In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  MacKean says she had a ‘very uncomfortable’ conversation with Peter Rippon after the Sunday Mirror article ran. ‘His eyes glazed over,’ she says. ‘It was very awkward.’

  On 16 January, Miles Goslett had contacted the BBC press office again, this time to ask who had made the decision to axe the report, and when Director General Mark Thompson and the controller of BBC2 had been made aware of it. The BBC refused to comment.

  In early February, having tried and failed to get the story picked up by the nationals, Goslett’s piece for the Oldie appeared to nail the myth that Newsnight’s investigation had been into the police and CPS rather than Jimmy Savile’s activities at Duncroft School and in his dressing room at the BBC. Goslett went on to say that a ‘BBC source’ had told him that the line about it being stopped for editorial reasons was ‘a smokescreen’. The real reasons were it would compromise the Christmas tribute show. Questions were also asked about whether Newsnight had uncovered evidence unknown to the police, and if that evidence had been passed on. ‘The BBC has serious questions to answer,’ Goslett concluded, before warning ‘that the matter is not at an end.’

  Peter Rippon’s response did not betray any great anxiety. He emailed Stephen Mitchell and Helen Deller to say, ‘The evidence about BBC premises was anecdotal, second hand and forty years old.’4 When the Daily Telegraph followed up by contacting Mark Thompson’s office for comment about whether he was aware of the investigation, Paul Mylrea, the BBC’s director of communications, told them it was being passed to the press office for a response.

  After the Oldie article was published on 9 February, a number of national newspapers followed up with stories of their own. It was at this point the BBC press office decided it would be helpful to get an official response from Peter Rippon, as Newsnight’s editor. ‘The allegations are personally damaging for your credibility as an editor,’ warned Stephen Mitchell. ‘So [it would be] good to put your name [behind] the denial.’5

  Rippon emailed Meirion Jones to say he was considering making a formal statement denying the allegations that Newsnight had withheld information from the police. He also asked for clarification on whether everything they had was from the same women that had spoken to Surrey Police during its investigation into Savile. Jones replied that it was not: Keri’s testimony was information the police did not have in 2007.

  On 10 February, Rippon supplied the BBC press office with a personal statement. ‘It is absolutely untrue that the Newsnight investigation was dropped for anything other than editorial reasons. We have been very clear from the start that the piece was not broadcast because we could not establish enough facts to make it a Newsnight story. To say otherwise is false and very damaging to the BBC and individuals. To allege that we are withholding evidence from the police is also damaging and false. I note that a number of newspapers are using the fact we did not broadcast something to put the allegations into the public domain themselves.’

  Stephen Mitchell recommended the last line be dropped.

  ‘I was very mistrustful of the reasons for dropping [the investigation],’ states Liz MacKean, who confronted Rippon again after the Oldie ran its story. ‘What I thought was, they don’t care; they’re not interested.’

  Soon afterwards, a member of the public contacted Meirion Jones via an email address listed on the Newsnight website. The woman explained she was a former BBC employee in the north of England who had witnessed sexual activity between Jimmy Savile and a girl of around 13 or 14 in a BBC dressing room in Yorkshire. Meirion Jones forwarded the email to Mark Williams-Thomas, the freelance child-protection expert who had decided to take on the investigation and was in the process of attempting to get a documentary commissioned by ITV.

  MacKean was convinced it was now a case of when, not if, the truth came out. ‘It was obvious that it would come out for no other reason than perhaps [Keri] or one of the others would come forward,’ she argues. ‘We knew … that Mark Williams-Thomas was going to take it elsewhere, with our blessing, because this was a story that needed to be told and the people that wanted to tell it deserved to have it out there.

  ‘My feelings were variously dismay, anger and resignation. I was very aware of this breach of trust. [It] made me feel extremely uncomfortable. It was obvious to me and Meirion we were the lonely voices. There was a them and us situation.’

  Jones and MacKean continued to discuss their grievances in private. ‘I remember saying to [Meirion], “There will be a reckoning.” What’s happened is wrong, particularly in relation to pretending we weren’t looking at what we really were looking at. I don’t know when it will happen, but this is not something that can be kept quiet.’ Meirion Jones agreed. He was very clear about how it would look.

  *

  Within a month, however, the initial furore surrounding the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile had died down. By mid-March, details emerged of how the dead disc jockey had arranged to dispose of his personal fortune. His last will and testament, dated July 2006, put the gross value of his estate at £4,366,178, of which around £3.6 million was earmarked for charity. It was a story that got unanimously positive coverage.

  The rest was to be shared out among his family and friends. Eight people, including two couples, were to benefit from the annual interest on a £600,000 trust fund. They included Savile’s nephew Roger Foster and niece Amanda McKenna; Sylvia Nicol, a member of his original fund-raising team at Stoke Mandeville Hospital; Mavis Price, who got to know him through Leeds General Infirmary and went on to manage the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust; Donald Bennett, the former transport manager at Broadmoor Hospital, and his wife Josie; and Roddy and Julie Ferguson, the latter being someone he had befriended in Fort William in 1969 when she was 15.

  Julie Ferguson, who wrote the poems on Jimmy Savile’s headstone, recalled first encountering Savile when he climbed Ben Nevis to test a tent in Arctic conditions. She and a friend were invited back to his hotel for a Coca-Cola. She said he was very strict and had high morals when it came to girls: ‘He had a zero tolerance to women behaving badly.’6

  Savile also made provision of £1,000 each for a further 18 people in his will. They included members of his Friday Morning Club, trustees of his charitable trusts, his cleaner, two cardiologists from Leeds, companions from his marathon-running days and Sue Hymns. His possessions would be auctioned off for charity at a later date.

  ‘I am very pleased that the bulk of Jimmy’s fortune will go to his charities,’ said Roger Foster, to whom Savile had also bequeathed his parents’ weddings rings. ‘I was aware [I was getting them] as Jimmy had lost them and I found them,’ Foster revealed. ‘Jimmy always insisted that it was the Duchess who, from heaven, guided me where to look and as such, when he was no longer here, she would want me to have them.’7

  These two tiny gold bands would be about all he did get.

  15. DIDN’T DIE, VERY GOOD

  We ventured outside into the salty air. Savile was wearing his green woolly hat, the ‘disguise’, although he seemed more upset when the disguise worked and people passed him by without a second look.

  Progress was slow. He was busy telling me that the experience of watching his brothers and sisters going through the emotional ups and downs of relationships and marriage had soured him for life. ‘If you have a dog you’ve got to walk it; if you have a cat you’ve got to give it a litter to have a shite in; even if you have a plant you’ve got to water it,’ he said. ‘Those are all things that live. If you don’t have anything that lives, 99 per cent of your problems are gone.

  ‘Imagine taking a human being in,’ he continued. ‘Wow! You have to dedicate 50 per cent of your life to them and they’ve got to dedicate 50 per cent of their time to you. In the old days, mothers looked after their sons; ironed their shirts, mended the holes in their socks. I remember 60 years ago a lad talking to me about how his marriage had gone wrong. He said, “She wouldn’t even clean my shoes.” Now that was because his mother cleaned his shoes and he was takin
g a female into his life. You can’t blame him for thinking that. What that lad said to me was just one snowflake making up a big snowball.’

  It was a curious mental association: marriage and his mother. And the way he had segued from things that don’t live to holes in socks left me confused. This didn’t bother him, he simply launched into the now familiar story about coming home from school to find nobody in the house. As we stopped at some railings beside the beach and looked out at the sludgy waves of the North Sea, I mentioned my brother and his wife who were sailing across the world in a small boat at the time. I told him about the fears my family harboured about them being out at sea.

  ‘Living and dying is part of life,’ he snapped. ‘If you live you’re lucky, and if you die, big deal. There’s a lot of it about. When I work in the hospitals 20 die every night.’

  I asked him whether he feared death or whether the formative experience of kissing corpses in the old people’s home across the road from his house in Leeds had given him a different perspective. ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said, somewhat surprisingly. Jimmy Savile was never less than sure about anything that passed his lips.

  ‘I prefer to feel my way and it could be that all that has made my attitude to living and dying what it is,’ he added. This was a rare glimpse of something beneath, perhaps a hitherto unseen ability to question himself and on occasion to be surprised by the answers. ‘I have faced death several times,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t even know that I faced death when I was ill as a small child. And then there was down the mine when the shaft collapsed.’

  He gestured ahead, to where a few lone souls on the sand were bent against the wind. ‘I came across here, 50 feet from where we are now, in the back seat of a Buccaneer with the Police Air Arm. We just missed the Grand Hotel; took two windows out. We were supposed to refuel in the air but the tanker couldn’t take off. So we ran out of fuel. I’m sitting strapped into this bloody amazing thing.’

  He explained the jet had to divert to RAF Honiton. ‘They told us they would put the arrester wires out and we’d see if we could pull those bloody great concrete blocks out of the ground. We hit the ground at 350 miles per hour, because we had no fuel left, and the thing caught on the arrester wire, and the next minute you’re standing still.’ He laughed.

  ‘It’s all a bit of fun. You’re gonna die, you didn’t die, very good. I had plenty of time to think about it because I was up in the air when we ran out of fuel. It didn’t bother me because I’m a bit odd. One minute you’re here, the next minute you’re not.’

  We continued along the Foreshore. Pensioners huddled on benches eating chips from card boxes or leaned against the railings in macs, caps and scarves. Beyond the tired façade of the Futurist Theatre, the flashing lights and bleeps of amusement arcades: Olympia, Gilly’s, Casino, Silver Dollar and Henry Marshall.

  We met a man who Savile introduced as the owner of some of the biggest arcades. ‘You see all this stuff here,’ he said, waving an arm at the gaudy seafront, ‘this kid owns all that. Like me, he is shy, retiring, self-demeaning.’

  The man smiled and shuffled his feet. ‘Unlike me, he doesn’t have any way to disguise it because he’s worn all the girls out and now he’s married.’ Savile explained that he was close to the man’s late father, Jimmy Corrigan, the slot machine king of Scarborough.

  Did he ever want to start an empire, I asked. ‘That was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do,’ he hooted, seemingly delighted at the opportunity to confound any theories I might be working on. ‘In the 42 years of working in the hospitals I have come across so many people who have suffered and died because they didn’t understand the meaning of the word “enough”. They didn’t think they had enough money or booze or silly white powder you stick up your nose. I learned very early on the meaning of the word “enough”. As soon as I had enough of anything I decided to take things easy for a bit.

  ‘An empire gives you aggravation. If you’ve got enough without that why should you be greedy and want for more? When I wake up in the morning I have got more money than when I went to sleep the night before.’

  He proceeded to tell me about ‘a geezer’ who ‘did the empire bit’. One day, the man went into his garage and found his son hanging by the neck. ‘He wished then that he could turn the clock back and spend less time getting far more than he needed in the first place,’ Savile said. ‘Some people are empire builders but as an individual it wasn’t the path that I chose.’

  We entered a coffee shop and sat down at a table with a Formica top. In the window was a sign with the word ‘PACE’. Savile called the owner over and made a comment about it being a ‘Paki shop’. It was a toe-curling attempt at humour. I felt embarrassed and asked her how she put up with him. ‘It does wear a bit thin,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with you,’ she sighed, addressing Jimmy directly.

  ‘Is there much room in the back?’ he gurgled, and took a loud slurp from his mug of tea.

  16. ALL FRONT AND NO BACK

  Why would Jimmy Savile choose to give up the freedom of self-employment, which, he claimed, saw him earning what would have been the very considerable sum of £60 a week from his scrap metal business, as well as his regular bike races and occasional record dances, in return for the £8 and 10 shillings he was offered as assistant manager at the Mecca Locarno dancehall in Leeds? It was something he never adequately explained.

  On another occasion, he spoke of having an epiphany while riding his bike across the Yorkshire Moors. What he never elaborated on, though, was the mysterious death of his business partner in the scrap metal business.

  I now believe that this sudden change in direction, and precipitous fall in income, was prompted by the death of his father in April 1953. Vince Savile was 67 and riddled with cancer having been misdiagnosed on a number of occasions. I also suspect that his father was his business partner.

  On the walk from the Queens Hotel to St Anne’s Cathedral for Jimmy Savile’s requiem mass, Alistair Hall, a cardiac specialist who delivered one of the eulogies, explained that Savile had confided in him that he’d used whatever money he had to get second opinions on his father’s condition and to pay for better treatment.

  The very last time we spoke, Savile, who wore his father’s wedding ring on the little finger of one hand, offered a rare insight into his mind-set at the time: ‘It was time to stop playing games and start thinking about what you were going to do tomorrow.’

  He talked many times about lying in the downstairs room in Consort Terrace and compiling lists of all the things he enjoyed in life and whether there was any way they could be combined in a job. His list of priorities included a late start to the working day, warmth, coloured lights, carpets, music and, most importantly, girls.

  One day, as he perused the situations vacant pages in the local paper, he spotted an ad for a job at the same dancehall where he had earned his first pay packet during the war. He told me that he marched straight into town, entered the County Arcade and presented himself to the Mecca manager as his new assistant. John Swale, for his part, insists that it was he who persuaded his friend to seek a job with Mecca.1

  ‘The daily routine nearly broke my spirit,’ Savile wrote of his first few weeks working at the dancehall.2 He described how his job consisted of dealing with ‘drunken bums’ at the door, lost property in the cloakroom and the ever-present threat of violence. He also said he moved out of the family home, which seems like an odd decision considering his beloved mother would be alone.

  At first, he chose to sleep in the dancehall’s cloakroom under a pile of coats. Then he moved into an old lifeboat moored near a weir on the canal that ran through the city centre. These floating lodgings were accessed via a builder’s yard, a plank onto a rotting barge and then a short jump over a gap between the vessels.

  When I asked him why he left the comfort of Consort Terrace, he said, ‘You can kid to mothers and that can be fatal. You can then start to kid to yourself.’ A more
likely reason is that unlike his mother’s house, he was able to take girls back to his barge – very young girls, according to some.3

  If he swaggered into the Mecca feeling like ‘Jack the Lad’ on the grounds he’d put on dances in country halls and cafés, Jimmy Savile soon recognised he had a lot to learn: ‘I realised there was a lot more to it than just being a Flash Harry … All I was before was like a Hollywood film set: all front and no back.’

  The dancehall was a regimented place, managed locally but centrally controlled by Mecca Ltd, which ran its chain of venues from offices in London. Staff had to be smartly attired and there was no alcohol on sale, except for over 18s who could buy drinks in the Tudor Club bar on the balcony overlooking the dance floor.

  Steve Martin, a Leeds contemporary, remembered the Mecca in County Arcade as something of a dive. ‘I must admit it was always our third choice,’ he told me. ‘Dancehalls filled up very quickly in those days and queues would form before opening time. Our routine was to go to the Capitol in Meanwood. If it was full we would go to the Astoria in Harehills and if we were stymied again we would go to the Mecca.’ Martin said Reg Parks, a Leeds native who was crowned Mr Universe in 1951, was a regular at the Mecca on Saturdays, ‘but he was too muscle-bound to dance’.

  Mavis Simpson, an 18-year-old in the early Fifties, recalled things a little differently: ‘We were allowed to go to the Mecca Locarno because the standard of behaviour was good. There was no bopping or jiving, and if you or your partner tried to do anything other than strict tempo dancing, you were asked to leave the dance floor.’

  Even back then, Jimmy Savile was bending the rules. ‘[He] was the young manager,’ said Simpson. ‘He wore clothes that were completely different to the usual suit, white shirt and tie. He made it more exciting. During the interval when the band had its rest periods he introduced dancing to records and that was a real magnet for jitterbug fans.’