In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  This lisping, hare-lipped Henry VIII lookalike owned the Cabaret Club and Casino opposite the Plaza, and also ran Manchester’s main gambling and wrestling venues, as well as prostitutes working around Oxford Street.

  In his memoirs, George Melly, the jazz and blues singer, wrote of being entertained by Benny at one of his venues, the Stork Club, which was located in a dark court off Cross Street. Benny, he recalled, ‘was a fund of unsolicited but useful information about his hostesses. “They’re no good,” he’d tell us as two of them swayed past on their way to the ladies. “Strictly platers.”’3 Plating was a slang term in the 1960s for oral sex.

  Jimmy Donnelly, who went on to become a founder member of Manchester’s infamous ‘Quality Street Gang’, confirms that Benny was ‘a pudding eater’, or pimp. He also suggests that Savile ‘stuck to’ Benny because he was a ‘face in the town’.

  With his trio of matching powder blue Jaguar Mark 10s – number plates BB1, BB2 and BB3 – parked bumper to bumper on Oxford Street, and cash to match his considerable flash, it’s not surprising that Benny inspired a rare level of admiration from his neighbour across the street.

  Manchester’s nightlife was booming in the late 1950s. It was a city of spielers and speakeasies with spy holes in the doors, illegal gambling dens and striptease joints serving cheap bottles of Chianti, and working men’s clubs offering cabaret acts and wrestling shows for the family.

  The gangs of Teddy boys that roamed the streets were a visible reminder of the violent flipside to the city’s many pleasures. Savile’s response to the threat they posed saw him go to the local paper, as he’d done when he first pulled up outside the Plaza in his fake Rolls-Royce. He wanted to publicise his zero tolerance policy with anyone wanting to come into his dancehall wearing crepe-soled shoes, drape coats or sideboards. It was a PR stunt that saw him keep a razor in the cash box so sideboards could be shaved off at the door, and he was duly photographed clutching the cutthroat and flanked by two of his heavies.

  ‘Jimmy was like a headmaster with the way he dealt with [troublemakers],’ said another of the men who had worked with Savile at the Plaza. ‘He would explain to them that there are two ways of doing things, one right and one wrong. “If you do the right thing,” he said, “you’ll have a great time with us. And if you do the wrong thing,” he said, “we’ll have a great time with you.”’ The latter, the man explained, meant heads being used as a battering ram on the exit doors.

  According to this man Savile told his bouncers to be careful not to mark their victims because he was wary of the police. ‘It was illegal to give someone a battering. But on the way out, whoever it was … you’d hear a clunk when their head opened the first set of fire doors and then they’d be dragged down the stairs by the doormen and you’d hear another clunk when their head opened the outside door downstairs.’

  In Louis Theroux’s film, one memorable scene captured Savile up late, enjoying a medicinal dram and regaling the cameraman with tales of his dancehall days. During the conversation he admitted his hard-line approach brought him into regular contact with the law. ‘I couldn’t care less,’ he bragged. ‘Tied them up, put them down in the boiler house until I was ready for them. They’d plead to get out. Nobody ever used to get out of my place … I was judge, jury and executioner.’

  On one occasion, as we trudged back to his flat on the Esplanade in Scarborough, Savile revealed that he sometimes went too far. ‘The only time I ever got in bother was because I was too heavy-handed with some of the villains,’ he said. ‘People knew there was never, ever any trouble in my place because they knew they would get a spanking, and two, they would never get in again, ever. With me, if you were barred you were dead.’

  On other occasions he admitted the police came in to inquire why there were so many young girls on the premises. His account of what he told them was typical of his tactic of making everyone feel a degree of complicity with what he was doing: ‘I said to the police chief, “You do know that your 16-year-old daughter comes in here, don’t you? Would you rather she was safe here with me or being preyed on by all those scumbags and slags?”’

  For all Savile’s boasts about zero tolerance and brutal bouncers, Donnelly scoffs when asked whether the upstart dancehall manager was a major player in the Manchester underworld of the late 1950s. ‘He wasn’t a worry to anyone,’ he spat. ‘Fucking hell, you’d knock him over. At one time everyone thought he was a poof, thought he was gay. That was his persona, and that’s why I think nobody worried about him with the young birds.’

  *

  The polio scare of the mid-Fifties had led to much hand wringing in government circles. Children left crippled by the disease were commonplace, and more than 3,000 died in the epidemic of 1952. Six years later, in 1958, when a vaccination programme was finally approved, a national information campaign was launched to quell the public’s fears. Mecca Ltd decided to offer its support by offering to make injection facilities available at each of its dancehalls. Jimmy Savile told me he placed a trestle table on the middle of the dance floor at the Plaza so people could be inoculated while the dancing continued all around them.

  Studio chiefs at Granada Television, located within walking distance of the Plaza, were on the lookout at the time for someone who regularly engaged with the younger generation who could talk on camera about the vaccination programme. When the call came, Jimmy Savile jumped.

  ‘I didn’t have a television set, I didn’t even know what a camera looked like,’ he explained. ‘I got showed in and sat down at a desk with a geezer. I was giving him the crack and all of a sudden two big barn doors opened at the end and about eight geezers rushed in and said, “That was terrific.” I said, “What was?” They said, “You’ve been on television. Can you come back next week?”’

  At six o’clock that night, an hour before the doors to the Plaza opened, Jimmy Savile claimed to have walked back up Oxford Street to find queues of people outside. When he asked what was up, they told him they’d been seen him on television. ‘Being conscious of body language, when I walked around I could see them all fall back a bit,’ he said. ‘There was this great difference because I had been on television and I thought, “Fucking hell, this is like having the keys to the Bank of England.”’

  Granada asked him back, hiring him to do a regular series of book reviews on a youth-orientated show. Savile claimed he was sacked after only a few weeks. The reason for his dismissal gives an insight not only into what was on his mind at the time, but also into how in later life he seemed to get a kick from hinting at his secrets. As he told the Guardian in April 2000, ‘I said [to Granada], “I want to expose a book. It’s for children and it’s dreadful; there’s this girl who’s well underage and she takes up with a geezer who’s yonks old and eventually they schlep off together …” Now bear in mind this was live TV, and I’m saying personally, I don’t think it’s a good thing because I don’t think an underage girl should be exhorted by her parents to strike up a relationship with a guy five, six, seven times older than she is.’4

  The book he was referring to was Peter Pan, and the journalist from the Guardian reported that when Jimmy Savile finished his story, he laughed himself silly.

  18. SONDERKOMMANDOS

  It was November 2009 and in the fug of Jimmy Savile’s front room in Scarborough we were now onto the fourth 90-minute cassette of the first day. In the time I’d been with him he had regaled me about cycling, wrestling, and run at least three marathons. And that didn’t take into account the two length-of-Britain epics – one a walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End and the other a cycle trip in the opposite direction.

  He’d just finished rebuilding an entire hospital wing and described how he lent his name, and his time, to the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign of the late 1960s. And yet despite these considerable endeavours, he never once stopped smoking his cigar. At 83, he didn’t look in the slightest fatigued.

  It was time to take a detour from his long list of sporting
and charitable achievements and cross over into some darker, more intriguing territory. We returned to Manchester of the 1950s. I told him I had read that Bill Benny was known as a bit of a gangster and wanted to know more.

  ‘Between us we were an unbeatable pair,’ Savile said, which was a relief because if he didn’t like a subject he’d feel no compunction at chopping it off at the knees. ‘We struck up this strange relationship stroke friendship. We’d look like Laurel and Hardy because he was this big, hulking geezer and I was a slim geezer and we developed into being a couple of local characters as a pair. We were characters individually but as a pair we were even bigger characters. I copped for the lord mayor and he copped for the mafia.’

  Savile explained that Benny had a reputation as the meanest man in Manchester – a title he was keen to wrestle off him. To settle the matter, he said they went on holiday together to the south of France. The bet was that both would take £50 spending money and the winner would be the one who returned home with the most.

  Savile claimed they were level pegging as they arrived at Nice airport to catch the return flight. At this point, he said, Benny suddenly disappeared. ‘I thought he was going for a piss until I thought, “Hang on, he went for a piss when we left the hotel.” Ah ha, now then. Sure enough …

  ‘What you need to know about grossly fat people,’ he continued, warming to his task, ‘is they freak out over perfume and aftershave. Their body odour is such that they think they are worse than everyone else. Bill is standing at this perfume counter and because he has no neck, he can’t turn his head. So I went up behind him and said, “That’s a nice one over there.” And he realised I had sussed him. He didn’t turn round, he just said, “You dirty, mean, tight-fisted, oyster-faced bastard.” The whole of Manchester was hanging on this thing … And from then on Bill Benny called me “Oyster” because I was so tight.’

  I wanted him to tell me how the doors were run on Oxford Street, and whether the success he cultivated at the Plaza made him a target for extortionists, racketeers and mobsters. We were talking about an era when chucking-out time was regularly accompanied by a mass punch-up and the blare of police sirens.

  ‘Not with me,’ he said. ‘I knew ’em. I knew the west coast mafia, they were friends of Frank Sinatra’s and they wouldn’t touch me. They left me alone.’

  So nobody was going to mess with you, then?

  ‘Nobody messed with me because I didn’t upset anybody. If they wanted to at least I was half prepared for it, you know. If you start wrestling with somebody in the street you could finish up pegging it.’

  What about the hoodlums and heavies in London, Manchester and Leeds?

  ‘The English mafia was the Kray twins,’ he replied. ‘The Kray twins influenced the whole thing. They operated from east London but such was their reputation that they influenced the whole country. All the gangsters wanted to be like the Kray twins. Ronnie was my patient for 11 years [at Broadmoor]. Ain’t nobody was going to mess with me because if I complained to Ron …,’ – he was now laughing slowly – ‘that would be it. I was the man leaning on the gate as far as Ron was concerned and I could make life hard or easy for him. We got on dead well. Nobody bothered me. Half of the people that worked for them [the Krays] worked for me. It’s about reputation. If you have a reputation that you know and employ these people … none of my lads ever, ever had to fight anybody, it was the reputation.

  ‘I brought three Hungarian lads who worked in the concentration camps in Germany – they pulled the dead bodies out and burnt them and things like that. For some reason, they finished up in Britain and I heard about them and sent for them.

  ‘They had dead white faces. They were Hungarians who had been pressed into service by the Nazis. They were called Sonderkommandos. They were not Nazis but they did Nazi work. And they worked for me. To them, life and death was a strange non-event. They’d pulled hundreds and thousands of bodies out of the gas chambers.

  ‘So what I did was for five pounds each I bought them a black evening dress suit, with a white shirt and a black tie. Every now and then I’d put on a bit of a party after the dance in honour of the saints where they came from.’ He cackled, the sound dampened against the thick Cuban cigar clamped in the centre of his mouth.

  ‘Well these guys, all I’d need to do was ask and they’d go and knock someone off, that was all there was to it. Nobody could talk to them because they didn’t understand the nuances of the English language. They never smiled, they had dead white faces and they were completely besotted with me.’

  Savile let out a low, menacing gurgle of pleasure. ‘One of my minders in Leeds weighed 36 stone. He was the fattest kid you ever saw. He was a good-looking lad and he had slicked back hair. He was giant, giant, giant. His name was Bernard. If someone called him a fat bastard …’ By way of illustration he explained that back then Coca-Cola was sold in bottles with metal caps. Bernard, he says, would pick up the cap, put it between his ring finger and his little finger and flatten it.

  ‘Nobody ever fronted me up. They realised it was a job that didn’t carry any bonuses. I had these people – so it was reputation.’

  19. SOMEONE THE KIDS COULD LOOK UP TO

  Those early television appearances released the genie of Jimmy Savile’s ambition. And yet not long afterwards, Mecca took the decision to remove him from the Plaza. As Bruce Mitchell correctly stated, even if he was fiddling the takings he was worth too much to the company to lose. The company’s chief, Carl Heimann, also saw something of himself in the lippy young hustler doing brisk business at previously failing venues.

  It was decided to make him area manager for the north. He was informed he would be returning to Leeds where he was to apply his Midas touch to the ballroom that had nurtured him during the war.

  Jimmy Savile was in his early thirties when he returned to the Mecca Locarno in Leeds. The dancehall still seemed an incongruous addition to the genteel emporiums, mahogany and marble of County Arcade, one of architect Frank Matcham’s trio of matching glass-roofed shopping emporiums and a hymn to Victorian ambition. When he stood outside the front doors, the Mecca’s new manager could look straight down Cross Arcade to Queen Victoria Street and the very first branch of Marks & Spencer, smiling at the thought that he was now a neighbour of one of the city’s other great exports.

  The Mecca was a very different proposition to the ballroom he left behind. Originally opened as a grand teahouse at the end of the nineteenth century, it was far larger than the Plaza. With its entrance off the arcade, the main space was accessed through a set of double doors beyond the pay kiosk. There was no seating in the ballroom area, but down a small flight of stairs was a café area named the Del Rio. It was decorated in Hawaiian-style bamboos and served snacks and soft drinks, and its most famous resident was a large and foul-mouthed African parrot named Jackie that lived in a cage in one corner.

  Situated off a balcony offering views onto the dance floor, the Tudor Club resembled an old-fashioned pub, with dark wood, chandeliers and furnishings in gold and red. It had its own small cocktail bar called the Pompadour and was popular with the local villains. Savile maintained that once he got going most of its regulars voted with their feet and joined the throng in the main dancehall.

  Further along the balcony was the manager’s office, which proved to be more popular with the Mecca’s younger female customers. On the instructions of Mecca top brass, its previous occupant had already started running the lunchtime teen disc sessions that Jimmy Savile had initiated in Manchester.

  Spinning the records on stage at these sessions was a young man named Jeffrey Collins. Known as ‘Little Jeff’ because he needed to stand on a crate to be able to see over the turntables, Collins was a hit with the crowd. But as he soon discovered, there was only ever going to be room enough for one star turn at the Mecca.

  Jimmy Savile immediately set about pulling the strokes that would get him, and less importantly, the Mecca, noticed. An exotic American saloon and a bubble car
were added to the sham Rolls, although he found less extravagant modes of transport to be every bit as effective when it came to publicity. He took to cycling into work dressed in a red, white and blue tracksuit topped off with a big hat, pink glasses and gold shoes. A flag with the words ‘Mecca Dance Hall’ was fixed to the back of his bike and he insisted on doing two complete laps of the city centre before freewheeling down through County Arcade.

  Before the scandal broke, Brian Thomas, a Mecca regular in the late 1950s and early 1960s, explained that a whole social scene sprang up around Jimmy Savile. On Sundays, he said, it was not unusual for as many as 40 cyclists to set off with him to Bridlington, Scarborough or Filey. He also encouraged teenagers to enter dancing competitions, driving his ‘team’ to Manchester for heats in a minibus. ‘I think that’s how he made his name – becoming involved with the kids,’ said Thomas. ‘He made it into more of a club than a dancehall really. He was big character, with his cigar and so on. He was someone the kids could look up to and speak to.’

  Early on in his tenure at Leeds, and still sporting dark, slicked-back hair, Savile accepted the offer of a free haircut from a group of young female hairdressers who attended his record nights. Arriving at Muriel Smith’s, a salon in Leeds, he surprised the staff by requesting that his hair should be dyed blond. It was the moment that perhaps the most defining aspect of his singular image took shape.

  ‘The next time I went into my dancehall it brought the place to a grinding halt,’ he told me. ‘One of my disc jockeys didn’t recognise me and told me to get off the stage. When they realised it was me there was a stampede of a thousand people to see or touch this weird thing with blond hair. I realised at that moment that I had stumbled on something.’