by Dan Davies
Despite the age difference, Hymns said she was initially bowled over by Savile’s fame and largesse. He took her to dinner at the Queens Hotel in Leeds, and to the InTime nightclub in the city. She told the Yorkshire Evening Post that one evening Savile collected her from the family home in his E-Type Jaguar, and her father had confronted him about the unusual garb he wore on television. ‘Don’t you feel like a bit of an idiot wearing a suit with bananas on it on the telly?’ he’d said. Savile’s reply was trademark: ‘What’s in your bank account, Reg?’
Hymns revealed that they would meet up in a café opposite Leeds General Infirmary or she’d stay with him in a cheap hotel in London when he was filming Top of the Pops. On one occasion, he invited her along to a photocall for the opening of the new offices for the Yorkshire Evening Post. Sue and a friend were persuaded to wear miniskirts and boots. ‘I think he even had his hand up my skirt,’ she admitted. The 22-year-old Prince Charles, who was guest of honour, seemed to find the whole thing hilarious.
The relationship petered out in 1970 when Sue Hymns moved to Munich. Three years later, she returned to Britain and settled in London where she met the man she would go on to marry. It was not until 1991, by which time she had divorced and moved back to Leeds, that their paths crossed again. The relationship was swiftly resumed, although if anyone ever inquired whether she was his girlfriend, Savile would reply that she was his cleaner or that he’d found her in a homeless hostel. She said he was frugal and not given to romantic gestures, although he did pay for dinner and regularly filled her car up with petrol.
Hymns insisted it never bothered her that she was kept in the shadows; she actually enjoyed the fact they lived apart. He had told her long ago that marriage and children would never work in tandem with his showbiz lifestyle. It was a life that saw him group his friends ‘into boxes’, she said. And as someone placed firmly in the Leeds box she learned not to ask questions of the others: ‘There may have been other women,’ she remarked. ‘I didn’t ask.’
Trying to discuss feelings with him was pointless. ‘Jim did have emotions, but he couldn’t show them,’ she said, although he was upset when she moved to London in 2004 to be closer to her daughter. Despite his desire to be seen as a flirtatious single man, kissing up the arms of strangers and being photographed with ‘dolly birds’ on his arm whenever the opportunity arose, he was said to have been ‘grumpy’ about her decision.
On their last night together, at Savile’s favourite pizza restaurant near his flat in Leeds, a member of staff offered to take their photograph. When the woman joked that they should look lovingly at each other, he whispered, ‘I don’t know what it would be like to be loved.’ Sue Hymns replied that she loved him, to which he said, ‘Yeah, I know you do.’
The popular image of Jimmy Savile as a famously private man with a regular, if larger than usual, sexual appetite was further underpinned less than two weeks after the Daily Mail article appeared, albeit in a manner that infuriated Roger Foster and Amanda McKenna, the relations who had assumed the roles of Savile family spokespeople in the aftermath of his death. In a story splashed across the front page of the Sun, Georgina Ray, a 40-year-old blonde divorcée from Cannock in Staffordshire claimed to be Jimmy Savile’s ‘love child’.
Ray insisted she was the result of a brief fling in 1970 between Savile and her mother, at the time a 19-year-old waitress in a greasy spoon café on the A5. She recalled her mother telling her that Jimmy had come in, made her laugh and carried her out across his shoulder and into his motor caravan. The fling lasted two weeks and her mother apparently made no secret of the fact Jimmy Savile was Georgina’s biological father.
In 2010, Georgina Ray defied the wishes of her mother and tried to contact Jimmy Savile. She wrote him a letter but heard nothing. Then, in early 2011, she travelled to Leeds and rang the bell of his flat. She told reporters that they spoke on the intercom but Savile pretended not to be in, shouting, ‘He’s away.’ She returned to Leeds to visit his coffin as it lay in state at the Queens Hotel.
Georgina Ray did not consider herself to be a gold-digger, although she was now pressing for a DNA test in order to be able to stake her claim to a share of Savile’s personal fortune, estimated at around £6 million.
On the same day, 16 December 2011, it emerged that Jimmy had in fact left £5.2 million, split between the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust and the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust. The executors of his will, the National Westminster Bank, were still collating his assets and possessions. Roger Foster was reported to be furious: ‘For [Georgina Ray] to say this is outrageous. Her only reason must be money.’6
Six months later, in a joint television interview with Sue Hymns to rebut still more sinister rumours emerging about her late uncle, Amanda McKenna offered her view of what had happened with Georgina Ray. ‘I first found out about [her] in the newspapers, which isn’t a great way to find out,’ she said. ‘I’ve got 31 cousins anyway, we’re an enormous family, [so I initially thought], “Great, that’s another cousin and it’s fabulous that my uncle Jimmy’s got a child.” Before I’d had any opportunity to make contact with her, the next minute there’s legal letters coming through and then she was contesting his estate. I do have very strong feelings about that because all that money is earmarked for charity.’7
*
Five days before Christmas, Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, hosted a drinks party. In attendance was Caroline Hawley, a BBC World Affairs correspondent. Hawley had just heard about the shelved Newsnight report and as Thompson worked the room, she took her opportunity, commenting that he ‘must be worried about the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile’.8 Thompson’s response was non-committal; it was a decision and an investigation he professed to know nothing about.
The following day, freelance journalist Miles Goslett contacted the BBC to inform them he had information about the Newsnight report. His allegations were that the BBC had covered up misconduct on its own premises and axed the Savile investigation to save the Christmas tribute programmes.
Goslett’s approach was dealt with by press officer Helen Deller, who knew about the Savile story. If the report had not been pulled, she was the person who would have written the press release explaining Newsnight had exposed Jimmy Savile as a paedophile. Indeed, just over a year before, Deller had written an email to Peter Rippon and Meirion Jones saying she understood the story was about Savile and focused ‘on allegations of abuse with victims willing to go on the record’. She had also warned, ‘we may have to do a bit of managing around this – despite such rumours circulating in the media for years.’9
Helen Deller contacted, among others, Peter Rippon to suggest a press response stating, ‘the angle we were pursuing could not be substantiated’.10
With the help of managers, including Peter Rippon, she now set about drafting their version of what had happened. Peter Rippon briefed her: ‘yes we did interview an individual about Saville [sic] with a view to pursuing a story involving the CPS and Police. We had been led to believe there had been a recent investigation into the allegations but these were dropped. However we could not gain sufficient information to stand this up.’11
Peter Rippon was at home on his Christmas break when he responded to Deller’s email. His minor correction was ambiguous as it suggested the woman who had alleged the CPS did not press charges due to Jimmy Savile’s age and infirmity was the same woman who had alleged that abuse took place on BBC premises. This was not the case. As Nick Pollard would later conclude in his report into the affair, ‘This elision of the two women’s accounts was extremely unfortunate and the consequences of the error were profound and resonated for months to come.’12
A final wording was quickly agreed between Deller and Rippon that emphasised Newsnight’s inquiries had been into the police/CPS investigation and why it was not ultimately pursued. It made no reference to the fact it had been launched because of Jimmy Savile’s years of abuse at Duncroft, the new testimon
ies obtained by MacKean, Livingston and Jones or that abuse was alleged to have taken place on BBC property.13
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
‘Have 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’
Jimmy 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.