by Dan Davies
James Wilson Vincent Savile was born on 31 October 1926. His parents, Agnes and Vince Savile, had already produced six children in fifteen years of marriage: Mary, Marjory, Vincent, John Henry, Joan and Christina. This Halloween baby, arriving nearly five years after their last, was an unwanted early birthday present for its mother: Agnes turned forty the very next day.
Jimmy Savile was what he always called a ‘Not again child’. As he told me at that first meeting, ‘When the Duchess told the neighbours she was up the tub, the neighbours said “Not again.”’ The unplanned youngest of seven, scrapping for attention and trying to survive in a large, working-class family living on the breadline in a northern city during the Depression: this was the foundation stone for the mythology he’d constructed around himself.
Leeds celebrated its 300th anniversary in the summer of 1926. An historical pageant was staged in Roundhay Park. The realities of life, however, were less vibrant: soot-darkened skies glowering over cobbles and chimneys and endless terraces of squalid back-to-backs. By late October, when Agnes gave birth to little Jim, as she called him, the city’s miners had only just been forced back to the pits having remained defiant long after the end of the General Strike.
The city Jimmy Savile was born into was one in which daily life saw packed trams ferrying workers to and from the engineering plants at Hunslet and the mills at Armley and Wortley. At Montague Burton’s tailoring factory on Hudson Road more than fifteen hundred men, women and children toiled side by side. But Leeds had also become somewhat notorious for its thriving black market, prostitution rackets and easy access to illegal gambling. It was a reputation that prompted one newspaper to describe it as ‘the City of Sin’, a label that Jimmy Savile always relished.
Savile’s father, Vince, held down regular if poorly paid employment with Jim Windsor, a bookmaker who took a certain pride in defying the law by accepting wagers from the working men of Leeds – off-course betting was illegal up until 1960. Operating out of a ‘blower room’ above a parade of shops on Vicar Lane, Vince Savile took such bets and issued handwritten slips through a small hole in the door. Outside, a lookout kept watch for the Black Marias that would periodically cart off those caught in the act. The punters were not the only ones to fall foul of the local constabulary; in later life, Jim Windsor boasted to one newspaper that he was arrested once a year for 20 years.1
Vince met Agnes Kelly before he had turned to illegal gambling. He was working at a small railway station in rural Yorkshire that she passed every day on the way to her first job as a supply teacher and child minder. Twenty-three years old and venturing beyond the pit villages of the north-east for the first time in her life, Agnes was tiny, fair and spirited; the opposite of the tall, awkward and softly spoken young man who passed the long hours he spent alone by training birds to take breadcrumbs from his hand. Despite their manifest differences, they were married in Lanchester, County Durham in March 1911.
The newly-weds moved in temporarily with Vince’s parents in Leeds, and just over a year later Agnes gave birth to their first child, Mary. Vince dabbled briefly with the idea of following his father into the assurance business but it seems that he was not designed for hard graft. When war broke out in 1914 an army medical revealed a condition that exempted him from duty.
Money was tight, and the family had to get by on Vince’s meagre earnings and the little that Agnes brought in as a supply teacher. And yet they still managed to maintain the payments on a larger than usual house situated only a short walk from the city centre. For Jimmy Savile, though, the memories of childhood that he shared with me all contained a common thread, that of being penniless in a time and place where opportunity simply didn’t exist. ‘I was forged in the crucible of want,’ was one typically florid description of his predicament.2
Added to the family’s relative poverty, Jim Savile was a small, undernourished and sickly child, the latter a legacy of the mysterious illness that struck him down as an infant. He consistently refused to elaborate on the nature of this illness, sticking instead to the well-worn line, ‘When you were poor, you got ill and generally died.’
According to Savile’s version of events, the situation was so dire that a doctor was called to the family home. After making his examination, the doctor shook his head gravely and wrote out a death certificate to ‘save himself a return journey’. With all hope seemingly gone, the local priest was duly summoned to administer the last rites.
As a devout Catholic, Agnes Savile decided to seek refuge in St Anne’s Cathedral in the city centre, leaving her mother to tend to the child in what seemed certain to be his final hours. While she was there, Agnes picked up a leaflet on a little-known Scottish nun, Sister Margaret Sinclair, who had died just a few years earlier. Sinclair had been posthumously credited with a series of miraculous intercessions, so Agnes closed her eyes and prayed to Sister Margaret for help.
In the very first chapter of his autobiography, Jimmy Savile wrote that as his grandmother lowered a mirror over his mouth expecting to collect his dying breath, she received instead ‘a right eyeful of involuntary, well-aimed pee’.3
Agnes Savile’s account was significantly different, however. In 1970, aged 84, she recalled the ‘illness’ struck when Jimmy was two and a half. ‘My eldest daughter had him out in the pram and stopped at a shop leaving Jimmy outside,’ she said. ‘He was strapped in, but jumped about so much that the pram overturned and the hood caught the back of his neck and severed one of the muscles.’4
The muscle refused to heal, Agnes explained. ‘He could not sit up, he could not even shut his eyes to sleep, and in fact slept staring up at the ceiling. He would go into spasms in which his face would turn round over his neck till he was looking over his back.’
After six months, she took her spasmodic and perpetually staring child to the hospital. He was admitted but after 10 days the doctors were still at a loss to diagnose the infant’s condition, concluding that their only option was to perform an exploratory operation. Agnes refused, saying she would rather take her youngest son home.
The child’s prospects looked bleak. ‘My mother was with me at the time,’ Agnes recalled. ‘She persuaded me to go to my husband’s office and bring him back. The office was near the cathedral. Seeing the door open, I went in – more because I didn’t want to get to the office before three than any particular wish to pray. I had been praying for so long, it was as though I had spiritual indigestion and could not pray any more.’
When Vince and Agnes got home later that day, they were expecting the worst. When Agnes’s mother announced the child had gone to sleep, they thought he was dead because his eyes were closed for the first time in months. It was then that they noticed his regular breathing.
Agnes Savile claimed that when Jim woke up that evening he was ‘perfectly cured’. The doctor was called back, but she made no mention of a death certificate. When the reporter asked Agnes what had happened, she replied: ‘We prayed for him to be cured, and our prayers were answered.’
Following her son’s startling and inexplicable recovery, Agnes wrote letters to her local priest and joined the campaign for the beatification of Margaret Sinclair. From 1965, when the Margaret Sinclair Centre opened in Rosewell, Scotland, Agnes embarked on the annual pilgrimage to give thanks.
This seemingly miraculous intercession was hugely significant to Jimmy Savile. ‘I was dying,’ he wrote in the very first page of his autobiography. ‘The Master, or one of his minders, hearing of this imminent addition to his heavenly host, sent in the nick of time a miracle cure.’5 It was not just how he saw himself, it was something the whole family believed, as his sister Joan Johnson confirmed many years later: ‘Someone up there listened and realized that the world needed [him], which of course it did.’6
So, rather than the downtrodden image of the ‘Not again child’ that he peddled in so many interviews over the course of his life, a different picture emerges of how Jimmy Savile regarded himself from the very beginning; a mi
racle child, the chosen one.
*
The one surviving photograph of all nine members of the Savile family was taken in a photographer’s studio on Burley Road at the outbreak of World War II. It was displayed in Jimmy Savile’s flats in Leeds and Scarborough. Flanking the group are Jimmy’s two older brothers, Vince and John Henry, both in their Royal Navy uniforms. Mary and Marjory, the eldest girls, stand at the back, while Christina and Joan, who smiles shyly from behind her father’s elbow, are to one side. Jimmy, who was twelve at the time but looked considerably younger, beams from the front.
Agnes is in the centre of the group, with Vince, a balding, slightly stooped figure at her side. It was a position she was accustomed to for she was the hub of the household, as well as for Jimmy being the sun that he orbited.
Diminutive and determined, Agnes managed the family’s finances skilfully, ensuring there was food on the table and just about enough money left over for her and Vince to attend the weekly dance and make a small contribution to the collection plate after church on Sunday. Her seven children were all made to attend church with her. ‘She was an old-fashioned religioso,’ Savile said. ‘She went to mass because she had a guilty conscience.’
Jimmy Savile described his mother as ‘ferocious’, albeit affectionately. He said it was her decision that the family moved into the three-storey, five-bedroomed terraced house on Consort Terrace, a house that was technically beyond their means. They had plenty of room, he recalled, but little in the way of furniture. With only enough for coal for the fireplace in the parlour, it was Agnes who kept the family entertained by playing a cheap upright piano.
‘The house had lots of steps and corridors,’ he remembered. ‘We had a bathroom with an old Victorian bath and an inside toilet. There was a cellar where the fuses were fitted … [and] an apostle clock on the wall. When it used to strike every hour, figures of the twelve apostles appeared above the face. I don’t know how my mother got that. She was very good at organizing and, suddenly, things would appear.’7
Joan maintained that it was from their mother that her younger brother inherited his drive. It was not the only personality trait they shared: ‘He’s very like her,’ she once said, ‘dominant, likes to get his own way.’8
If Agnes wanted the best for her family, she was generally frustrated by her husband’s lackadaisical approach to money. ‘She was never happy because she couldn’t provide what she really wanted,’ Savile maintained. ‘She was ground down by the wheel of life. It knocked bits off her.’
While his mother looms large in his story, there is not much more than the family portrait and one faded black and white snap of his father taken during his time as the stationmaster from which to gain a sense of Vince Savile. Jimmy Savile remained reluctant to talk about his father, to the extent that he even refused to tell me when he died.
Records show that Vincent Joseph Marie Savile was born in Salford in 1886, and by the age of 15 was working as a butcher’s assistant. His father, John Henry Savile, had been an estate agent in Leeds before becoming a superintendent in an assurance agent’s office.
According to Savile, Vince’s chief gift in life was a flair for arithmetic. He rose at 11 each day because the horse racing didn’t start until 12, meaning the children had to tiptoe around the house before school. He also introduced his youngest son to cigars when he was seven, offering him a drag one Christmas thinking it would make him violently ill and put him off forever.
‘He was a lovely, line of least resistance, mañana, never got excited fella,’ Savile told me. ‘That’s what he was.’ It was about all that he did confess of his father. But was theirs a close relationship? On one rare occasion, Jimmy Savile did reveal a bit more: ‘As close as you could be. At that age you don’t understand closeness … you only understand closeness when you haven’t got it … He demanded nothing from me. I demanded nothing from him.’9
*
Whether Jimmy Savile actually cheated death as a child or not, whether the family was as impoverished as he maintained, and whatever the truth about his relationship with his father, he was unquestionably the runt of the litter. He was so ‘skint’, as he put it, that he qualified for subsidised canvas sandshoes, and was given free milk and spoonfuls of malt each day at school to stave off rickets.
A photograph of his class at St Anne’s Elementary School on the day of their first Holy Communion shows the pencil-thin Jim Savile sitting at the front. He is not wearing socks. Joan admitted that her brother had fewer opportunities than the other children in the family: ‘We all went to college but when it came to [his] turn the money had run out.’
And yet the few people who did remember Jimmy Savile as a child recalled him as bright and his mother as a warm, welcoming figure who was well known in the Woodhouse area of Leeds.10
At Christmas, Savile maintained his big treat was being taken to Lewis’s department store in the centre of Leeds to look at the toys. He also reminisced with me about days out to Scarborough organised for the children of the poor and of a holiday camp in the Yorkshire Dales where he was made to bed down on a wooden floor. He recalled standing outside and looking at the stars: ‘I’d come from a back street in Leeds in the days before clear air, when everywhere was smoky and dirty. It was so magical I stood there for ages.’11
One of his favourite stories was about coming home from school to find the house empty. A tin of baked beans and an egg would be waiting for him in the kitchen, which he’d heat up on the stove and eat out of the tin. He said it was like his mother had gone on strike but insisted this was an arrangement which suited him down to the ground.
Here was a solitary child who did not spend much time playing with kids his own age. Sometimes he would head into town to the cinema but more often than not he whiled away the hours outside school in the corridors and wards of the St Joseph’s Home for the Aged across the road from the house. Vince Savile was a trustee of the home which was run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, an order of nuns that Jimmy Savile continued fund-raising for long after they had been forced from their premises on Consort Terrace.
St Joseph’s, I suspect, was where the seeds of his fixation with death were sown. ‘They were always dying,’ he said of the elderly residents in our first interview. ‘I’d ask, “Where’s Mrs so and so?” and one of the nuns would tell me that she’d died. Then they’d say, “Why don’t you go downstairs and say goodbye to her?”’ He claimed to have enjoyed getting to ride in the hearse for the funerals.
He talked of smuggling in bottles of stout for the elderly residents and stated that his desire to help others stemmed from the example set by his parents, both of whom were active members of the community. ‘My earliest recollections are of having strange people in my house playing cards, and going to whist drives, beetle drives, socials and dances,’ he said.12 ‘I made the realisation even in the early days, and bearing in mind I was only six or seven years old, that doing things for people isn’t a bad idea. People smile at you and they patted you on the head and they were pleased to see you. And at that age it was quite easy to be a pain in the arse.’
When she accompanied her son to Buckingham Palace to collect his OBE in 1972, Agnes Savile remembered how as a little boy ‘her Jimmy’ made a habit of helping old ladies with their parcels when they stepped off the trams. When I asked him about where the desire to do philanthropic works had come from, he replied, ‘When you’re born in the circus, you stay in the circus.’
Her little brother might have been a frail and oddly self-contained boy but Joan also recalled that he possessed a markedly different outlook on life to the other Savile kids. ‘Maybe it was because he was a delicate child,’ she offered. ‘Maybe it’s because children who have been snatched from the jaws of death lead a charmed life.’13
She also said that by the age of 14, they were expected to fend for themselves. ‘We were out there on our own. It were up to us,’ she claimed. ‘We used to get smacked many a time, but it never did us any harm.
Mum were a great believer in self-help, but if we were ever in dire straits we knew she was there.’
In later life, Jimmy Savile steadfastly refused to elaborate on his relationships with his brothers and sisters. During that first meeting in Leeds he did reveal, though, that the trials and tribulations of his siblings’ various relationships had stoked his own fear of emotional attachment. He spoke of the excitement on the street when one of them announced they were getting married, the trestle tables and tablecloths and women making sandwiches. ‘And then,’ he said with a well-practised look of incredulity on his face, ‘the women cried in the ceremony.’
He maintained that he could never work out why they cried: ‘I thought it was very strange. And anything from six months to two years later the participants wanted to kill each other. I thought this was amazing … It gave me a lop-sided view of partnerships because they started off as idyllic but invariably for some reason went wrong.’
Beyond the lessons he learned from them about the pitfalls of romance, Savile’s two brothers and four sisters appeared only in brief cameos in his anecdotes. It seems that most came to enjoy his fame and occasional largesse, although the few newspaper clippings on John Henry, or Johnnie as he was known, suggest that he for one was jealous not only of his younger brother’s success but his status as their mother’s favourite.
*
In interviews, Jimmy Savile would get prickly when pressed about his childhood. ‘I don’t believe all this psychological stuff that says you’re a bastard because you got frightened by a snake as a child,’ he told one reporter. ‘That’s a cop out.’14
In 1990, Lynn Barber reported that Savile became ‘seriously annoyed’ when she probed him about his formative years. ‘We had no time for psychological hang-ups,’ he’d snapped at her. ‘We were just survivors, all of us. None of that, “Oh, I was ignored as a child” – what a load of cobblers. All I know is that nothing particular wrong happened and I had a good time.’15