a mental hospital, and in March 2014 it emerged that his nephew, the son of his sister Joan, was sentenced to four years in prison in 1986 for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl.11

  What he told me about never having been a child can, I believe, only have informed his inability or unwillingness to have normal relationships, while also contributing to his need to surround himself with people much younger than himself. And what of that formative experience on the train when he claimed an older woman thrust her hand down his trousers and took what she wanted? It was an act of cold compulsion that he seems to have replayed and inflicted over and over again.

  In hindsight, I wish I had pressed him more on his attitudes on sex, particularly in light of the strange things he said and wrote. I can at least be satisfied I asked him about the rumours on every occasion we talked.

  For a while, I had wondered whether his secret might have been murder – particularly in light of what I’d been told about the owner of the Maison Royale in Bournemouth – but I found nothing concrete to support that theory. It would have made his constant shifting and obdurate refusal to allow anyone into his confidence that much easier to understand.

  The reality is he was never going to give up that which he’d guarded so jealously and for so long; the things he knew would lead to his certain fall. Added to this, experience had taught there was no real appetite for pursuing him. He had been seen to do too much good, and he knew too many powerful people for that to happen. The contacts book shown to me by Janet Cope was his insurance. It was just one of so many policies he took out.

  Another was his faith, which might explain why a man who did so many terrible things also resolved to do so much good, or at least wanted to be seen to be doing so. ‘He always told me the scales would always balance,’ Cope recalled, although Reverend Colin Semper is sure that Jimmy Savile knew in his heart that what he was doing was wrong, and that the tireless fund-raising was a doomed attempt to pay off his debt.

  In the ten years since I pushed on the front door of Lake View Court and sat with a feeling of nervous anticipation as he descended in the lift, my feelings about Jimmy Savile have been twisted and tested and bent out of shape until they’ve broken into pieces. Did I choose him or did he choose me? I’m still unsure. As with all who encountered him, other than those who were subjected to the appalling reality of what he was, Jimmy Savile stayed out of reach; a plume of acrid smoke that billowed and dispersed before any sense could be made of it.

  Ultimately, the truth is where it always was. All that remains is rotting in a concrete-encased coffin, buried at an angle in an unmarked spot on a North Yorkshire hillside.

  ENDNOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1 Roger Bodley, speaking in the foreword of the catalogue for Dreweatts’ auction of Jimmy Savile’s possessions

  2 Independent on Sunday, 30 October 2011; Sunday Times, 30 October 2011, Sunday Telegraph, 30 October 2011

  3 Mail Online, 20 September 2012

  4 BBC News Glasgow and West Scotland, 3 October 2012

  5 Daily Express, 9 October 2012

  6 The Times, 10 October 2012

  7 ITV Daybreak, 9 October 2012

  8 Daily Telegraph, 9 October 2012

  9 Daily Mirror, 10 October 2012

  CHAPTER 3

  1 Yorkshire Post, 8 November 1972
/>
  2 The Times, 23 December 1989

  3 Jimmy Savile, As It Happens (Barrie & Jenkins, 1974), p. 2

  4 Reveille, 23 May 1970

  5 Sunday Times Magazine, 2 August 1992

  6 Savile, As It Happens, p. 1

  7 Daily Mail, 3 January 2004

  8 Sunday Times Magazine, 2 August 1992

  9 Anthony Clare, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair (Heinemann, 1992), p. 249

  10 Alison Bellamy, How’s About That Then? (Great Northern Books, 2012), p. 24

  11 The Times, 23 December 1989

  12 Sunday Times Magazine, 23 May, 1982

  13 Sunday Times Magazine, 2 August 1992

  14 The Times, 23 December 1989

  15 Independent on Sunday, 22 July, 1990

  16 Clare, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, p. 241

  CHAPTER 4

  1 ‘Psychotherapy in Prisons and Corrective Institutions [Abridged]’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, 8 December 1953

  2 ‘Anna Raccoon’ blog, 23 October 2012

  3 ‘Swallow Falls Softly’ posted on www.thecareleaversfoundation.org, 30 November 2011

  4 ‘Anna Raccoon’ blog, 23 October 2012

  5 Mail Online, 2 November 2012

  6 Mail Online, 2 November 2012

  7 Pollard Review Report, 18 December 2012, p. 44

  8 Kat Ward, Keri Karin – the Shocking True Story Continued … (self-published, 2012), p. 56

  9 Ibid.

  10 Pollard Review Report, 15, p. 105

  11 Pollard Review Report, Appendix 12/009

  12 Pollard Review Report, p. 32

  13 Pollard Review Report, p. 32

  14 Transcript from Nick Vaughan-Barratt interview with the Pollard Inquiry, 29 November 2012, pp. 25–26

  15 Pollard Review Report, 25, p. 107

  16 Pollard Review Report, 34, p. 110

  CHAPTER 5