by Dan Davies
After the memorable 1991 interview for his In the Psychiatrist’s Chair series on Radio 4, Anthony Clare remembered Jimmy Savile being ‘exceedingly wary, edgy, like a prize-fighter on his toes, anticipating a flurry of hooks to the head.’16 Clare later wrote that he was particularly struck by his interviewee’s recurring ‘emphasis on money and a denial of feelings’.
Despite Savile’s reluctance, or inability, to open up, Clare picked up hints that being the ‘not again’ pregnancy, the seventh of seven in a household that was ‘skint’, ‘may have left the young Jimmy not merely materially deprived but emotionally deprived too’.
In conclusion, Clare pondered what made him ‘project into [Savile] a foreboding that his solitary, shifting life is but a manifestation of a profound psychological malaise with its roots in that materially deprived, emotionally somewhat indifferent childhood which he so flatly describes’.
In the light of what we now know both of Jimmy Savile and how common it is for those who abuse to have been abused themselves, it is a question mark that coils, unfurls and hangs in the air like cigar smoke.
4. THE FIRST BRICK
Meirion Jones told me that he has vivid recollections of the summer garden parties at Duncroft Approved School for Girls. As both a child and a teenager, he had attended the events with his parents. His aunt Margaret Jones was the headmistress of the school and, since 1970, she had shared a house in the expansive grounds with her mother, Meirion Jones’s grandmother. ‘Imagine a stately home with a huge gravel drive littered with posh cars,’ Jones replied when asked to describe the spectacle. He spoke of the lines of trestle tables with ‘amazing food laid out on them by the girls’, and guests that included minor royals – Princess Marina (the Duchess of Kent) and Princess Alexandra; fading film stars such as James Robertson Justice, who starred in the Doctor in the House films, John Gregson, who was in a number of big British war movies, and Ian Carmichael, who played Bertie Wooster in a big BBC TV series in the Sixties. Another visitor was Dick Haymes, an actor and crooner who was famous in the Forties and Fifties and who was married six times, once briefly to Rita Hayworth. Jones described his aunt ‘swanning around as the grand dame of the event, with a celeb on each arm’.
‘It was a really strange scene,’ he said of the half Jacobean, half Georgian hall that had been transformed into a secure facility for troubled and criminally minded girls of above average intelligence. All of which meant that when, in the early 1970s, Jimmy Savile drove through the gates in his convertible Rolls-Royce, and started making regular visits to the school thereafter, ‘it didn’t seem all that weird’.
Duncroft occupied an unusual space on the outer edges of the care system. As well as its celebrity guest list, it had a high-profile patron in Lady Norman, widow of Lord Montagu Norman, the celebrated wartime governor of the Bank of England. Lady Norman was an enthusiastic advocate for mental health issues and had two buildings named after her at Duncroft, one a hostel for girls over the age of 16 and the other the house that Margaret Jones and her mother lived in.
The school was regarded as something of an experiment, one that was using psychotherapy to correct the behavioural defects of the girls placed in its care. In an era that witnessed the rise of social services and a school of thought that argued vulnerable, damaged youngsters were better off being looked after by the state, Duncroft was considered to be at the cutting edge.
Evidence of Duncroft’s place within the care system can be found in a Royal Society of Medicine article from 1953,1 in which Dr Christofer Lack, consultant psychiatrist at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Ealing, wrote about the role of psychotherapy in approved schools. He stated, ‘certain types of girl are found unsuitable for psychotherapy at Duncroft. The mentally dull girl … does not respond.’ Lack concluded that throughout the approved school system, girls of poor intelligence should be kept together ‘so that their sense of inadequacy is minimised’.
Dr Lack also revealed that each year, of the 300 or so girls sent by the courts to approved schools in the southern half of England, ‘only about 12’ went to Duncroft. The school was, therefore, a small community with a deliberately selective intake. Among the girls at Duncroft were daughters of ambassadors, surgeons and well-known producers at the BBC, as well as others from less white-collar backgrounds. The common factors were they had transgressed and all possessed high IQs. Margaret Jones viewed them as ‘her chosen ones’.2
Girls were sent to Duncroft for a variety of misdemeanours. One girl, who arrived at the school as a 14-year-old in 1972, insisted years later that ‘half the girls were there as punishment for being the victims of sexual abuse – the “crime” of having sex under age, as we thought it’.3 Others were put in Margaret Jones’s care for dabbling with drugs, anorexia, attempting suicide or for running away from children’s homes or abusive parents.
According to another girl who was sent to the school in 1965, Margaret Jones was passionate about proving to the Home Office, under whose jurisdiction Duncroft fell, that the girls’ lives could be turned around given the chance to continue their education and live in a decent environment. The headmistress was, as this woman remembers her, ‘a messiah on the subject’.4
Meirion Jones describes his aunt as a complex woman. He believes she had been ‘shaped by the fact she was running this very strange institution’. He has clear memories of the photographs of Margaret posing with the celebrities who visited Duncroft. Jimmy Savile was among them.
‘She had a strange view of what the world was like,’ explains Jones. ‘She was very bright, very focused and interested in celebrity, which is why you ended up with all these film stars and, eventually, Savile. I think she thought she was doing right by the kids, by opening things up to them and letting them see another life.’
In November 2012, Margaret Jones, then 91, told a newspaper that she had been ‘hoodwinked by Jimmy Savile’5, who she allowed to occasionally sleep overnight at Duncroft. She explained he had been introduced by the mother of one of her pupils, and that no complaints were made about him.
Duncroft was nothing if not a curious set of contradictions: on the one hand was its bucolic Surrey setting and garden party guest list; on the other was its barred windows and staff carrying large bunches of keys. It was ‘a stately home crossed with a prison,’ said Meirion Jones, and as such, it doesn’t hold happy memories for many of those who were sent there.
The school was run primarily by single women, most of whom, like Margaret Jones, were in their forties and fifties. Discipline was enforced through chores – endless cleaning of corridor floors, tidying staff quarters or working in the kitchens – and a rewards system of cigarettes (40 a week if a girl behaved, down to 10 a week if she didn’t). Days were filled with lessons in typing, shorthand and home economics, or sessions with the psychiatrist who, according to Margaret Jones, had the authority to put girls in the padded isolation unit. During their time off, girls lounged in a common room where they smoked incessantly, gossiped about the staff and listened to records.
Life behind the eight-foot high walls surrounding the estate was also subject to the scrutiny and curiosity of regular visiting parties of trainee psychiatrists, social workers and Home Office officials.
But by the early Seventies, fears were expressed that the experiment was beginning to founder. Duncroft was placed in the hands of social services, and as such became known as a community home school. This reclassification makes it sound cosier but the reality experienced by some of those inside does not tally. The recollections of some former Duncroft girls, published online, speak of emotional abuse and staff cruelty. Other girls, however, have warmer memories of their time there, and its staff. From 1970 to 1974, Meirion Jones says he visited Duncroft School ‘very regularly’ with his parents, chiefly to visit his grandmother. ‘The normal thing we’d do is drive over to the school where my aunt would be finishing up stuff. We’d go and have a chat with her, leave the car there and then and wander through the grounds to my aun
t’s house.’
From 1971 onwards, Jones recounts that he saw Jimmy Savile at Duncroft ‘on at least half a dozen occasions’, and spotted his Rolls-Royce parked on the gravel drive on numerous others. Jones was in his teens by this point and his memories of Savile are clear: ‘He was full of banter, though had no real conversation as such. I had a feeling that he was somebody with whom you didn’t really know what was going on. There was somebody hidden behind who you couldn’t see.’
On one occasion, Jones saw Jimmy Savile drive off the premises with three Duncroft girls in his dark convertible. He says his parents, who both had backgrounds in teaching, confronted Margaret Jones about it. ‘They would say to my aunt, “He’s a 50-year-old guy and these are underage girls. What are you doing?” And she would say, “He’s a friend of the school.”’
‘[Savile] said, “I’ll take them for a run,”’ admitted Margaret Jones. ‘I had no reason to doubt him. Please remember, my staff were always on watch. Except when they were off in his car, which I allowed stupidly.’6
Margaret Jones claims she considered Savile to be an ‘oddball’. Her nephew insists she thought Savile ‘was fantastic’, and his invitation to her to take a holiday in one his homes on the south coast provided further conversation on the drive home.
Meirion Jones was suspicious of Jimmy Savile from that day on, as were his parents. His grandmother had altogether more serious misgivings about the famous visitor in their midst. ‘She hated him,’ Jones says. ‘She thought he was creepy.’
In October 1978, Meirion Jones’s mother had dropped in to Duncroft to visit her mother-in-law when Savile arrived at the house unannounced and demanded to be cooked a meal. ‘It was all very awkward and ended up in a row,’ he recalls his mother telling him. She also said that she had found him to be ‘quite intimidating’. Meirion Jones is sure of the dates, as is his mother, because his sister had just gone to university and his grandmother died the following month.
By this stage, Meirion had left London to attend university in Cardiff, where he went on to edit the student newspaper. After graduating, he worked as a print journalist before landing a job at BBC Radio in 1988. Seven years later, he moved into television and a job with BBC2’s Newsnight where he would establish a reputation as one of Britain’s leading investigative journalists.
‘I always had my ears open,’ Jones says of the suspicions aroused by what he’d witnessed of Jimmy Savile at Duncroft. ‘I didn’t hear anything at first but when I moved into telly at the BBC, I started to hear the odd story. I’d try to track down where the story had come from but it always ended up as a conversation in a green room, or something like that. There was never anyone who was a witness or who knew a victim or anything like that. Cameramen would say he had underage girls in his caravan but I could never get to the bottom of any of that.’
Jones also heard Jimmy Savile’s name mentioned in the course of his investigations into paedophile priests within the Catholic Church. Having looked on websites such as Friends Reunited for references to Duncroft, he had found hints but nothing concrete. Something did grab his attention, though: mentions of a police investigation having taken place at some stage.7
*
In late 2008, a 50-year-old woman named Keri began writing her biography.8 The project was suggested by her counsellor as part of her therapy following a mental breakdown. Keri had suffered with chronic anxiety and depression since spending an abusive childhood in and out of care homes and approved schools.
She had gone on to marry three times, and had seven children by five different fathers. ‘Due to my background of abuse, I was entirely unaware of how to have, or hold onto, any kind of intimate relationship with a man,’ Keri explained. Three of her children had been taken into care as babies, and another as a 10-year-old. In 1982, while she was pregnant with her fourth child, she spent a year in prison for deception.
Keri had never known her natural father and claimed to have been abused by her stepfather. At the age of 12 she was sent to Garfield House in Norfolk where, she alleged to the local police in 1999, a care worker had sexually molested her. Two years later, in late 1972, she was transferred to Duncroft. She was 14 at the time.
In late 2009 and throughout 2010, Keri began publishing online chapters from the second instalment of her biography, Keri-Karin Part 1. They covered her time at Duncroft. In one chapter, she wrote about typing classes, being taught dressmaking and the screams she heard coming from the padded room. More pertinently, she referred to the first time she witnessed a celebrity visit to the school, by a man she referred to only as ‘JS’.
Keri reported that the ‘girls flocked to gain attention’ from JS and a small group was tasked with cleaning and polishing his car. He brought with him records and cartons of duty-free cigarettes, which he distributed among the girls as gifts. She also wrote that he would spend hours with Margaret Jones, chatting and laughing in her office. ‘I always looked forward to JS visiting,’ Keri recorded, ‘because it meant pleasant food, rides down the lane in his sports car and extra cigarettes.’
In the very next paragraph, she spelled out the price of such perks. ‘Sadly, it also meant one had to put up with being mauled and groped when he pulled into a lay-by some five miles along the road. I wasn’t the only girl that JS favoured with this either. In fact, he often tried to press me to ‘go further’ than simply fondling him and allowing him to grope inside my knickers and at my partly formed breasts. He promised me all manner of good things if I would give him oral sex.’ 9
One of these inducements was the promise of a trip to see him record one of his television shows at the BBC. Keri acquiesced. Afterwards, she said she gagged and JS leaned across her and flung open the car door, telling her ‘Not in the car. Not in the car.’ He was good to his word, though, and the first of a number of trips to the BBC was arranged.
In the summer of 2011, Meirion Jones found the website on which Keri had published her biography. ‘It was absolutely clear cut,’ he says of his reaction to what she had written. ‘I recognised everything she was saying about Duncroft, whereas most journalists would have probably seen it as a fantasy world with all these celebs and these girls being locked up in this stately home and being on drugs the whole time. Going out to Television Centre or Shepherds Bush Empire? Yeah, I knew they did that. Most of that world knew. And as soon as I saw “JS”, it was obvious who that was.’
Jones was working on a film with Mark Williams-Thomas, a former Surrey Police officer who specialised in major crime and child abuse. They were collaborating on an investigation into how paedophiles can be tracked down. While carrying out research together at Interpol in Lyon, Jones had ‘a long chat’ with Williams-Thomas about Jimmy Savile, his own memories of Duncroft and what Keri had written about hers. He thought Williams-Thomas might have heard about the Savile investigation, given his Surrey connections. Williams-Thomas, who left Surrey Police in 2000, had not.
Williams-Thomas was immediately interested, recalls Jones, ‘but the libel situation was such there was no chance [of doing anything while Savile was alive]’. In any case, Jones, who also discussed Savile with his Newsnight colleague Liz MacKean, was fully committed to other investigations.
*
When news broke of Jimmy Savile’s death on 29 October 2011, Meirion Jones knew it was time to make his move. On the morning of Monday, 31 October, he spoke to his boss at Newsnight, the programme’s editor Peter Rippon. He also fired off an email to Tom Giles, the editor at Panorama, writing: ‘This may not be up Panorama’s street but when I was little my aunt ran a bizarre approved school in a stately home and we would go and visit and Jimmy Saville [sic] would turn up and charitably take the 14-year-old girls on unescorted outings to TVC [BBC Television Centre] and the like and then molest them with his friends. Some of the girls are now prepared to talk about this … and of course he’s dead so he can’t sue.’10
It was not the first time at the BBC in which aspersions had been cast on the previously goo
d name of Sir Jimmy Savile OBE. In May 2010, it was brought to the attention of senior executives at the corporation that Savile was gravely ill. Nick Vaughan-Barratt, a senior executive, emailed George Entwistle, then the BBC Controller of Knowledge Commissioning, to inform him that the BBC had no obituary prepared. At the end of the email, Vaughan-Barratt added, ‘I am not sure we would want one … I have a personal interest here: my first job in TV was on a JS show – I know him well and saw the complex and sometimes conflicting nature of the man at first hand.’ He concluded by adding, ‘I’d feel v queasy about an obit. I saw the real truth!!!’11
On 1 November 2011, a day after the announcement of Jimmy Savile’s death, Vaughan-Barratt, by then the BBC’s head of Events, sent another email. This one was addressed to Jan Younghusband, Commissioning Editor for BBC Music and Events, and contained the reasons why no obituary had been prepared in advance. ‘We decided the dark side to Jim (I worked with him for 10 years) would make it impossible to make an honest film that could be shown close to death.’12 Younghusband followed up by sending an email of her own to Entwistle, agreeing ‘something celebrating a particular part of [Savile’s] TV career is probably better than the [life] story as there are aspects of this which are hard to tell’.13
When later questioned about what he meant by ‘the dark side’, Vaughan-Barratt explained that he had worked with Savile on regional BBC programmes in Leeds in the 1970s, and heard rumours ‘about him abusing his position at Stoke Mandeville … there were accusations that he was having sexual relations with patients.’14 He stated, however, that he never heard anything about ‘illegal activity … with underage girls’.
Younghusband claimed that she didn’t know what was meant by ‘the darker side’ of Jimmy Savile, although she had heard rumours that he ‘mishandled charity money’ and knew there was speculation about his sex life.15 George Entwistle would later claim that he did not read Younghusband’s email and did not believe it was sent as a warning about Savile.16