In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  ‘On a Sunday night he used to take a few of us to a restaurant, an Indian place in the curry centre of Manchester,’ she says. ‘We used to go there for a curry and he would park his Rolls Royce up. Afterwards, he would take us home with the roof down on his car, and we’d all be singing our heads off.’ She remembers there were three or four girls that Savile took out regularly but insists he never tried it on with her. ‘I never saw him in a relationship with anyone,’ she maintains. ‘Between you and I, I don’t know whether he was gay.’

  Other teenage girls in the area could confirm this was not the case. Pam Batty had first encountered Jimmy Savile at the Plaza. ‘He used to get a coffee and come and sit with us,’ she recalls. ‘He was a real ladies’ man. He was a charmer. A lot of people thought he was gay but nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t think he was in any way, shape or form that way inclined.’

  She says Jimmy Savile paid her and a friend to listen to demo tapes he was sent: ‘We used to pick them up or he’d drop them off at the house or he’d pick us up and we’d go and listen to them.’ Pam was 18 and an apprentice hairdresser at the time, and she also insists Savile never tried anything with her.

  Pam’s friend, who was younger, did get into a relationship with him, however. ‘They just seemed to click,’ Pam says. ‘She was quite an attractive girl and obviously he thought that.’

  Pam Batty says they knew Jimmy Savile was a good deal older than them, but not how much older. She also confirms that the relationship with her friend was sexual and that she sometimes stayed with Savile at the Black Pad. ‘When it all fizzled out, she was quite upset,’ recalls Pam. ‘Obviously Jimmy wasn’t; he was just Jimmy. He just carried on.’

  Jeff Dexter was another young person who discovered the truth about Jimmy Savile’s sex drive. Dexter had first entered Savile’s orbit when he appeared as a teenage dancing prodigy at London’s Lyceum Ballroom. Despite looking young for his age, Dexter was street-wise and ambitious and went on to work alongside Tony Calder in promoting pop records and DJ’ing for Mecca. ‘He looked like someone off the ballroom circuit, like a ballroom manager,’ he says of Savile. ‘But he had three watches on, that was one thing I remember.’

  Dexter was just 16 when he was hired to appear with Jimmy Savile, who was by then 36, at the Daily Mail Boys & Girls Exhibition at Olympia in December of 1962. The teenager was to give lessons on new dances such as the Twist and the Madison on a miniature dance floor, while the Radio Luxembourg star spun records. Other attractions at the two-week show included a sports arena, the world’s biggest model railway and a scale model of the recently launched Telstar satellite.

  Many years later, and some time before Jimmy Savile’s death, Dexter described Jimmy Savile to me as a ‘pervert’ and commented that they would ‘lock him up and throw away the key’ if anyone found out what went on behind the scenes at Olympia. Shortly after the Exposure documentary on ITV, I asked Dexter about that comment and whether he witnessed anything that chimed with what was being reported about Jimmy Savile. His answer was brief: ‘Yep.’

  But, he added, ‘All those girls, young and old, threw themselves on Jimmy. It was there for the taking … None of them complained, otherwise he would have been locked up years ago … I was 16 years old and [the girls] were my age. And the fact I’m with Jimmy Savile and I’m on stage in this ballroom set-up, to a lot of girls who come from out of town, you are fair game. So I was fair game and Jimmy was fair game at the time as well.’

  Another source said: ‘He didn’t go looking for [girls]. They turned up. He was a pop star. When you’re in that business they’re always there in front of you. There were so many around. The Sixties were the sex years. All the girls wanted to try sex and all the boys wanted to be into sex. Everyone was at it everywhere like rabbits.’

  ‘Girls chatted to us,’ the source maintained. ‘We were harmless because we weren’t chasing anybody. We were safer than the others and by that I mean the men who were trying to trap them and marry them. We were great at consoling girls when they’d fallen out with other boys. We liked to console them.’

  *

  If Jimmy Savile was addicted to sex, as Tony Calder suggests, it was quick, emotionally detached liaisons that he sought. And in pliable teenagers, he found partners that he could control and manipulate without the prospect of having to confront the emotional void at his core. Money, his other great obsession, provided a further layer of protection.

  At the start of the New Year, he set off on a tour billed as ‘Johnny & The Hurricanes and The Juke Box Doubles’. It was a curious concept, combining a popular singing act with what can only be described as an early incarnation of Stars in Their Eyes with lookalikes performing songs in the style of Elvis Presley, Adam Faith, Gene Vincent and The Shadows. The 18-date schedule began at the Gaumont State in Kilburn and finished at the Nelson Imperial, just in time for the release of Jimmy Savile’s follow-up single ‘The Bossa Nova’.

  While he was off touring the country, The Beatles arrived in Manchester to play two dates, at the El Rio and The Three Coins, venues owned by local promoter Danny Betesh. A month later, the group released their debut LP, Please Please Me, and by May were top of the singles charts with ‘From Me To You’.

  The album followed an identical trajectory, and on the day it reached number 1, a newspaper advertisement appeared for Jimmy Savile’s next big engagement: a new weekly pop music column. ‘Great news for the “with it” brigade,’ trumpeted the copy. ‘The People has signed up disc-jockey, super showman Jimmy “Luxembourg” Savile to write brutally and bluntly about records.’

  Jimmy Savile was now moving smoothly through the gears. He regaled the paper with how he had built up a £20,000-a-year income ‘by outrageous showmanship and brilliant tycoonery’. He was travelling almost constantly between Leeds, Manchester and London and working ‘at a furious pace from 10.30 a.m. to 3 a.m., on six days a week’. On the seventh, he said, he took his beloved mum out.

  In a summer that witnessed Secretary of State for War John Profumo resign over his affair with Christine Keeler, £2.3 million stolen in the Great Train Robbery in Buckinghamshire and Pauline Reade’s disappearance on her way to a dance in Manchester, the first victim of what would later be known as the Moors Murders, Jimmy Savile’s moneymaking bandwagon rolled into Great Yarmouth where he was compère for a seasonal showcase at the Royal Aquarium. The main attraction was teenage singing sensation Helen Shapiro, who had first topped the charts as a 14-year-old. Among those lower down on the bill were Roy Castle and an upcoming comedian by the name of Ronnie Corbett.

  Savile was driven to those weekend gigs on the coast in his E-Type Jaguar, insisting on travelling in slippers and sleeping most of the way. He didn’t want to spend his wages on a hotel so stayed in a caravan that belonged to a friend.

  After the shows, he did not have to go looking for female company because local girls queued up to speak to him or get his autograph. The result was a steady stream of visitors to his temporary digs.

  When he wasn’t working, sleeping or having sex, Savile was consumed by a desire to stay fit. He would regularly round up various acolytes and run for miles, often late at night. On other occasions, he would get on his bike and cycle over the Pennines to Leeds to see the Duchess.

  This was a period of pandemonium and change, driven largely by the meteoric rise of The Beatles and the slew of home-grown beat groups that trailed in their wake. Teenage girls screamed through live performances, fainting and wetting themselves with excitement, and chased the Fab Four and anyone associated with them, in and out of venues up and down the country.

  The phenomenon was described as ‘Beatlemania’ for the first time in a story published in the Daily Mirror on 15 October 1963. Three days later, Savile received the news that Bill Benny had been found dead in a flat in Rusholme. Benny had taken part in a wrestling bout at the Free Trade Hall after which his business partner Vic Lewis visited him in the dressing rooms. They had headed to the Cab
aret Club for dinner before Lewis retired to his hotel and ‘Bill took a girl back to his flat to continue his partying’.4 Lewis received the news at seven o’clock next morning. ‘I was stunned,’ he wrote in his memoirs.

  Three days later, the heavens opened on Benny’s funeral in Manchester. Lewis remembered how people came from all over Britain, while Savile’s recollections centred on how he stole the show. ‘There are no flowers or decorations on the coffin at a Jewish funeral,’ he explained at our final meeting. ‘I turned up with a massive wreath and put it right on top of his coffin … Nobody said a word, nobody objected. The king thing was that I was the meanest man in Manchester, so I stood by the coffin and put a cigar on the lid so he could have a smoke on the way over. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.’

  Benny’s heart had given out while being fellated. The girl had been found trapped underneath his dead body. Within hours, though, Jimmy Savile had arrived at the flat where Benny’s body was found. But why he felt the need to be in Bill Benny’s flat so soon after his death, how he got in there and what he might have been looking for will likely remain a mystery.

  If not his keen morbid fascination, one possible explanation is that Savile was recovering paperwork from a deal that had seen Bill Benny buy the failing Hulme Hippodrome theatre from the James Brennan cinema circuit for £35,000 in November 1960,5 before selling it to Mecca for £50,000 just sixteen months later.6 This 43 per cent profit was turned without any renovations being done, and no mention of Benny’s name being made in the sale. Could it have been a moneymaking scam cooked up by Benny and Savile, Mecca’s man on the ground in Manchester?

  26. A CROSS BETWEEN A BEATLE AND AN ALDWYCH FARCE CURATE

  The story of Bill Benny’s death is significant not only because he was Jimmy Savile’s friend but also because of its direct link to his next career spin-off. Savile told me that the reason he became a wrestler was because Benny invited him to referee a benefit contest for a grappler who had died soon after a bout. He claimed to have refused, prompting Benny to call him a ‘miserable bastard’. But Savile wasn’t backing out, he insisted. He wanted to fight.

  He had employed a number of wrestlers as bouncers at his dancehalls and been introduced via Benny to the many former grapplers who worked in and around Manchester’s club scene. After surprising Benny with his willingness to climb between the ropes, six weeks were spent training at a local gym with Bert Jacobs, who would go on to coach Britain’s wrestlers at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The all-male, physical world of wrestling was one that Jimmy Savile felt at home in. It was useful to him in terms of recruiting minders and bouncers, but also for again being able to showcase his physical prowess.

  The charity bout was to be staged at the Devonshire Sporting Club in Broughton, a venue previously owned by Bill Benny. The opponent was ‘Gentleman’ Jim Lewis, the undefeated welterweight champion of the world who, according to Savile, had ‘a temper as long as my thumb’.

  On Sunday, 15 December 1963, readers of Jimmy Savile’s ‘Pop-Talking’ column in the People got the exclusive low-down on his grappling debut. ‘The joint was packed tight, about a thousand people,’ he wrote, before recounting how he spent seven rounds ‘in the air flying in one direction or the other.’

  Lewis took the lead with a body slam in round three before Savile equalised with a forward roll double Nelson in the fourth. ‘Two quick body slams in the seventh’ ultimately clinched the contest for the more experienced man. Savile broke a toe but described it as ‘about the best experience of my life’.

  It seems like too much of a coincidence that a benefit event in aid of a wrestler who had died after a bout should take place at Bill Benny’s club just a few weeks after Benny’s own death in identical circumstances. So why was Jimmy Savile so adamant that it was Benny who had invited him to fight and not that it was Benny he was fighting for?

  *

  In October 1963, seven days before Benny’s death, two boys, aged 11 and 14, appeared at Salford Juvenile Court where they pleaded guilty to stealing a £152 watch from Jimmy Savile’s flat. The 14-year-old was put on probation for two years, the 11-year-old was fined £10.1 No mention was made of whether they broke into his flat or were invited inside.

  Fifteen months after Savile’s death, a joint report by the Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC recorded that 13 people had come forward to make allegations of being sexually assaulted by the disc jockey and dancehall impresario in the period to the end of 1963. One, a 10-year-old boy, was said to have spotted him outside a hotel, asked for an autograph and been assaulted by penetration.

  In March 2013, a review by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) into allegations and intelligence material concerning Jimmy Savile reported that, also in 1963, a male victim in Cheshire reported an allegation of rape by Jimmy Savile to his local police officer the day after it occurred. He was told to ‘forget about it’ and ‘move on’. The officer did not make a report of the allegation and, consequently, an investigation was not undertaken.2

  For all the carnage being wrought in secret – at his flat, in dark corridors and in dressing rooms – Jimmy Savile was doing an extremely effective job of masking the compulsive side to his nature. Wrestling gave him another physical outlet but, like his work as an increasingly high-profile DJ, it also offered the promise of contact with those he preyed on.

  As he began to acquire the riches he’d always craved, the next career milestone on his journey to national stardom was approaching. In the summer of 1963, ITV launched a new weekly pop programme aimed at teenagers. Filmed in London and presented by Dusty Springfield, Keith Fordyce and the teenage Cathy McGowan, Ready Steady Go’s combination of mimed performances, interviews and a studio audience of gyrating young hipsters proved to be catnip to the nation’s teens. ‘[It] was doing amazing things,’ said Bill Cotton, then the BBC’s assistant head of Light Entertainment.3 ‘A lot of people were being affected by it.’

  Among them was the incongruous figure of Tom Sloan, the BBC’s head of Light Entertainment. Sloan was a disciple of Sir John Reith, the BBC’s first director general, a famously autocratic leader who insisted the corporation’s purpose was to educate, inform and entertain. While the pop world was anathema to Sloan, he could not stand by and let ITV dominate. His response was to task Bill Cotton with making a rival show. Cotton quickly decided it should be distinct from its competitor by being based on the charts. It was a simple but clever plan as the charts were now dominated by British acts.

  Cotton’s first choice as producer was Johnnie Stewart who had produced Jukebox Jury and a wide range of other music-related programming for the BBC. A long series of planning meetings followed. At one of these meetings, a producer named T. Leslie Jackson suggested Jimmy Savile as a possible presenter of the new show, chiefly on the say-so of his teenage son. The idea was shot down immediately and Jackson went home that evening to inform his son, Paul, that Savile ‘would never work on the BBC’.4

  Nearly 40 years later, Paul Jackson, who went on to become a BBC producer himself, recalled what his father had said that evening: ‘Savile was thought to be dodgy, there was a feeling he was heavy, you didn’t cross him, he was a heavy dude.’

  Stewart had other ideas. But first he would have to overcome the opposition of Tom Sloan. When Stewart had announced he wanted to use Savile on Juke Box Jury, Sloane told him, ‘I don’t want that man on television’. Stewart’s reply was telling, given Savile’s long career and history of offending at the BBC: ‘Sorry baby, but that man is box office.’5

  Stewart wasn’t the only figure at the BBC who believed in Jimmy Savile. An ally was found in the shape of Barney Colehan, a producer who had worked on The Good Old Days and would go on to produce It’s a Knockout. Colehan believed the new show should adapt Radio Luxembourg’s successful Teen and Twenty Disc Club format for television and, after some debate, Bill Cotton was finally persuaded that Jimmy Savile should be called in to make a pilot.

  It was Stewart who c
ame up with the title of the new show: Top of the Pops. His vision included using a quartet of Radio Luxembourg DJs as rotating presenters. Sloan and Cotton were comfortable with Alan Freeman, Pete Murray and reigning Melody Maker DJ of the Year David Jacobs. Jimmy Savile, however, remained a problem. ‘The BBC thought he was a bit strange alright,’ said Bill Cotton. ‘They didn’t know quite what to make of him. He seemed to me to be a kind of 20th century clown.’6

  But Jimmy Savile wasn’t the only aspect of the new show that made the BBC establishment jumpy. The wider moral panic over pop music and the effect it was having on the nation’s teens was a determining factor in the decision to broadcast the new show from the BBC’s northern studios. It was agreed that a converted church on Dickenson Road in Manchester was a far safer place to house these young ‘undesirables’ than the corporation’s sparkling new Television Centre in west London.

  The MP Edward Heath had seemed to speak for a generation when he grumbled about not being able to understand what The Beatles were talking about. The axis of popular music had shifted, as Jimmy Savile discovered in December 1963 when he attended the opening night of The Beatles’ Christmas Show at the Gaumont Theatre in Bradford. Comparing the noise from the audience to standing ‘on the starting grid at Silverstone Grand Prix car race with 30 Formula One cars revving like mad’, he told me that he went to the rear of the auditorium to see whether it was possible to hear the music. Spotting his blond hair in the distance, Paul McCartney dedicated a song to ‘Jimmy Savile at the back’, sparking a charge from frenzied fans who believed they might be able to pursue their quarry all the way to The Beatles’ dressing rooms.

  The next day, Savile dropped in for tea ‘with the lads’ at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool only to emerge to find the building besieged by fans. Thirty police officers were required to hold back the crowds, and a borrowed car was commandeered for the group’s guest to make his getaway.