In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  As far as it’s possible to tell, Savile worked at three Yorkshire collieries. The first, the Prince of Wales Colliery in Pontefract, was a training centre for new conscripts, one of 13 in the country. South Kirkby Colliery in South Elmsall was where he was posted after completing his basic training, and was one of a string of mines in the area north of Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield. Waterloo Main at Temple Newsam in Leeds was his third and final posting, and the scene of the accident he claimed finished his mining career.

  Pontefract was a bleak, unforgiving place: a racecourse, pit and not much besides. Like Savile, Herbert A. Purnell was a Leeds boy who had trained with the Air Training Corps from the age of 15, been called up as a Bevin Boy and sent for training at Pontefract in late 1944. ‘A lot of the lads there lived in a hostel because they were from all over the country,’ he remembered. It chimes with what Savile wrote in his autobiography about his fellow recruits being the ‘most incredible and bizarre types’. Among his intake, he said, were ‘doctors, auctioneers, farmers, officer cadets, clerks’.

  On their first day, the conscripts were kitted out at the stores with a pair of sturdy boots with steel toecaps, a safety helmet and a belt from which to hang a safety lamp. Four weeks later, at the end of ‘Stage A’ training, the rookie miners were then sent underground for the first time.

  For many, memories of the first ‘big drop’ remained vivid. ‘You went into the cage with trepidation,’ remembered Warwick Taylor who was put to work at a coalmine in Wales and later became chairman of the Bevin Boys Association. ‘It was supposed to descend at 30 foot per second, but they let it go at 70 foot per second … The pressure on the eardrums was intense. Some of the lads got nosebleeds on the way down. Most of us couldn’t wait to get out.’ At the end of his first drop, Jimmy Savile remembered, ‘Twenty-five white, wobbly-legged flowers of British youth emerged like cattle to the abattoir.’2

  Stage B Training took place at the mines the recruits were assigned to. Savile was sent 20 miles away to South Kirkby Colliery, known for containing the finest steam raising coal in Yorkshire and being the deepest mine in the county. He and his childhood friend Joe Baker were initially billeted in a temporary miners’ hostel in Featherstone, where they received orders to present themselves in work clothes at the pithead baths no later than 6 a.m.

  On a normal day, a miner’s shift began with undressing and placing his everyday clothes in a locker. He would then be given a bar of soap, scrubbing brush and towel and told to move naked along a short corridor, past the shower room and into the dirty area containing further lockers containing work clothes. Once changed, he’d move on to the lamp room where a ‘tally’, one of two numbered brass discs, was exchanged for a freshly charged hand lamp. Each tally was placed on a hook in the lamp room and served as proof that a miner was in the pit.

  But rather than join the queue for the cage, Jimmy Savile claimed to have been put to work at the pithead. This was a noisy, brutal arena in which the incessant din was created by shunting engines, hammers on steel and giant spoil buckets tipping muck that piled up into an ugly scar across the surrounding countryside.

  Savile was assigned to the screens, the long, steam engine-powered steel trays that shunted backward and forward allowing graded lumps to fall through into railway trucks below. It was a common posting for new Bevin Boys who took up position alongside elderly or disabled miners on either side of the conveyor belt.

  For all his later claims that he was unlike the other recruits because he actually enjoyed being a miner, even Savile admitted working on the screens was ‘a job reserved for the young, the old and the damned … The noise, the dark and dust and the torn fingers created an impression of Hell that I will carry to the grave.’3

  In time, he secured work underground but only because it was a job that nobody else wanted. The pit bottom at South Kirkby was a subterranean cathedral from which roadways, or maingates, took the men to the various mining districts. Savile’s new job was in one of these tunnels, working for the Corporal, the man in charge of all haulage work in the mine.

  ‘There was no doubt I was odd,’ he told me during our first meeting in Leeds. ‘I was always odd. People would say, “You’re a funny one, you are lad.”’ And the job he was given reflected that. He was stationed two miles from the pit bottom and a mile and a half from the face. Forced to perch on a narrow bench in a manhole chiselled into the wall of the tunnel, he spent his eight-hour shift alone. His task was to lever coal trucks back onto the tracks whenever they derailed. ‘The job used to drive everyone bonkers – no lad would do it,’ he said. ‘They would imagine ghosts and all sorts. I loved it.’

  He told me about the pocket he had stitched into his coat and smuggling in books on astronomy, languages, people and travel. ‘I learned down South Kirkby colliery,’ he explained. ‘You can’t get a better learning place in the world than a pitch dark hole underground with only a lantern for company.’ He said he remained ‘King of the Corner’ for three and a half years.

  Hemsworth and the surrounding villages of South Kirkby, South Emsall, Fitzwilliam and Kinsey were home to tough, tight-knit communities that looked after their own and in which favours were rife. Jimmy Savile said he did not fit in: ‘I’d never go to the pub for a drink with the lads, it wasn’t my scene. I was quite prepared to go home and sit and think.’4

  He pinpointed one day when ‘they drew apart from me and I started to draw apart from the normal world’.5 He arrived late for work, still dressed in his blue suit, white shirt, navy tie and suede shoes from the night before. There was no time to go through the bathhouse and change into his work gear so as he came skidding into the yard, he just managed to exchange his tally for a lamp before squeezing into the cage. He was still dressed in his Sunday best and clutching a newspaper.

  Ignoring the looks and comments from the other miners, Savile said he smiled and looked ahead as if nothing was out of place. ‘The deputy sat at the bottom to check the lamps,’ he recalled. ‘When I turned up in a sharp suit, he checked the lamp and his eyes went up the suit. It freaked him.’

  He talked of feeling the eyes on him as he walked off in his suit to his position on the dark bend in the tunnel. Once at his manhole, he took off his shirt, jacket and trousers, folded them up in the newspaper and settled down to read his latest book, occasionally stopping to shoulder a wayward tub back onto the rails. He said he worked naked and saved enough water from his canteen to wash down his face and hands at the end of the shift. Then, when the eight hours were up, he unfolded the paper and climbed gingerly back into his folded suit and shirt and headed back to the pit bottom. He claimed that he arrived looking as immaculate as when he had left: ‘The effect was electric.’

  This was a story he told on many, many occasions, and it was the same ending every time: ‘In the history of coalmining nobody ever went to work at the coal face in an immaculate suit and came back clean,’ he claimed. He insisted the other miners didn’t want to stand next to him in the cage. Miners were superstitious by nature, and in the queue someone had said he was a witch. Jimmy Savile didn’t care. For the first time in his life he realised being odd had an effect on people.

  ‘I wasn’t sure what it did but it did develop my out-of-the-box thinking,’ he told me 60 years later. ‘I didn’t do it for any reason, I just realised that going back clean would freak people out, and it did. Underneath the clothes I was as black as night. But I realised that being a bit odd meant that there could be a payday.’

  *

  When victory over the Germans was declared in September 1945 there was a sharp rise in absenteeism among the Bevin Boys.6 The country still needed coal but there was little motivation for the conscripts to return to work when they could see servicemen being welcomed home as heroes. Under the terms of the Emergency Act, however, periods of extended leave or absence still had to be registered with both the pit and the labour exchange.

  Savile had been mining for less than a year and, I strongly suspect, had b
ecome a repeat absconder by this time. For example, he claimed to have been one of the first tourists to cycle through France after the war, obtaining a transit visa that allowed him to travel by train to Switzerland via France. He said he spent his first night in France ‘in a shelter with 300 homeless people’ before setting off for Le Touquet, the fashionable seaside resort some 40 miles away. There, he found beautiful villas with furniture smashed to smithereens inside. ‘No birds flew about it and the feeling of unreal macabre was overwhelming,’ he said.7

  When he returned from France, stocked up with spare bike parts he intended to sell on at a tidy profit, Jimmy Savile discovered he had been transferred to Waterloo Main colliery in Leeds. In his autobiography, he stated that by this time he had done ‘nearly four years at South Kirkby’ which would have made it late 1948, some months after the last of the Bevin Boys had been demobbed.

  On my last visit to see him at his Scarborough flat, he had on display his miner’s lamp, a snap tin used for food and a thick slab of coal mounted on a wooden plinth that was presented to him when he returned to South Kirkby in the 1980s. As one of the most famous men to be recruited under Bevin’s scheme, his photograph had dominated a display at the National Mining Museum of England in Wakefield. It hung in a glass case above the items now arranged on his mantelpiece.

  I asked him how he felt about going back underground once the war had been won and troops were returning home. ‘I’d learned enough not to necessarily go down the pit,’ he replied, hinting at the wheeling and dealing he was doing on the side. ‘I knew I could always get a quid or two one way or another. But unfortunately you didn’t get a ration book. I had to go down the pit to get a ration book to eat, so of course I went.’ He also admitted that he was put on night shifts as punishment for going AWOL.

  The upside to be being assigned to Waterloo was that he could move back in to Consort Terrace. Each morning, he said he’d rise at 3 a.m. and walk for half an hour in his clogs to catch the train that took him to the pit. But rather than being left alone with his books on a quiet stretch of tunnel, he spoke of Waterloo teaching him to ‘enjoy the delights of manual labour’. Such delights were to indirectly lead to the accident that resulted in him leaving the mines; another significant brick in the facade of his mythology.

  He said he was lying on his side in an eighteen-inch high tunnel, shovelling dust off the belt between shifts. He was working alone and should have had his safety lamp placed in a position so its light shone down the coalface to let others know he was there. Instead, when the shot-firer looked down the face and saw nothing, he detonated his charges. A split second later, the roof of the tunnel came crashing down on the concealed figure up ahead. ‘There was no sound,’ Savile recalled, ‘just a localised “WHUMP”.’

  Concussed and covered in debris, including one large piece of stone that had fallen onto his back, he said he called out and was pulled clear by his fellow miners. He remembered being totally unmarked, ‘but my legs moved in a funny sort of way.’8 At the surface, he was told to lie on a pile of coal until the end of the shift.

  During the next few days he recalled that his aches and pains gradually disappeared, all except for the one in his back. He went to Leeds Infirmary where neither X-rays nor a physiotherapist could locate the source of the problem. As a last resort, heated electrical pads were placed on his thighs.

  Savile maintained that as the pain got worse, he kept returning to the hospital for regular check-ups. He was eventually fitted with a surgical webbing corset fortified by steel rods, which left him incapable of lifting his feet more than an inch. When he asked what his prospects were, a nurse is supposed to have taken his name card from a filing cabinet and coldly informed him that he would never walk again without sticks.

  He was signed off on sick pay: ‘two walking sticks were added to my survival kit and hey presto I was released into the free world, after seven event-filled years underground.’9 Of course, seven years underground would make it 1951 or 1952, a period in which Jimmy Savile was making a name for himself as a racing cyclist rather than as a shuffling invalid.

  Trying to confirm the dates when he was mining is like trying to nail smoke. In 1994, Savile showed a reporter the rudimentary surgical support jacket he once wore. ‘I keep this … as a reminder of an accident that changed, and nearly wrecked, my life,’ he explained. ‘I was 24 and had been working in the pits for six years when I was blown up underground … I was like a zombie for three years, with two sticks and that boned jacket.’10

  According to this timeline the accident must have happened in 1950, or more probably early 1951. But if his recovery did indeed take three years, one small but rather significant fact is ignored: in August of 1951, he took part in the very first Tour of Britain cycle race. And in the official race brochure he was listed as ‘Oscar “The Duke” Saville’ [sic], a ‘company director’.

  In 2008, over lunch at the Athenaeum Club, the story changed again. He told me, ‘I did seven years as a Bevin Boy, two extra than I was meant to have done.’ The most plausible timeline was given to a newspaper 30 years previously: ‘So there I was, a young man just turned twenty with two sticks and about half a mile an hour as top speed.’11 If he’d just turned 20, the accident would have happened in late 1946 or early 1947.

  But even if Jimmy Savile was signed off sick in 1947, the speed of his recovery can have been nothing short of miraculous. Why? Because in the spring of 1948 a young and extremely fit Jimmy Savile appeared as an extra in the British film, A Boy, a Girl and a Bike starring Diana Dors and Honor Blackman. The story is based around a fictional cycling club, and Savile and a pal landed work and moved into digs in Grassington as the production moved between locations. The film climaxes in a prestigious Yorkshire road race, in which, for a second or two, the unmistakable figure of a 21-year-old Jimmy Savile can be seen. He looks lean and healthy, and is pedalling his racing bike like the elite competitor that he surely was at the time.

  The dates are not the only inconsistencies in his story, however. During the miners’ strike of the 1980s, Savile gave an interview to the Sun in which he expressed his sadness at the state of the industry. The article stated: ‘In 1948, Jimmy was finally allowed to leave the pits when a chest cold showed up on X-ray.’12

  More perplexing still is a throwaway quote from a 1981 newspaper article in which he hit back at critics who accused him of being too hungry for publicity: ‘When I was James Wilson working down the pits for £2 a week for six shifts, it didn’t matter to anyone,’ he retorted.13

  It is unlikely that this was a typo, given that Wilson was one of Jimmy Savile’s middle names. So why did he refer to himself as James Wilson, and was it an uncharacteristic slip of the tongue? He once told me that he was named after a cousin, Jimmy Wilson, who died in a car crash at the age of 22. Could it be that Jimmy Wilson died much later than this and Jimmy Savile was using his late cousin’s papers to evade work? Unfortunately, records of the Bevin Boys were destroyed in a fire in 1950 and only around 500 members of the Bevin Boys Association are alive today, making corroboration of any of this impossible.

  *

  The Bevin Boys were, as the title of Warwick Taylor’s memoir attests, The Forgotten Conscripts. They had to wait more than 50 years before being presented at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day. Taylor’s long campaign for public recognition finally came to fruition in 2008 when he led a delegation of former Bevin Boys to 10 Downing Street to receive medals from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. ‘This is wonderful news for a brave group of men who have been forgotten and shelved for years,’ said Taylor afterwards. ‘We have finally surfaced in the national consciousness.’14

  I met Jimmy Savile that very morning outside the Athenaeum Club before he joined the former Bevin Boys at Downing Street. But as Taylor later explained to me, the association had not invited Savile. Jimmy Savile was invited by Downing Street. Taylor recalled that a member of Downing Street staff had told him to ‘think of the publicity’ that his presence w
ould generate.

  Taylor also told me that he’d approached Jimmy Savile at the reception and invited him along to one of their regular get-togethers. He did not get the response he had expected: ‘Savile said nothing and just walked away from me,’ recalled Taylor. ‘He didn’t want to get involved.’

  Taylor’s theory is that Jimmy Savile wasn’t a Bevin Boy at all. He said that he knew of no other conscripted miners who had been sent to work at South Kirkby or Waterloo. While the terminology Savile used when describing his mining career, and Joe Baker’s confirmation that he trained with him at Pontefract and worked with him at South Kirkby would seem to suggest otherwise, it is very unlikely that he was a Bevin Boy for as long as he variously claimed. The possibility that he was using another man’s identity papers in order to dodge work and further his career on the edges of the black market is, of course, another intriguing alternative.

  This period in Jimmy Savile’s life remains as murky as the environment he claimed to have worked in. Most of the pits where the Bevin Boys served have long since closed. The gates of South Kirkby colliery were padlocked in 1988 and it was demolished soon afterwards, while golfers now roam the landscaped grounds where Waterloo Main Colliery once stood. Among the 164,000 and more records stored by the Coal Mining History Resource Centre, I could find no evidence of a shot-firing accident at Waterloo Main between 1944 and 1950 although, as Warwick Taylor pointed out, one miner was killed every six hours and another was seriously injured every six minutes. ‘It’s unlikely the accident would have been reported,’ he conceded.

  9. OLD AND INFIRM

  Attitudes towards the Jimmy Savile investigation within the Newsnight offices seemed more positive in the wake of the successful interview with Keri, even if the spectre of the planned Jim’ll Fix It tribute show at Christmas remained a background worry for those working on the story. The BBC received more than 12,000 applications for tickets for the recording of the show, though Jones and MacKean didn’t know this at the time. Jones was concerned enough, however, to voice his reservations about the scheduling of the tribute to Newsnight’s editor and their executive editor on the Savile report, Peter Rippon.