In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (30 page)

39. PIED PIPER

J
immy Savile climbed the ladder of a scaffold tower and on reaching the platform at the top, spread his arms wide and soaked up the acclaim. Below, 20,000 sun-baked teenagers from all across Ulster cheered their approval. A chain-link fence shimmered in the distance. It had been erected by the Royal Marines and marked a different sort of dividing line to the one these young people were used to, enclosing the makeshift arena laid out on the disused airfield at Nutts Corner.

Beyond the fence stood hundred of officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, backed by troops of the British army. The forces of law and order, or oppression and fear depending on which side of the sectarian divide you came from, maintained a watchful if twitchy presence. At this moment in time, however, the temporary fence represented a line between young and old. Youngsters from opposite sides of an increasingly bitter sectarian divide had come together to walk and to witness a pop festival, and now they were in the hands of a higher authority; a man describing himself as the ‘Pied Piper of Peace’.

As the cheers eventually subsided, Savile addressed his captive audience from his high vantage point beside the stage. ‘You have proved that the teenagers of Northern Ireland see more then violence in life,’
¹
he blared, as a sea of clapping hands rippled before him. ‘This is the greatest day of my life so far.’

Fifty-one bombs had exploded across Northern Ireland and the British mainland in the previous year alone, killing 29 people and injuring hundreds more. In February 1972, the IRA claimed
responsibility for an explosive device that went off at Aldershot Barracks, killing six female ancillary workers and a Roman Catholic padre. It was thought to have been planted as retaliation for the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 civilians, seven of them teenagers, carried out by British troops in the Bogside area of Derry just a month before. On 14 April, 24 separate Provisional IRA bombs went off at points across the province, and gunfire was exchanged between gunmen and the security forces. On one single Friday in July, ‘Bloody Friday’, 22 bombs exploded in a 74-minute period, killing nine and injuring 130.

In the summer of 1973, the Northern Ireland Association of Youth Clubs, the only interdenominational youth organisation for both sexes in Ulster, decided to contact Jimmy Savile. As vice-president of the National Association of Youth Clubs in Britain and a regular visitor to Ireland through his work with the Central Remedial Clinic, he was deemed the perfect choice to lead an eight-mile sponsored walk to raise money for a new youth centre in Belfast. Security forces advised Savile that he could be a target for IRA snipers but he was having none of it. The chain-link fence he said, would keep him safe, ‘not from bullets but from birds’.
²

The walk began in the village of Mullusk, with Savile dressed in a bright yellow tracksuit and setting a brisk jogging pace from the front. Three helicopters whirred overhead, while soldiers and police officers mingled with the crowds that lined the route. ‘It was most moving to see women weeping as we passed,’ recalled Savile, who explained his grandparents had been born in Belfast, so this was like ‘coming home’.
³

Afterwards, reporters jostled to get a word from the colourful emissary from the mainland. He told them there were times when ‘a man has to stand up and be counted’
⁴
before offering his blueprint for peace. ‘The growing generation in Ulster have to ask themselves whether they want to appreciate the beauty of life, or smash their surroundings, shoot one another and plant bombs then run away like cowards,’ he said. ‘If that’s really their idea of a good time, then we’ve got no hope.

‘I feel I’ve succeeded if the kids here have had a better time with me than among the troubles clamouring for their attention. Maybe at the end they will decide they have been wasting their lives fighting instead of having a ball.’
⁵
There were no more IRA bombs in 1973.

Jimmy Savile was still a good decade away from being at the height of his powers, and the apex of his influence, yet here he was remodelling himself as a platinum-haired peace envoy. There was now no limit in his mind to what he could achieve.

Since his mother’s death, he had been the subject of another BBC documentary,
The Life of Jimmy Savile
, which he had narrated himself. It was presented as a montage of a fast-moving life: cycling from Land’s End to John O’Groats, volunteering his services at Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville, and talking seriously about his charity work and religion. Amid his cod philosophising, he’d also revealed things about himself: ‘I’m not homosexual,’ he said, ‘I like girls – but I’ve never got around to marrying anyone.’
⁶

He enjoyed keeping the press guessing, and relished deceiving them over the prospect this marital status might be about to change thanks to a fabricated affair with Polly James, the 25-year-old former singer from Pickettywitch. ‘I’m a normal sort of chap. I’ve fancied her for three years. It’s just taken me this long to make up her mind that I mean it,’
⁷
he said. Six weeks later, Polly James, who was in the process of launching her solo career, announced that Jimmy Savile was too old and she’d gone back to her ex-boyfriend. Former band members have since claimed that there was no relationship, and it was a ‘a set up for publicity’
⁸
designed to promote the band’s new single.

In late December, at a gala evening attended by captains of industry at London’s Talk of the Town club, the Variety Club of Great Britain named Jimmy Savile its Showbusiness Personality of the Year. After accepting the award and basking in the acclaim of his peers, he left for Broadmoor to do an overnight shift.

Jimmy Savile was now seen as a man who could communicate with the population at large. The Department of Environment
hired him to front a £750,000 campaign on the importance of wearing car seatbelts. Its slogan, ‘Clunk Click’, became the title of his new Saturday evening chat show on BBC1.

Clunk Click
started its eight-week run in May, with Jimmy Savile promising anything but the usual format. ‘It will be about people and places with which the average TV viewer would not normally have any contact,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that there are so many people doing such valuable jobs who have never been heard of. Why not give them a chance to speak?’

He insisted that nothing on the show would contravene what he described as ‘the social code’, before adding, ‘Say what you like about the pop scene but I have never done anything which I believe would corrupt anyone.’
⁹

The show’s producer was Roger Ordish, who first met Jimmy Savile when he was employed as an occasional director on
Top of the Pops
. Ordish’s first impressions had not been particularly favourable: ‘[It was] his unapproachability,’ he recalled soon after the slew of stories about Jimmy Savile’s offending behaviour began to emerge. ‘We weren’t actually communicating.’

There was nevertheless something about Ordish that Bill Cotton instinctively felt made him ‘the right man for Savile’, and he despatched the producer to Broadcasting House to meet him. Ordish would end up working with for the next 21 years.

The reviews of the new show were not unanimously positive. ‘The candid serenity of [Savile’s] face rebukes the cynical but does not prevent us from feeling like hospitalised invalids who are being visited against their will,’ wrote Peter Black in the
Daily Mail
.
¹⁰

As this suggests, Jimmy Savile was now as famous nationally for his charity work as he was for his TV and radio appearances. He spoke regularly of his role at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, and launched a scheme to build an £8,000 luxury recreation lounge at its National Spinal Injuries Centre, housed in a series of antiquated Nissen huts.

He also revealed why he so enjoyed working in the hospital’s mortuary department. ‘I find I’ve got an aptitude for dead people,’
he said. ‘When I’m holding somebody that has just died I’m filled with a tremendous love and envy. They’ve left behind their problems, they’ve made the journey. If somebody were to tell me tonight I wouldn’t wake up in the morning it would fill me with tremendous joy. Sometimes I can’t wait.’
¹¹

*

In September 1973, soon after his triumphant march through Belfast, Jimmy Savile was offered an improved two-year contract with BBC Radio 1.
Savile’s Travels
would be extended to two hours and he would be paid around £15,000 a year for his two shows. By delivering big audiences for a station that was still regarded as an upstart organisation by higher powers at the BBC, Savile was deemed to be more than worth his pay rise.

Before putting the deal on the table, however, Douglas Muggeridge, the controller of Radio 1 and 2, first needed to put his mind at ease. He’d heard rumours about Jimmy Savile, and specifically what went on during the making of
Savile’s Travels
.

Rodney Collins was 23 years old at the time, and had been employed as the network’s publicity officer since April 1971. He had got to know and like Muggeridge during his stints on music papers, and his job involved advising the controller on the public image of the networks and the people it employed. Collins described his boss as being ‘open to ideas, open to challenges and open to accepting new broadcasters’.

Of the DJs on Radio 1, Collins stated that Jimmy Savile stood out, describing him as ‘a different animal to everyone else’. Unlike those who had come over from the old Light Program or those recruited from the pirate stations, Savile had already made his name, which meant, in his words, that
Savile’s Travels
and
Speakeasy
were ‘very much moulded around what [he] believed he could bring to Radio 1’. In fact, Collins doubted whether the programmes ‘would have continued with any other presenter’.

Collins said Jimmy Savile differed from his colleagues in other ways, too. ‘I had a home number for absolutely everybody apart from Jimmy Savile,’ he reported. ‘If I wanted [him], I either had to
leave a message for the producer’s office or it was Leeds Infirmary. Savile was his own man.’

He admitted that ‘rumours about disc jockeys came through all the time’, although they were not exclusively about sex. It was, therefore, fairly routine for Muggeridge to ask him to inspect what was being heard on the grapevine. On this occasion, and as the fallout from payola and Claire McAlpine’s death saw Radio 1 ‘zigzagging all over the place’, Muggeridge asked Collins to make inquiries with a number of leading newspaper editors about whether they had heard the rumours about Jimmy Savile ‘entertaining’ young girls in the
Savile’s Travels
motor caravan. More importantly, he was to ascertain whether they were planning to pursue them in print.

‘I spoke to four journalists,’ Collins explained. What they told him was yes, they had heard the stories but they were not planning to run with them. This was due, they said, to Jimmy Savile’s exceptional popularity and the work he did for charity. Two days later, Collins verbally reported the news back to Muggeridge.

One question remains: where did Douglas Muggeridge hear the rumour? ‘He never told me and I never asked,’ Collins replied.

Andy Kershaw maintains rumours about Jimmy Savile were still rife by the time he joined Radio 1 in 1985: ‘At the end of one appearance, one of Savile’s producers – so went the legend – was sitting on the rear step of the vehicle while Savile had his way with a young member of the audience within. Then a little old lady came up the road. “Where’s Jimmy?” she asked. “Er. He’s gone already, I’m afraid,” the producer lied. The vehicle by this stage was bouncing on its axles. “Oh dear. Well, please will you give him this from me?” And she handed over a jar of marmalade. “I made it myself,” she explained. “It’s for Jimmy. To thank him for everything he’s doing for the young people.”’
¹²

What else he was doing was, of course, becoming apparent to the young people at Duncroft Approved School in Staines. There, his favourite girls would be taken for a drive in his Rolls-Royce and soon enough, he’d have their hands down his trousers, his
tongue in their mouths and his fingers in their knickers. He told them he’d be able to tell if they were virgins.

Jimmy Savile’s modus operandi was to test the girls out in order to convince himself they wouldn’t say anything. He’d offer them money in a post office account, jobs at his nightclub complex in Bournemouth or trips to the BBC. In return he’d demand oral sex – ‘Jimmy specials’ as he’d call them. If they looked like being sick, he’d fling open the car door and make sure they vomited outside.

He’d remind them that if they refused to cooperate they would ruin things for the other girls; there would be no more visits, no more free cigarettes and no more minibus trips to the BBC where they got to mingle with his famous ‘friends’. Worse, he’d tell them he’d ensure everyone knew who was responsible.

Jimmy Savile knew exactly what he was doing, as one former Duncroft girl explained: ‘[He] did it in such a way that he always covered himself. You knew it was your word against his and you would never be believed … he manipulated situations … we were vulnerable and in need of love and attention.’
¹³

40. THE ONLY THING YOU CAN EXPECT FROM PIGS

O
ver the course of the four years I had been interviewing Jimmy Savile, we had established an unlikely rapport; unlikely, given he was adamant he didn’t need or have friends, and I had spent a large chunk of my teens and twenties warning anyone who would listen that Jimmy Savile was an ‘Agent of Satan’.

If we were at one of his various homes he would inevitably ease himself into a reclining chair and a fresh Cuban cigar would be lit as a symbolic cutting of the ribbon on the talks. Talks is probably the wrong word, because I would be expected to initiate a line of questioning before listening in respectful silence as he laid the brick of one anecdote on top of another, gradually disappearing behind the wall of his own mythology. He selected stories as I imagined he picked records during the Fifties and early Sixties.

By 2008, he was but an occasional presence in the papers. There had been a recent story about the West Yorkshire Police using his voice on ‘talking signs’ that were being trialled on lamp posts in the Hyde Park, Headingley and Woodhouse areas of Leeds. The signs were designed to warn students about the risks of burglary. There had not been much else.

Publicity of a different kind was on his mind during this particular meeting in Leeds, specifically the
Sun
’s coverage of an abuse scandal that had broken over the Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey. Jimmy Savile had first visited the home in the early 1970s to open a fete. It was the period in which the worst offences were alleged to have taken place.

A black and white photograph had emerged of Savile at the home. In it, he was wearing a tight-fitting tracksuit with large, square-framed sunglasses that looked like they were on upside down. He was on his haunches, surrounded by a big group of children. At the edge of the group a boy of about eight was holding up a giant badge saying ‘Jim Fixed It for Us’.
Jim’ll Fix It
did not begin until 1975, which therefore suggests he was a visitor to Haut de la Garenne over a number of years.

When confronted by a reporter about the picture, Savile’s kneejerk reaction was to deny he had ever visited Haut de la Garenne. Two days later, though, he admitted he’d made a mistake. While there was a shortage of new facts to report, the
Sun
kept using the picture of Jimmy Savile with those poor, unfortunate children as a motif for a case without leads; an emblem of an island’s assumed shame.

The phone rang suddenly and Savile picked up. ‘Morning … Have we heard from our friends? … Really? … Right. Right … You tell me what you want to do and I’ll do it,’ he chortled, before his face settled into a grim smile.

‘I see … Right, now then, does your pal think we’ve got a good chance if we go for this or what? … Yeah … Yes … No … Right … Yeah … Right … Yes. Is that possible or not? … Good, send that off … You’ll need your counsel fella to tell me in the morning whether we’ve got a chance … Right, so the bottom line is that you’ve got a press release there and he’ll tell me in the morning whether we have a go and if we do have a go, you release that in the morning and we’ll have a go … Right … So you’ll let me know in the morning … Good … Ta ra.’

Savile put the phone down. ‘That’s the lawyers,’ he said. ‘They’ve got a reply from the
Sun
saying they don’t think they’ve hurt me at all. They’re going to put a press release out but the counsel are going to tell me in the morning what chance of success we have. If it’s 70 per cent or over, we’ll have a go; if it’s less than 70 per cent we’ll just go to the press complaints and it’s just a slap on the wrist. That’s our plan for tomorrow morning.’

He showed me a copy of the letter his lawyers had been instructed to send to the paper and reiterated how much money he had made over the years by taking or threatening legal action against tabloids. And yet, by this point, I had not found a single story that implicated Jimmy Savile in a scandal, let alone one that had resulted in a legal windfall.

I asked him how he was meant to remember where he had been on any given day thirty-five years ago. ‘Thirty-eight years ago,’ he snapped. ‘I was there for half an hour.’

Perhaps realising that he had revealed how much he did remember, he softened. ‘A load of bollocks. Anyway, the thing is, they know what they’re doing. They want to get away without a slap and if goes to the press complaints they’ll see that as a victory.’ Thirty-eight years ago would have put his visit at 1970. The photograph, which featured a
Jim’ll Fix It
badge, could not have been taken before 1975. It appears that Jimmy Savile, who was a regular visitor to Jersey, was calling on the children of Haut de la Garenne for five years at least.

Savile remarked that it was easy to write about a murder or a rape. ‘The difficult stories are good news stories … With a murder or a rape all you’ve got to do is get a name, a date, a time and a place. Then you speak to someone next door and you can be done in half an hour. You’re home and dry.’

I put it to him that he had spent the best part of 50 years in the media spotlight and yet had never been the victim of so much as a kiss and tell. Why, given this apparently spotless record, were the tabloids now hunting him?

‘How the hell should I know?’ he grunted. ‘The only thing you can expect from pigs is shit.’