In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (12 page)

Neither Meirion Jones nor Liz MacKean were consulted about the official line the BBC had now adopted.

Sometime over the next 48 hours, Mark Thompson claims that he discussed the story with BBC News. He cannot remember whether it was in person or on the phone, or whether he spoke to Helen Boaden or her deputy Stephen Mitchell, but the details he received on the matter of what Caroline Hawley had said to him at the drinks party were as follows: ‘Oh well, they were doing an investigation into Jimmy Savile … but the programme themselves decided not to proceed with it for editorial or journalistic reasons.’
¹⁴
He maintains that he did not learn any specifics of the investigation or the fact it was into allegations of sexual abuse. The transcript of a recorded telephone conversation between the journalist Miles Goslett and Nick Pollard would appear to suggest otherwise. The dialogue, which took place eleven months after the publication of Pollard’s report, and was released by a Tory MP, included Pollard making an off the record acknowledgement that it might have been a ‘mistake’ to omit from his report a piece of evidence that would appear to cast doubt on Thompson’s assertion that he knew little or nothing of the nature of the allegations against Savile until after he left the BBC. The piece of evidence in question, which Pollard received before publishing his findings in December 2012, was a letter from Helen Boaden’s lawyer that explicitly stated in December 2011 she had told Thompson that the BBC had investigated Jimmy Savile over allegations of sex abuse.

‘I think the truth is that I sort of overlooked [the letter]. I didn’t see there was a particular significance in it,’ Pollard told Goslett. ‘Partly because Mark Thompson had said “No [Boaden] didn’t tell me about it. It was an open question. She might have done or she didn’t.”’
¹⁵

A subsequent statement by Pollard’s lawyers maintained that the ‘letter was given full and proper consideration and the Review stands by its conclusions on this issue’.
¹⁶
Namely, Pollard found ‘no reason to doubt’ Thompson’s version of events.
¹⁷

Whatever former Director General Mark Thompson knew, on 1 October 2012, less than two weeks after he’d left office, BBC executives faced spiralling outrage over Savile and the national broadcaster’s handling of the situation.

Its response was to turn on itself. Helen Deller, believing that Jones was the source of the leaking of material to the media, sent an email to Peter Rippon, Stephen Mitchell and Paddy Feeny, the head of communications. It is an accusation Jones has consistently denied, and all the journalists involved confirm that he was not the source of the story.

‘No excuse. No more discussions with him,’ wrote Deller, referring to Meirion Jones. She then suggested ‘a discreet conversation with HR to establish options’ about the
Newsnight
reporter’s employment at the BBC.
¹⁸

12. LOOK UP, YOU BASTARD

‘H
ave you got anything with four wheels?’ Jimmy Savile was on the phone to a local cab company. ‘Well now. We’d like to go to Helmand province, Afghanistan.’

The radio controller had clearly heard this one before because Savile didn’t even have to give an address. He rang off, put the portable phone down on the footrest and left the sitting room. Morning light streamed through the floor to ceiling windows. Beyond the glass, fast-moving clouds cast shadows on the North Sea and across the ruins of Scarborough Castle on the horizon.

When Savile returned he was wearing a quilted black Adidas jacket over his regulation shell suit, this one in electric blue with red and green detailing. The woolly hat was the last bit of what he called ‘the disguise’. He loved Scarborough and wanted to show me some of it before we headed back up towards his flat for breakfast at his favourite café.

Five minutes later, the minicab pulled up below. Savile was standing in the window looking down at the driver. He was stock still, offering a double thumbs-up. The thumbs were no more than 20 centimetres apart and facing inwards. It was an inward double thumbs-up, a style that was briefly popular in the Seventies.

After he’d been holding the pose for about 30 seconds I decided to break the impasse and ask him whether I should go ahead and let the driver know we were on our way. Savile ignored me and continued to hold the pose, readjusting his feet and gently flexing his knees to take a more solid stance.

‘Come on, yer twat.’ He tapped the window with one hand before resuming his inward-facing double thumbs-up. I stood back, willing the driver to look up at the window and wave or smile or better still, both. It had been at least a minute now, maybe more, and it was getting uncomfortable. ‘Look up, you bastard,’ Savile hissed.

Having finally been prised from the window, he carried on as if nothing had happened. Locking the door to his flat behind him, he rustled along the landing and descended two flights of communal stairs sideways, rather than straight on. He said that if I knew how many of his patients in Stoke Mandeville wound up there after falling down the stairs, I would be doing the same thing.

Savile instructed the driver to take us through Scarborough’s impressive boulevards before heading down towards the arcades, seafood stalls and fish and chip emporia along the pleasure beach. This was once the domain of two of his friends: Jimmy Corrigan, whom he had mentioned in his autobiography, had his amusement arcade empire, and Peter Jaconelli, the former mayor, who had crowned himself the ‘Ice-Cream King’ of the town.

We passed by the lifeboat shed and the small fishing port to our right. Savile pointed out a boat, the
Corona
, which had seen service at Dunkirk. As we rounded the headland, he said something about the road being engineered to move in order to withstand the tide. He liked to describe himself as a cork on the waves, someone who ebbed and flowed with the current. He stared out of the window, his mouth set in a grimace.

His mood seemed to brighten when he recalled the day the
QE2
arrived in Scarborough on its last round-Britain voyage. As a publicity stunt, he had boarded it in high seas from a fishing boat. It was touch and go whether he’d make it. Were it not for the strength he had acquired as a wrestler, marathon runner and long-distance cyclist, he said he would have fallen and drowned.

‘That’s enough,’ he suddenly barked, and he told the driver to turn around and head back the way we came.

Later, we were sat opposite each other in a cramped wooden booth in the Francis Café near his flat. The café used to be a
hairdresser’s and retained many of the original fixtures. We were talking about his days as a professional wrestler. I told him I had just finished reading the memoirs of Jackie Pallo, Savile’s regular tag team partner in the late 1960s. Like Savile, he dyed his hair blond (although Savile insisted he never dyed it; he bleached out all the natural colour), and like Savile, he was an acquired taste. He was what they called in wrestling circles, a ‘heel’, and crowds booed him.

In his book, Pallo had been quite open about the sexual shenanigans that went on backstage, but insisted the wrestlers abided by a strict set of rules.

‘Wrestlers have their own code about females,’ he wrote. ‘For instance, it is strictly taboo to take a girl out who is under 16, even if she looks – and claims to be – a lot older. The lads reckon it’s up to a bloke to make sure, and if anybody breaks the rule, he gets a very heavy sorting out from the others, sometimes for several weeks. Wrestlers really loathe men who attack children, rape young girls, and beat, mug and rape the old and defenceless.’
¹

I put it to Savile that this was an odd thing to say, given that surely the vast majority of people loathed men who attack children, rape young girls, and beat, mug and rape the old and defenceless. ‘Well there you go,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders and focusing on his food.

Pallo also said the bachelors among the wrestling fraternity never had to go looking for girls. ‘The Ring Rats – wrestling’s equivalent to the pop world’s groupies – go after them,’ he claimed. ‘In the 60s, hundreds of girls used to shriek at the violence and drool over rippling muscles and bulging trunks.’ At some venues, he insisted, grapplers had to step over ‘undulating bodies’ on their way to and from the ring.

I asked Savile whether this was the case. ‘Ooh there was,’ he said, egg yolk dripping from his chin, ‘but that happened in the pop business too. All the lads would be out pulling a bird and bringing them into the changing room. In those days sex wasn’t important. Newspapers have made it important by scandalising it.
In those days it was entirely consensual, it just happened and there was never any scandal chat in the papers about people having sex like there is now. They’ve made it into something else.’

He had been flirting persistently with a rather flustered looking teenage waitress and just as I was thinking about why he had offered this odd caveat about the newspapers and their ‘scandal chat’, all the lights in the café suddenly went out. ‘Give us all yer money,’ barked Savile, jumping to his feet and making pistols with his fingers.

When the lights came back on a few seconds later, Jimmy Savile announced he no longer wanted to talk about wrestling. And he certainly didn’t want to talk about sex.

PART TWO

13. OSCAR ‘THE DUKE’

J
immy Savile often told stories of the marathon rides that he embarked on as a young man. It was during one such cycling trip to Scotland that he first clapped eyes on the remote Glencoe bothy he would buy half a century later.

He had been a keen cyclist since the age of 11 when his mother had bought him his first bike. She hoped it would build up his strength after what had been a sickly childhood. But if the bike made him fitter, it also gave him independence; from the moment he first wobbled down the cobbled slope of Consort Terrace, he regarded his bicycle as his ‘passport to freedom’.

After pedalling his way back to fitness following the accident at Waterloo Main Colliery, Jimmy Savile became well known within Yorkshire’s burgeoning cycling community. Except he wasn’t known as Jimmy Savile at all, but Oscar Savile, thanks to the rare Oscar Egg frame on his bike.

‘At the time it was one of the top lightweight frames,’ confirmed Ken Russell, a Bradford rider who was one of the county’s leading cyclists at the time. ‘They were quite expensive.’

I tracked Russell down in the months before Savile’s death, and he had fond memories. ‘[Savile] was supposed to be a company director. At one time he was into scrap metal but I don’t know much of the detail. He was always quite flashy, even then.’

Cycling was going through a boom period and Jimmy Savile made a lasting impression on his fellow riders. ‘We used to meet in Otley nearly every Sunday night with the other clubs and the other cyclists,’ recalled Russell. ‘We’d have a general chinwag and
he was nearly always there. He was the life and soul of the party. We used to think he was a bit of a buffoon really, but I could tell he wasn’t. I could see that years before he became well known.’

By 1950, Savile said he was racing competitively on a regular basis. Records show he achieved a second place finish in that year’s Edinburgh–Newcastle race and looked set to go one better in an event in Skipton after pulling clear of the chasing pack alongside his friend Dave Dalmour, who decades later would run with him in marathons and become a regular at his Friday Morning Club meetings.

‘It looked like we were going to win it,’ Savile told me, ‘but then we saw this grass verge with two girls having a picnic.’ Not for the first time, his libido overruled all other considerations. They slammed on the brakes, threw down their bikes and joined the girls. By the time they reached Skipton, Savile said the race was long finished.

‘He was a good rider, but he was never a great rider,’ said Russell. ‘He was a real character, however. Some of the other riders thought he was a bloody fool, and he was a buffoon at times. But he was just one of the bike riders. He wasn’t important and nobody thought that he would ever become famous.’

*

Jimmy Savile was desperate to take part in the first Tour of Britain, organised as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations and sponsored by the
Daily Express
. A race of twelve stages covering 1,403 miles over 14 days, it would take riders from London to Brighton, along the south coast and into the West Country, up into Wales, the north-west and the Lake District, before arriving at its most northerly stop in Glasgow. From there, it would head back south to Newcastle, on down the eastern side of England and finish in London. The prize fund totalled a princely £1,000.

A place in the four-man team representing Yorkshire could only be secured with a strong performance in one of the major stage races leading up to the Tour. The inaugural Butlins Holiday Camps 7-Day race, which saw competitors racing between camps in the
north, was significant not only because it was where Jimmy Savile earned his ride in the Tour of Britain but also as the moment he chose to unleash his brand of jack-the-lad showmanship on an unsuspecting public. ‘Even though I was nobody at the time nationally, I worked by instinct,’ is how he described it to me.

‘In the Butlins Race, he would get to the start dressed in a tuxedo,’ said Ken Russell some 60 years later. ‘And then he would arrange for somebody to come with a tray and mirror and a brushing comb.’ Doug Petty, a young bike builder, gave exactly the same account of Savile’s bizarre antics. So, while the other riders were stretching their legs and going through their final preparations, ‘Oscar’ Savile was prancing around in his best suit and preening for the crowds.

Petty’s memories of the Newcastle–Ayr stage in that race suggest that Savile revelled in his role as two-wheeled eccentric. ‘Oscar was Oscar – he had his cigars and his flash clothes,’ he said. ‘He always used to ride with a five-pound note pinned inside his jersey. It was the old fiver, the big white thing.

‘We were going through this village in Scotland and everybody was knackered and we saw Jimmy, who was a bit in front, going into this Co-op, selling sweets and everything. We knew he had money so we dived in after him and this woman behind the counter said, “Is this a hold up?” And we said, “No love, we’re road racing but we’re all starving hungry and we’ve got no money. But he has and he’ll pay for it.”’ Petty said Savile dutifully unpinned the fiver, paid for his rivals’ refreshments and then got back on his bike.

On the next stage, ‘Oscar’ Savile secured his place in the Tour of Britain by crossing the finish line third in Carlisle. He also finished the race with a new nickname: ‘The very first national picture I had was on the front page of the
Daily Express
with a cigar in my mouth,’ he told me, although I searched and could find nothing. ‘It said ‘Oscar “The Duke” rides in the Tour.’ He also claimed that a picture of Winston Churchill posing with a cigar was relegated to page five.

‘I was forever with the gimmicks, before gimmicks had even been invented,’ he continued, insisting not for the first time ‘the common denominator was fun’. ‘Not fun at anyone’s expense,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t fun belittling anyone, it wasn’t fun cheating. It was straightforward fun.’

Honest, clean fun at nobody else’s expense: it was, he claimed, his philosophy for life.

*

On 15 August 1951, 49 cyclists representing thirteen teams assembled at ‘the Cockpit’ in Hyde Park. Among them were outfits consisting of professional riders from France, Ireland and Scotland; semi-professionals racing in the colours of British bike manufacturers such as Dayton, ITP, Viking and Pennine; and a mixture of amateurs and independents representing the various regions.

In the race programme, rider number 48 was listed as ‘Oscar Savile, a company director also known as “The Duke”.’ The picture showed him grinning, jaw jutting forward and dark hair slicked back to his head. His Yorkshire teammates were Don Wilson, a 24-year-old cycle frame builder from Bradford, Jim Wilson, a bike dealer from Sheffield, and 20-year-old Douglas Petty.

At 9.30 a.m., the peloton rode out of London under orders, spare tyres tied to their bodies in a figure of eight and fruit stuffed into pouches in their jerseys. A convoy of vehicles followed in their wake: the commentary van with its pair of giant horn speakers fixed to the roof, support cars for the various teams and a swarm of fun cyclists and kids who wanted to ride alongside the competitors.

The race started at noon from Farnborough Common in Kent and after flying through Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, ‘Oscar’ Savile decided to make his move at St John’s Cross. His break was brief and unsuccessful; the first stage was won by Frenchman Gabriel Audemard, who passed the finishing line on Brighton’s Madeira Drive in front of thousands of cheering fans.

Savile seemed to be more focused on making headlines than he was on the race. On the second stage to Bournemouth, he trailed
in last but promptly changed into his suit and joined the winners, race officials and local dignitaries at the civic reception in the town that evening. There, he got up on stage, thanked the crowds for turning out and got a big laugh when he said while the other riders had been timed by stopwatch, he was being timed by calendar.

The race certainly earned its epitaph as the ‘Hard Luck Tour’; the weather was appalling throughout, and little was laid on for the riders. On their way out of Plymouth and riding as a group, Savile told me the competitors pulled alongside an open-backed truck carrying groceries.

‘We were all pirates in those days because nobody had any money,’ he said. ‘So I went up to the front and talked to the driver while the lads at the back were knocking off all the gear – grapes and fruit and this, that and the other. That was how we ate.’

He admitted his ‘strokes’, as he called them, were designed to get him into the pages of race sponsors the
Daily Express
. ‘They were always looking for stories,’ he said.

He duly gave them one in Weston-super-Mare: ‘Cyclist wins by a neck’ pronounced the headline above an item about race leader Dave Bedwell, a cycle mechanic from Romford who had used his day off to go for a 20-mile practice ride. ‘Before that,’ wrote the
Express
reporter, ‘he had been challenged to a race, had accepted and had been beaten. The challenger, and the winner by a neck – was cigar-smoking Oscar Saville [sic], otherwise known as “The Duke”. The race was on donkeys.’
¹

The item went on to say that Oscar then missed the boat ferrying competitors across the Bristol Channel to the start of the fifth stage in Cardiff. Savile told me the whole thing was a set-up: ‘I’d pulled a bird who was staying at the same hotel I was staying at – oh, thank you very much indeed!’

Not wanting to leave for Cardiff at six o’clock that evening with the rest of the competitors, he made arrangements to spend the night with his ‘bird’. ‘One of the officials had one of the early Jaguar SK120s, so I said to him “Why don’t I miss the ferry and you can drive me round to the start?” That was the story: Oscar
has missed the ferry. I hadn’t missed the ferry; the ferry hadn’t gone by that time.’

‘I was a known character,’ he said as we looked through a replica programme from the 1951 race one afternoon in Scarborough. ‘They didn’t bother that I didn’t win anything. I was part of the Yorkshire team because I’d flash the team out. I had more front than Brighton and Blackpool put together.’

Doug Petty, who was faring significantly better in the race than his teammate, agreed: ‘I don’t think some of the other riders appreciated how good he was on a bike. But they all loved him, oh yeah. Some dismissed him as a bit weird, you know, but he was marvellous at appealing to the crowds.’

And among the crowds there were plenty of willing young women. ‘I remember one of the stages and there were thousands of people there as we were lining up to start,’ said Petty. ‘This bunch of girls came up and said, ‘Can we have your autograph? And do you mind if we take your photo?’ Well of course it had to be a snogging session photo. When I looked up the race had gone. They went without me. I had to chase like buggery.’

The 160-mile stage between Morecambe and Glasgow turned out to be Savile’s undoing, although in his autobiography he claimed his demise was caused by doing a good deed for a fellow rider whose finances were running low.

The plan hatched was for Savile to make a break from the peloton, a break that nobody would take seriously, and Derek Buttle, a 25-year-old former Thames lighterman, would give chase. They figured that by building up a big enough gap between the rider and the pack, they could ensure Buttle claimed the £10 prize for being first to the top of the 1300-ft Shap Fell.

By Kendal, they were seven minutes in the lead. Buttle was first to the top and won the £10 but Savile was physically spent and soon afterwards he climbed off his bike and collapsed beside the road. ‘I tell you where he packed,’ said Ken Russell. ‘It was at Penrith. I always remember the PA van coming past and saying that he’s packed.’ Oscar had paid the price for his late-night carousing.

His retirement from the race proved to be a blessing in disguise. So taken were the organisers with this oddball in their midst that they forbade him from cycling home to Leeds and summoned a second loudspeaker car instead. ‘Oscar’ was invited to become a race commentator: ‘It turned out that I was a natural ad-lib broadcaster and finished up entertaining crowds up to 50,000 without turning a hair,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘This lurking ability sealed my racing fate. My chat was more valuable than my legs.’
²

Without a race to get in the way, he gave his undivided attention to courting publicity. In Scarborough, on only the second rest day of the Tour, he persuaded Doug Petty to join him in a fishing boat off the front. And when the race resumed its progress down the east coast, he enjoyed the buzz of hurtling into towns and villages ahead of the riders to inform the waiting crowds what was happening. And in an age when announcers generally spoke in the cut-glass diction normally heard on the BBC, Savile’s Yorkshire accent and quick-fire patter represented a genuine novelty. ‘I’d keep the crowd well entertained,’ he told me. ‘The
Daily Express
loved that. They thought it was the greatest thing in the world.’

Thirty-three of the 49 riders who started the race succeeded in making it all the way back to London. At the finish, huge crowds again braved the wind and rain to hear Jimmy Savile’s unusual commentary describing the closing stages. Scotland’s Ian Steel was presented with the trophy but Jimmy Savile had glimpsed the future, and it did not involve hawking scrap metal or pedalling up hills. ‘A former teammate said to me, “He’s a right idiot”,’ Ken Russell said. ‘I said, “If he meets the right people, he’ll really go the top”. I was proved right.’

Russell would go on to win the very next Tour of Britain, a race for which the
Daily Express
retained Jimmy Savile’s services as race commentator. ‘I think they paid him very well,’ said Russell. ‘When the
Daily Express
stopped sponsoring the Tour of Britain, which would have been about 1954, I remember seeing him on television maybe a year or two afterwards. The BBC was showing Silverstone motor racing and who should be there but Jimmy
Savile; it was sponsored by the
Daily Express
. I often think that’s what made him, really. I think the
Daily Express
really helped him, they kind of adopted him.’