In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Savile had what Calder describes as a ‘shag pad’ in Leeds; almost certainly the grace and favour flat supplied by Mecca: ‘Three or four bedrooms and beds with people shagging in them all night long,’ he says. ‘There were queues of girls outside waiting to get shagged. He’d share them out. They’d do as they were told.’

  Calder describes these girls as Savile’s ‘followers’. ‘They were his little slaves. He’d obviously shagged them all before he passed them on: “Julie, go with TC.” “Julie, go with Raymond.” They would. They’d be told to go off and shag a few guys before they could shag him again. “You’ll like that, won’t you?” “Oh yes, Jimmy.” “Who’s the boss?” “You are, Jimmy.” “Off you go then.”’

  The attraction, Calder felt at the time, was that Jimmy Savile ‘was the father figure’. Girls trusted him.

  Jimmy Savile became Tony Calder’s ‘mentor’ and the young man spent the next 18 months being trained as one of his DJs and playing gigs on the London circuit of Mecca venues. He even took a room at the run-down Aaland Hotel in Bloomsbury, where Savile stayed when he was in London to record his radio shows.

  ‘[He] lived in the front room so he could check who was coming in and out,’ Calder recalls. ‘Some nights he’d come in because he’d been out in Leeds. He’d knock on my door and say, “Oh good, you’re on your own. I’m sending [a girl] down because she’s got nowhere to sleep. And he’d send this girl down and you’d have to shag her.”’

  At Mecca, Savile reported directly to Eric Morley, who ran the Miss Great Britain contest for the company. For one 12-week period in 1961, Calder says that both mentor and protégé were seconded to work for Morley, chaperoning beauty queens.

  According to Calder, teenage girls threw themselves at Savile. ‘His rule was: the younger the better. I remember he shagged one girl and he told me, “That was close. I thought she was underage. But it was her [16th] birthday.”’

  He insists Savile was terrified of being caught having sex with underage girls and warned him about the dangers: ‘Jimmy said to me, “If you fuck underage girls you can go to jail. Sixteen is the limit.” … If a girl had her 16th birthday he was over the moon.’

  According to Calder, Savile couldn’t get enough sex: ‘Shagging … was not just a night-time pastime, if it was available there and then it was, “I’ll shag it now” – he never took precautions.’ Instead, he boasted about his fail-safe technique. When it was put to him that he must have illegitimate children all over the country, Savile’s response to his young protégé was blunt: ‘Maybe, but if I don’t know about them I don’t care about them, and I don’t want to care about them.’

  Tony Calder likens the Jimmy Savile of this period to ‘the Pied Piper’. He says he was ‘leading them down the path and getting a blowjob on the way. It was a great life for him.

  ‘All he was doing was going out to clubs, playing music. He had a second hand Roller and the money started to come in. And when it started, it came in like an avalanche. He was playing all over the country, doing guest appearances. He had a phenomenal place in Leeds [the Mecca Locarno]. He was king of the castle.’

  By the early 1960s, Jimmy Savile might have been forgiven for feeling untouchable. With a series of hit Radio Luxembourg shows, a budding television career, a packed dancehall and a fleet of cars scattered around Leeds, life seemed sweet. But while all this was going on in the glare of publicity, it is clear he was conscious of the need to keep his other activities away from prying eyes.

  Calder remembers being at the table one evening as a senior police officer was wined and dined. ‘We’d go out on a Saturday night somewhere near Leeds, maybe Wakefield, and I remember going to see a jazz act. [Savile] didn’t go there to hear the music, he went there because the police would all turn up and they’d have dinner. It was the only time he ever bought anything other than fucking chicken and chips.

  ‘This guy would drink, and the one thing Jimmy hated was paying for somebody to drink alcohol. But he’d pay for it. I asked him why he was paying for it and he said, ‘I’m paying for it because he’s the chief of police and he’s my friend and I’ve got to be a friend.’

  Calder also remembers Savile being warned about his behaviour. ‘[The police officer said] “You’ve got to cut it out,” whatever it was,’ to which Jimmy ‘was taken aback.’ Once one police chief retired or moved on, Calder says, Savile would move on to wooing the next: ‘He wasn’t stupid. Whatever he was doing he was covering his back.’

  Savile also began building his reputation for doing charity work, which functioned as an extra layer of insurance against those now questioning him. In 1961, Charles Hullighan, the chief porter at Leeds General Infirmary, invited the local celebrity to help out with the launch of the hospital’s radio station. Savile accepted the invitation, offered his services as a volunteer porter for a few days and began what would be a lifelong association with the institution that just 15 years earlier had told him he would never again be able to walk without sticks.

  When I asked Tony Calder what he thought of Savile at the time, he denies that it ever crossed his mind to analyse him. But he does say that he believes the mining accident cast a pall over his existence. ‘Something affected him and he wouldn’t talk about it to me. Something went wrong. Not just physically but psychologically. It affected his whole way of living, what happened down that mine. His whole outlook, his austerity, came from having a life-threatening situation. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to live. The fear of what happened down that mine fucked him up for his whole life … I think whatever happened … put him behind the 8-ball, it dictated the strangeness of his life.

  ‘We’d be sitting having a meal and something would come over him and I’d ask him what was wrong. He’d say, “I’ll be alright in a minute. It’s hard to explain. I was in the mine and there was an accident.” And then he’d change the subject and start chatting up some bird: “How old are you?” “Sixteen.” “Fucking beautiful. And does your mum and dad know you’re out on the town?” “Oh yeah, yeah, they’re OK.” “Have you ever been to Leeds?” “No.” “Would you like to go to Leeds for the weekend?” “OK.” “So ring your parents and tell them you’re going with Jimmy Savile to Leeds for the weekend.” And they would. And they’d come for the weekend and he’d give them the train fare home. There was nothing that any girl who had been shagged could complain about,’ Calder maintains. ‘They got fed, they got a train ticket home and there’s another five bob for a taxi from the station. He wasn’t over generous. He would never pay for it. He’d never, ever fucking pay.’

  Their relationship began to falter in 1962, Calder says, when some men joined Jimmy Savile’s entourage ‘who made him look very unattractive’.

  *

  In God’ll Fix It, Savile opened the chapter titled ‘How Do I Cope with Sex?’ with the following thought: ‘The word “sex” is like the word “love”. It means differing things to different people. Sex at its worst is corruption, as when young people might be corrupted to provide sex.’

  It now reads like a discussion Jimmy Savile had with himself. His line about sex meaning ‘differing things to different people’ sounds like the justification he’d settled on for the corruption he spoke of in the very next breath. Calder describes how Savile would pass girls round, and make them have sex with his acolytes before he’d go with them again. Some of these girls might have been willing, but Savile still exploited his status, from the moment he talked them into his flat, his office or into his car for the trip to Leeds, right through to the moment he cast them aside after satisfying his needs.

  In the same chapter, he went on to talk about how sex, like drugs, could cause people to kill each other, as well as being the source of ‘great remorse, great guilt’. As a single man who had enjoyed more than his share of sexual encounters, he insisted that his rule was never ‘make love to anyone if it causes them distress’. It doesn’t sound like he was convinced, as evidenced by his closing thought on the matter: ‘W
hether it’s okay to God we’ll just have to wait and see.’3

  21. A LOT WORSE IF IT WAS TRUE

  From my first visit to Leeds, when I had been frisked in the foyer of his flat by Inspector Mick Starkey of the West Yorkshire Police, Savile made it plain to me that his inner circle included what he described as ‘high-ranking police officers’. Policemen were among the regulars at the Friday Morning Club, the weekly coffee morning Savile hosted at his flat. So how close was the relationship?

  ‘Obviously if you run a public place you are hand in glove to the authorities,’ he said. ‘If anything goes wrong you want the police to come and sort it out. Therefore you are friendly with coppers because it’s us versus them on the outside. We’ve always had a relationship with them and that still goes on.

  ‘Now I’ve got a different policy,’ he added. ‘Today, as you know, tabloids and magazines are always sniffing, looking for this, that or the other. In my case, they say, “No one can be that good, there’s got to be something somewhere.” How do I beat ’em?’

  He was laughing now, so much so that he struggled to get his words out.

  ‘Every one of my places has a middle-aged woman cleaner and you can’t hide anything from a middle-aged woman cleaner. If I was into the white powders or the pornography or anything like that, they would find it. And of course, when the coppers come in, I don’t keep a safe or a drawer that’s locked.

  ‘A cleaner comes in, has a little look around when she is on her own, if only to get a flavour of her client. I’ve had all mine for years and years and years, and they are all knocked out that I never keep anything locked up. They can go in drawers and all sorts; you can’t keep anything from a lady cleaner.’

  I couldn’t see how his middle-aged cleaners related to my original question, but that didn’t seem to matter to Jimmy Savile. ‘So whenever anybody from the tabloids rings up with something,’ he continued, ‘I tell ’em that instead of talking to me, why don’t I arrange for them to have a chat with one of my lady cleaners. It knocks their story for shit.’

  I asked him why he thought people thought bad things about him; why the rumours persisted, even though he had done so much for charity.

  ‘It’s the standards of journalism that have gone down,’ he replied, leaning back in his chair and examining the glowing embers of his cigar. ‘What the tabloids have done is make uninteresting things interesting. A lot of the stuff they write is quite uninteresting. It doesn’t matter whether so and so has copped off with someone else’s wife. They have educated the public to find that quite interesting.’

  It wasn’t a direct answer so I decided to see if he would tell me how such rumours made him feel. ‘It doesn’t bother me in the slightest,’ he proclaimed. ‘Not at all. I have a phrase when someone puts a story in a tabloid about underage sex; I say, “It would be a lot worse if it was true.” They say, “Are you saying it’s not true?” I say, “I’m not saying nothing, but it would be a lot worse if it was true.” Of course it’s not bastard true.’

  So where did these rumours come from? Was it because he was at Radio 1 at the same time as Jonathan King, who was later convicted of sex with minors?

  ‘Editors and feature journalists are quite happy if they’ve got something to destroy,’ he said. ‘They are anarchists.’

  He went on to tell a story about a female reporter who once phoned him up to tell him she had been asked to join him on a cruise on the Canberra. She was sent as a honey trap.

  ‘The dumb bastard editor hadn’t asked me whether she knew me,’ Savile cackled. ‘I told her she shouldn’t tell him and that she could come with me on the Canberra. She did and she had the time of her life, putting herself about a bit with all the young officers. She ate with me every night and people were thinking, “What the fuck is he doing with a darling bird like that?”

  ‘And when she went back, she told her editor that she tried everything but I was as clean as a whistle. He said, “Good, I quite liked that Jimmy Savile anyway.”’

  People came up to him every day, he said, to say they had been at school with him, or their fathers had worked with him, or that he used to go out with their sisters and had got them into trouble. ‘You don’t argue with them,’ Savile said. ‘They like to pull you down from whatever height they put you at. It makes them feel much higher.’

  He let out a loud sigh and picked something out from between his teeth. ‘I’m getting past the stage of tales being told about me now.’

  22. PROJECT DJ

  Mark Williams-Thomas looks and dresses like an off-duty policeman. He is a big man with a serious manner that’s not hard to imagine in the environment of a police station interview room. Between 1989 and 2000 he served with Surrey Police in child protection, CID, as a family liaison officer and then in a dedicated paedophile unit.

  ‘It was very clear [to me] the focus on policing was very much around interfamilial abuse,’ he explains, ‘and not on stranger or detached abuse from, say, the schoolteacher or the vicar,’ he told me. I decided to focus on that and as a result started to generate some high-profile arrests and information.’

  He says it was his interview with one of Jonathan King’s victims that sparked the major Surrey Police investigation into the pop impresario. In 2001 King was convicted of one charge of buggery, one of attempted buggery and four charges of indecent assault on five boys aged fourteen to sixteen. In sentencing him to seven years in prison, Judge David Paget QC said, ‘You used your fame and success to attract adolescent and impressionable boys. You then abused the trust they and their parents placed in you.’1

  Williams-Thomas had left the police force by this time. ‘I just got to a point where I needed a challenge,’ he says. ‘I needed something different. I had done everything I wanted to do. In terms of policing, I didn’t want to go into firearms, I didn’t want to do traffic, I didn’t want to work in drugs. Child protection and major crimes [such as] murders and kidnaps were my area of expertise but it can be pretty soul destroying. All you tend to deal with is the worst ends of everybody’s lives.’

  He also admits the bureaucratic aspects of the job made him uncomfortable; one former colleague told him he was a ‘nightmare to manage’.2 Williams-Thomas has been quite open about the fact he would talk openly to journalists about cases, and professionally share information if he believed it was in the public interest and could benefit the investigation.3

  On leaving the police, Williams-Thomas set up his own child protection and risk management consultancy. He also completed an MA in criminology at Birmingham University after meeting Professor David Wilson while working on Murder Prevention, a Channel Five series inspired by the real-life Homicide Prevention Unit within the Metropolitan Police. He would also work as a crime adviser on TV police dramas, including the long-running BBC series Waking the Dead, and appeared as a pundit on Sky News, commenting on high-profile criminal investigations, including the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

  As a result of his police background Williams-Thomas started to get more work in the media. In 2005 he presented the ITV miniseries To Catch a Predator, an exposé of chat-room paedophiles. He then went on to work with Meirion Jones on a Newsnight report into how an Irish paedophile priest was able to escape justice.

  In the summer of 2011, while the pair worked together on research at Interpol, Jones quizzed Williams-Thomas about whether he had heard anything about Jimmy Savile during his years as a police officer. ‘He was a TV celebrity who presented Jim’ll Fix It, and someone I grew up with,’ says Williams-Thomas. ‘I didn’t know him for anything else. He dressed in tracksuits and always had a cigar – yes, he was a strange eccentric. Did I have any other views about him? No – he was just on TV.’

  Jones was surprised, and recounted what he had seen at Duncroft, and found in online forums. He then outlined how he’d like to pursue a potential investigation. The one major obstacle that existed was Jimmy Savile himself. Any such story would be a legal minefield.

  On 4 Nove
mber, just less than a week after Savile’s death, Williams-Thomas emailed Meirion Jones to say he wanted to be involved. His experience, skills as a researcher and years of service with Surrey Police made him a valuable asset. ‘We put £500 in the budget for him to look at all the evidence and come to an assessment for us,’ Jones explained.4 While Williams-Thomas did assist Meirion Jones and Newsnight, he says he did not get paid for the work he did.

  Jones had done a number of stories about paedophiles in the past, but could not claim to be an expert on child abuse, and nor could Liz MacKean. ‘You want somebody who is a child protection professional,’ he explained, ‘and who has dealt with these sorts of abusers … like Jonathan King, to go through that stuff and give you an assessment.’

  Confirming that Surrey Police had investigated Jimmy Savile was vital in terms of corroborating the claims of the former Duncroft girls. Williams-Thomas advised that if they could ascertain Surrey Police had submitted a file to the Crown Prosecution Service it would demonstrate the allegations had been taken seriously. That, Jones insists, was the story in a nutshell: the fact Jimmy Savile had been the subject of a police investigation into historic child sex abuse.

  Williams-Thomas’s contacts would also be useful at a time when one tabloid newspaper seemed to have been given a head start on the scoop, and had already begun contacting some of the women.

  He tested the water by making inquiries with a number of different forces before additional information from the women speaking to the Newsnight team revealed the name of a female police officer from Kingston Road police station in Staines. This officer was said to have interviewed the women as part of Surrey Police’s investigation.

  In addition to seeking confirmation from Surrey Police that there had been an investigation, Williams-Thomas was required to assess the evidence, which now included Jimmy Savile’s activities beyond the walls of Duncroft. His behaviour at the BBC, at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and the Haut de la Garenne children’s home in Jersey was in play, and Williams-Thomas made a professional estimate that they were now looking at a predatory paedophile who had offended at institutions all over the country.