by Dan Davies
‘At the time it was one of the top lightweight frames,’ confirmed Ken Russell, a Bradford rider who was one of the county’s leading cyclists at the time. ‘They were quite expensive.’
I tracked Russell down in the months before Savile’s death, and he had fond memories. ‘[Savile] was supposed to be a company director. At one time he was into scrap metal but I don’t know much of the detail. He was always quite flashy, even then.’
Cycling was going through a boom period and Jimmy Savile made a lasting impression on his fellow riders. ‘We used to meet in Otley nearly every Sunday night with the other clubs and the other cyclists,’ recalled Russell. ‘We’d have a general chinwag and he was nearly always there. He was the life and soul of the party. We used to think he was a bit of a buffoon really, but I could tell he wasn’t. I could see that years before he became well known.’
By 1950, Savile said he was racing competitively on a regular basis. Records show he achieved a second place finish in that year’s Edinburgh–Newcastle race and looked set to go one better in an event in Skipton after pulling clear of the chasing pack alongside his friend Dave Dalmour, who decades later would run with him in marathons and become a regular at his Friday Morning Club meetings.
‘It looked like we were going to win it,’ Savile told me, ‘but then we saw this grass verge with two girls having a picnic.’ Not for the first time, his libido overruled all other considerations. They slammed on the brakes, threw down their bikes and joined the girls. By the time they reached Skipton, Savile said the race was long finished.
‘He was a good rider, but he was never a great rider,’ said Russell. ‘He was a real character, however. Some of the other riders thought he was a bloody fool, and he was a buffoon at times. But he was just one of the bike riders. He wasn’t important and nobody thought that he would ever become famous.’
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Jimmy Savile was desperate to take part in the first Tour of Britain, organised as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations and sponsored by the Daily Express. A race of twelve stages covering 1,403 miles over 14 days, it would take riders from London to Brighton, along the south coast and into the West Country, up into Wales, the north-west and the Lake District, before arriving at its most northerly stop in Glasgow. From there, it would head back south to Newcastle, on down the eastern side of England and finish in London. The prize fund totalled a princely £1,000.
A place in the four-man team representing Yorkshire could only be secured with a strong performance in one of the major stage races leading up to the Tour. The inaugural Butlins Holiday Camps 7-Day race, which saw competitors racing between camps in the north, was significant not only because it was where Jimmy Savile earned his ride in the Tour of Britain but also as the moment he chose to unleash his brand of jack-the-lad showmanship on an unsuspecting public. ‘Even though I was nobody at the time nationally, I worked by instinct,’ is how he described it to me.
‘In the Butlins Race, he would get to the start dressed in a tuxedo,’ said Ken Russell some 60 years later. ‘And then he would arrange for somebody to come with a tray and mirror and a brushing comb.’ Doug Petty, a young bike builder, gave exactly the same account of Savile’s bizarre antics. So, while the other riders were stretching their legs and going through their final preparations, ‘Oscar’ Savile was prancing around in his best suit and preening for the crowds.
Petty’s memories of the Newcastle–Ayr stage in that race suggest that Savile revelled in his role as two-wheeled eccentric. ‘Oscar was Oscar – he had his cigars and his flash clothes,’ he said. ‘He always used to ride with a five-pound note pinned inside his jersey. It was the old fiver, the big white thing.
‘We were going through this village in Scotland and everybody was knackered and we saw Jimmy, who was a bit in front, going into this Co-op, selling sweets and everything. We knew he had money so we dived in after him and this woman behind the counter said, “Is this a hold up?” And we said, “No love, we’re road racing but we’re all starving hungry and we’ve got no money. But he has and he’ll pay for it.”’ Petty said Savile dutifully unpinned the fiver, paid for his rivals’ refreshments and then got back on his bike.
On the next stage, ‘Oscar’ Savile secured his place in the Tour of Britain by crossing the finish line third in Carlisle. He also finished the race with a new nickname: ‘The very first national picture I had was on the front page of the Daily Express with a cigar in my mouth,’ he told me, although I searched and could find nothing. ‘It said ‘Oscar “The Duke” rides in the Tour.’ He also claimed that a picture of Winston Churchill posing with a cigar was relegated to page five.
‘I was forever with the gimmicks, before gimmicks had even been invented,’ he continued, insisting not for the first time ‘the common denominator was fun’. ‘Not fun at anyone’s expense,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t fun belittling anyone, it wasn’t fun cheating. It was straightforward fun.’
Honest, clean fun at nobody else’s expense: it was, he claimed, his philosophy for life.
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On 15 August 1951, 49 cyclists representing thirteen teams assembled at ‘the Cockpit’ in Hyde Park. Among them were outfits consisting of professional riders from France, Ireland and Scotland; semi-professionals racing in the colours of British bike manufacturers such as Dayton, ITP, Viking and Pennine; and a mixture of amateurs and independents representing the various regions.
In the race programme, rider number 48 was listed as ‘Oscar Savile, a company director also known as “The Duke”.’ The picture showed him grinning, jaw jutting forward and dark hair slicked back to his head. His Yorkshire teammates were Don Wilson, a 24-year-old cycle frame builder from Bradford, Jim Wilson, a bike dealer from Sheffield, and 20-year-old Douglas Petty.
At 9.30 a.m., the peloton rode out of London under orders, spare tyres tied to their bodies in a figure of eight and fruit stuffed into pouches in their jerseys. A convoy of vehicles followed in their wake: the commentary van with its pair of giant horn speakers fixed to the roof, support cars for the various teams and a swarm of fun cyclists and kids who wanted to ride alongside the competitors.
The race started at noon from Farnborough Common in Kent and after flying through Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, ‘Oscar’ Savile decided to make his move at St John’s Cross. His break was brief and unsuccessful; the first stage was won by Frenchman Gabriel Audemard, who passed the finishing line on Brighton’s Madeira Drive in front of thousands of cheering fans.
Savile seemed to be more focused on making headlines than he was on the race. On the second stage to Bournemouth, he trailed in last but promptly changed into his suit and joined the winners, race officials and local dignitaries at the civic reception in the town that evening. There, he got up on stage, thanked the crowds for turning out and got a big laugh when he said while the other riders had been timed by stopwatch, he was being timed by calendar.
The race certainly earned its epitaph as the ‘Hard Luck Tour’; the weather was appalling throughout, and little was laid on for the riders. On their way out of Plymouth and riding as a group, Savile told me the competitors pulled alongside an open-backed truck carrying groceries.
‘We were all pirates in those days because nobody had any money,’ he said. ‘So I went up to the front and talked to the driver while the lads at the back were knocking off all the gear – grapes and fruit and this, that and the other. That was how we ate.’
He admitted his ‘strokes’, as he called them, were designed to get him into the pages of race sponsors the Daily Express. ‘They were always looking for stories,’ he said.
He duly gave them one in Weston-super-Mare: ‘Cyclist wins by a neck’ pronounced the headline above an item about race leader Dave Bedwell, a cycle mechanic from Romford who had used his day off to go for a 20-mile practice ride. ‘Before that,’ wrote the Express reporter, ‘he had been challenged to a race, had accepted and had been beaten. The challenger, and the winner by a neck – was cigar-smoking Oscar Savill
e [sic], otherwise known as “The Duke”. The race was on donkeys.’1
The item went on to say that Oscar then missed the boat ferrying competitors across the Bristol Channel to the start of the fifth stage in Cardiff. Savile told me the whole thing was a set-up: ‘I’d pulled a bird who was staying at the same hotel I was staying at – oh, thank you very much indeed!’
Not wanting to leave for Cardiff at six o’clock that evening with the rest of the competitors, he made arrangements to spend the night with his ‘bird’. ‘One of the officials had one of the early Jaguar SK120s, so I said to him “Why don’t I miss the ferry and you can drive me round to the start?” That was the story: Oscar has missed the ferry. I hadn’t missed the ferry; the ferry hadn’t gone by that time.’
‘I was a known character,’ he said as we looked through a replica programme from the 1951 race one afternoon in Scarborough. ‘They didn’t bother that I didn’t win anything. I was part of the Yorkshire team because I’d flash the team out. I had more front than Brighton and Blackpool put together.’
Doug Petty, who was faring significantly better in the race than his teammate, agreed: ‘I don’t think some of the other riders appreciated how good he was on a bike. But they all loved him, oh yeah. Some dismissed him as a bit weird, you know, but he was marvellous at appealing to the crowds.’
And among the crowds there were plenty of willing young women. ‘I remember one of the stages and there were thousands of people there as we were lining up to start,’ said Petty. ‘This bunch of girls came up and said, ‘Can we have your autograph? And do you mind if we take your photo?’ Well of course it had to be a snogging session photo. When I looked up the race had gone. They went without me. I had to chase like buggery.’
The 160-mile stage between Morecambe and Glasgow turned out to be Savile’s undoing, although in his autobiography he claimed his demise was caused by doing a good deed for a fellow rider whose finances were running low.
The plan hatched was for Savile to make a break from the peloton, a break that nobody would take seriously, and Derek Buttle, a 25-year-old former Thames lighterman, would give chase. They figured that by building up a big enough gap between the rider and the pack, they could ensure Buttle claimed the £10 prize for being first to the top of the 1300-ft Shap Fell.
By Kendal, they were seven minutes in the lead. Buttle was first to the top and won the £10 but Savile was physically spent and soon afterwards he climbed off his bike and collapsed beside the road. ‘I tell you where he packed,’ said Ken Russell. ‘It was at Penrith. I always remember the PA van coming past and saying that he’s packed.’ Oscar had paid the price for his late-night carousing.
His retirement from the race proved to be a blessing in disguise. So taken were the organisers with this oddball in their midst that they forbade him from cycling home to Leeds and summoned a second loudspeaker car instead. ‘Oscar’ was invited to become a race commentator: ‘It turned out that I was a natural ad-lib broadcaster and finished up entertaining crowds up to 50,000 without turning a hair,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘This lurking ability sealed my racing fate. My chat was more valuable than my legs.’2
Without a race to get in the way, he gave his undivided attention to courting publicity. In Scarborough, on only the second rest day of the Tour, he persuaded Doug Petty to join him in a fishing boat off the front. And when the race resumed its progress down the east coast, he enjoyed the buzz of hurtling into towns and villages ahead of the riders to inform the waiting crowds what was happening. And in an age when announcers generally spoke in the cut-glass diction normally heard on the BBC, Savile’s Yorkshire accent and quick-fire patter represented a genuine novelty. ‘I’d keep the crowd well entertained,’ he told me. ‘The Daily Express loved that. They thought it was the greatest thing in the world.’
Thirty-three of the 49 riders who started the race succeeded in making it all the way back to London. At the finish, huge crowds again braved the wind and rain to hear Jimmy Savile’s unusual commentary describing the closing stages. Scotland’s Ian Steel was presented with the trophy but Jimmy Savile had glimpsed the future, and it did not involve hawking scrap metal or pedalling up hills. ‘A former teammate said to me, “He’s a right idiot”,’ Ken Russell said. ‘I said, “If he meets the right people, he’ll really go the top”. I was proved right.’
Russell would go on to win the very next Tour of Britain, a race for which the Daily Express retained Jimmy Savile’s services as race commentator. ‘I think they paid him very well,’ said Russell. ‘When the Daily Express stopped sponsoring the Tour of Britain, which would have been about 1954, I remember seeing him on television maybe a year or two afterwards. The BBC was showing Silverstone motor racing and who should be there but Jimmy Savile; it was sponsored by the Daily Express. I often think that’s what made him, really. I think the Daily Express really helped him, they kind of adopted him.’
Russell offered a final footnote from the aftermath of his victory in the second Tour of Britain. He was back at work at Ellis Briggs bike builders in Shipley when Jimmy Savile walked into the shop carrying a briefcase. ‘I used to pull his leg a bit,’ Russell recalled. ‘I said to him, “Now then, Jim, let’s have a look at what’s in your briefcase,” because he used to play the part of the suave businessman. He opened his briefcase and all that was in there was his handkerchief.’
14. SMOKESCREEN
In January 2012, Helen Deller in the BBC press office was alerted to the fact the Sunday Mirror was preparing a story on the axed Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile. She tried and failed to dissuade the paper from printing it,1 and the article appeared on Sunday the 8th. ‘Newsnight probe into sex claims against national treasure Sir Jimmy axed by BBC bosses’ blared the headline. Underneath: ‘Programme is scrapped days before Christmas TV tributes’.
The opening ten paragraphs laid out the bald facts of what had happened, although there was no mention of all the ex-Duncroft girls who had been spoken to by Newsnight’s reporters. The story then alluded to ‘new reports’ that had surfaced since Savile’s death suggesting he was a recluse who couldn’t stand to be around children.
The article quoted a ‘BBC source’ who had told the Sunday Mirror that by interviewing the three women, Newsnight hoped to establish the truth of the claims about and details of a 2007 police investigation. ‘But senior BBC executives then halted the investigation,’ it continued. ‘Our source said Newsnight reporters were told to scrap it. It clashed with a Boxing Day Jim’ll Fix It tribute show hosted by the actor Shane Richie.’
On the day before the story was published, ‘a BBC aide’ also told the Sunday Mirror that ‘Newsnight were investigating alleged failings within the CPS, and the programme was canned because they did not have enough proof to run the story.’ The lie was now in the public domain.
The full-page story concluded with a further closing of ranks by those close to the dead star. Janet Humble, Savile’s niece, was quoted as saying, ‘It looks like muck-raking. As a family we just wish Sir Jim could be left to rest in peace. He did more good than bad in his life and how many celebrities can say that?’ Stephen Purdew, owner of Champney’s Health Farm and friend for more than 30 years, weighed in with his own rebuttal: ‘Sir Jim was a great man, a legend who should be remembered for all the wonderful things he did for other people.’
That afternoon, Meirion Jones emailed Peter Rippon to say that it sounded like the BBC source was someone who thought they shouldn’t have done the investigation in the first place. The BBC press office was of a different opinion; in other words, that Jones himself was the leak. James Hardy, head of communications for BBC News, seemed to sum up management’s suspicions about Newsnight’s investigative reporter when he emailed Deller to say that he was unconcerned by the newspaper story but given the opportunity he would ‘drip poison about Meirion’s suspected role’.2
The day after the piece ran, I emailed Peter Rippon to say that I had information that could be useful
to the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile – I had started to find people who had seen and heard of his offending behaviour. He forwarded my email to Meirion Jones with the message: ‘Do you want to have a chat with him? I guess we should stick to just public domain help.’ This email would appear to suggest Rippon was comfortable about Jones speaking to a journalist, even though senior figures within the BBC, including Helen Boaden and Stephen Mitchell, had not sat down with him to get his version of events. This was for the simple reason they considered him to be ‘untrustworthy’.3
Meirion Jones was still privately furious about Rippon’s decision when I met with him for the first time in February 2012. It was soon after the publication of a story in the Oldie by Miles Goslett which revealed the Newsnight report contained evidence that Savile abused minors on BBC premises and allegations that Mark Thompson knew about what a contentious report it was. The story significantly increased what was in the public domain, but Jones still categorically refused to go into the reasons for the report being pulled.
Liz MacKean, it transpires, was equally angry. ‘The BBC immediately began lying, suggesting the story was about the CPS and we’d not stood it up, and not about the thing it was about,’ she says. ‘I challenged Rippon on that. I was thinking that I had contacted 60 people, and I’ve told them we were investigating a story about a celebrity visitor to Duncroft and was there anything they wanted to tell us.
‘But if the BBC is then saying that it was about the police or the CPS, depending on which press office put it out, that makes me a liar, right? It was just outrageous. I was so aware of what [the women] would think. Would they think I was pulling the wool over their eyes? Probably not. [Keri] obviously knew exactly what was happening but it was a very difficult position to be in. The people who make these decisions don’t go out and meet people, they don’t talk to victims, they don’t have anything on the line in terms of trust and that is exactly what they were jeopardising.’