In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Savile reported that he reversed the car 500 yards whereupon the girl told her parents that she was going for a drive with her new friend. He then added, ‘Should the reader feel that her folks appear unconcerned, you would not believe the stories I might tell you about some parents.’ He wrote these words in 1974 when he was coming up to his 48th birthday.

  His account described how they drove around for a while, talking and smoking until ‘steam started to come out’ of his ears. Realising that a two-seater sports car was not conducive to what he had in mind, ‘a diabolical plan formed within’. Taking her to the Scarborough flat, he wrote, ‘was out of the question because the Duchess was in residence’ so he headed instead to a garage where he kept his convertible Rolls-Royce. The car, he added with relish, had fold-back seats and, ‘seeing as I’d saved her from a watery grave she was duly appreciative’. The girl was dropped back at her parents’ house at 4 a.m.

  He told readers of his newspaper column that he’d agreed to speak to the girl on the phone the following week. But when he called her, she said it would not work out because, in her words, ‘You’ve got too much money, and I love you.’3 In his autobiography, he embellished the story still further by stating that the girl left town that week ‘to work away’, although he received Christmas cards from her for some years to come.

  Nothing about it rings true: the reasons the girl gave for not seeing him again despite what she felt for him, the convenient detail that she moved away soon afterwards, or the coda that he’d treated her so well that she remained in touch via cards at Christmas.

  It is a story that shows how comfortable Jimmy Savile felt about putting his secrets out there for all to see. Perhaps he enjoyed the thrill: the allusion to the girl’s age in the reference to her being accompanied by her parents; the fact she was of an age where she needed their consent to go off with him; his caveat that it was the girl, not him, who suggested they go off in his car. But most importantly, by writing about it in a national newspaper the very next week, Jimmy Savile’s version of events – his alibi – was safely recorded in print.

  *

  Just a couple of months later, in May 1965, he decided to treat his mother to a trip to London. He put her up at the Hilton while he preferred to stay in a shabby hotel on Hunter Street. It was owned by Bill Mills, the proprietor of his previous London base, the Aaland Hotel. He’d had to move out of the Aaland in March, along with the ‘young pop artists’ occupying the other 13 rooms because the building on Coram Street was due for demolition. As Mills explained, ‘We were told before Christmas that we would have to go, but I let the kids stay on for as long as I could.’4

  ‘My Jimmy is more comfortable here than being in the Dorchester,’5 Agnes Savile told a reporter while sipping on a cup of tea at his new digs just off Russell Square. ‘He doesn’t like the big hard atmosphere of the big hotels,’ she added. Was this anything to do with his penchant for bringing young girls back at all hours of the morning?

  It was the first time Jimmy Savile’s mother had been interviewed by a national newspaper, and what she said offers a rare insight into their unusual relationship. ‘My Jimmy is just an ordinary sort of chap,’ she insisted. ‘I know some people are outraged by him, but really he is playing to the public. It’s all an act. I know, I’m his mother.

  ‘He has always wanted me to have the very best’, she went on. ‘He’s given me a picture postcard flat at Scarborough overlooking the sea, put a taxi at my disposal so I needn’t walk anywhere, and an open credit account at any shop. Nothing is too much trouble for elderly people or youngsters, he helps them as much as he can.’

  Agnes Savile spoke of how her youngest son had helped women and old people off the trams in Leeds as a child. ‘Now he opens church fetes and functions,’ she said. ‘Yes, he does it free …’ In fact, she said he did too much for charities: ‘He never seems to have any time to relax,’ she added. ‘Even if he gets into a train he is signing autographs.’

  The lack of girlfriend or any apparent romance in her son’s life was clearly being noted by this time because the reporter’s final question to Agnes Savile was whether she would like him to marry. ‘Yes, but in the entertainment world it is a great hazard,’ she replied. ‘In Manchester, three or four thousand teenagers attend his record sessions; it must be a very understanding wife who would put up with all the adulation he gets. I have never heard him say he wanted to get married. But I hope he does one day when he retires for in the entertainment world there is no happiness at all.’

  In the Duchess’s ‘king flat’ in Wessex Court on Scarborough’s Esplanade, I probed Jimmy Savile about his relationship with his mother. He was adamant there was ‘no tactile affection’6 during his childhood, and that he had to learn how to enjoy her. It wasn’t love but friendship, he said.

  I wanted to know how their relationship evolved in the years following his father’s death, and how it developed to the point where he once described it as ‘living through her proxy’. The first thing he told me was, ‘She was ruthless.’

  It’s an assessment that Tony Calder, who met Agnes Savile when he went to stay with Savile in the Mecca house in Leeds, agrees with. He describes her as ‘domineering’, and Savile’s devotion was such that it got ‘to the point where it was embarrassing’.

  ‘He’d get up on a Sunday morning in that dirty fucking house – his shagging house in Leeds. His mum lived round the corner. He’d walk round and see her, and they’d go to church.’ Savile, Calder recalled, would be ‘kissing her hand coming out of the church. He had his arm around her like she was his girlfriend. It was a bit sad.

  ‘You could see that he’d never have a serious relationship with another woman while his mother was alive because she wouldn’t approve of it,’ he says. ‘That was his whole take on it: “I’m shagging like crazy because she doesn’t know about it and I see her on Sunday to go to church and I see her in the week when I’ve bought things for her.”’

  When Calder chided Savile for the fact he’d never be famous beyond the shores of Britain, he replied that he didn’t care because it would be too far away from his mother. ‘“Mother”: she was always “Mother”,’ Calder recalls. ‘Or “the Duchess”. She wasn’t very pleasant to many of the people with him and she treated me like one of the ponces around her son.’

  Another source has warmer memories of Agnes. He too confirms her youngest son was in thrall to her. ‘He loved her to death. But the Duchess was the boss … [when he visited her] he had to behave himself. He couldn’t be smart. He became a different Jim. “Now Jimmy, I want you to sort this out, go down to the shop for me and this window needs fixing.” It was all that.’

  A young Mancunian DJ named Dave Eager became Jimmy’s unofficial assistant at the top Ten Club. ‘All [Jimmy] ever said about his childhood to me,’ says Eager, ‘was that his mother and him always had a relationship where it was constantly on test.’

  Eager recounted how such conversations played out: ‘“What are you buying me for my birthday, Jim?” “What do you think I’m buying you? A set of Pyrex dishes.” “What?” “Somebody like you at your age should be in the kitchen cooking food. So Pyrex dishes is what you’re having.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” His mother, because of her nature, would never, ever ask Jim for money. So there was always this little game.’ Eager states Agnes treated her son ‘like a little boy. He never grew up in her eyes.’

  Another constant in their relationship, it seems, was Agnes’s sense of disapproval. According to another of Agnes’s visitors: ‘She’d go, “I don’t know how he dares go out dressed like that.” … She’d tell me stories about when he was little, like he used to wear a big hat when [they] went to the shops. The stories were from when she had control of him and now he was out of her control.’

  Agnes would regularly moan about him, often when he was within earshot: ‘“He doesn’t come anymore. He used to come and see me every night but now I don’t hear from him for a week sometimes.”’ E
ager describes such exchanges as a test of how much control Agnes still exerted.

  The more he provided, the tighter her grip on him. ‘She had a lurking suspicion that I would come unstuck sooner or later,’ Savile wrote in his autobiography.7 He also said she never watched him on television or congratulated him on his achievements, and lived in constant fear of the police knocking at the door: ‘She thought I was stealing all the money,’ he said.8

  And yet, Jimmy Savile’s mother became his most regular and conspicuous companion. ‘Bit by bit she turned into a terrific sort of pal,’ he told me. ‘I found that me teaming round with her – I used to take her to functions and awards dinners; she was only five foot tall and had this golden hair – well, people loved it.’ They went on holidays together to the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, where Agnes enjoyed playing the one-armed bandits in amusement arcades, and Rome to visit the Vatican. Bizarrely, Savile maintained she had ‘the energy of a teenager and could pleasure all night as often as the opportunity arose’.9

  In 1991, Jimmy Savile told Anthony Clare that he realised he could have a better time ‘teaming’ about with his mother because a conventional girlfriend would give him ‘brain damage’.10 With the Duchess he could have a meal or take off somewhere with no strings attached. They had a great time together; a time, Savile insisted, ‘you couldn’t have … with a girl’. When Clare asked him why, he replied, ‘Well, because a girl would be a different kettle of fish, because a girl is more of a partnership. As against the Duchess – she brought me up for the first part of her life and I brought her up for the second part of her life.’

  Over the course of his life, Jimmy Savile offered many reasons for why he never married. He claimed that his peripatetic lifestyle legislated against it. He argued there were just too many girls. He said it was because he had never been in love. They are very possibly true, although his preference for girls under the legal age of consent was surely a more conspicuous obstacle. It is also tempting to speculate that the certain knowledge he had to provide for his mother, to ensure above all else that she would never want for anything again, left an emotional void in his life.

  Dave Eager recalls one particular conversation in the 1960s. They were discussing relationships and Savile said, ‘You could meet somebody, think, “You look beautiful” now and … have a great relationship. But if they had a stroke would you be prepared to look after them for the rest of your life? If the answer is you’re not sure, you’re not giving them 100 per cent commitment.’ Eager says that years later Savile confirmed this was exactly how he felt about marriage.

  ‘That’s why he had his mother living with him,’ Eager says. ‘[Savile said] “I don’t want to think there’s nobody looking after her. She’s my mum.” And that’s what he meant about family. That’s why he got involved with all the charities because they were his family. He was giving to them and getting back emotion.’

  In the aftermath of the revelations about Jimmy Savile, Jeff Dexter said he believed Jimmy was a victim himself. I have wondered this myself and suggested to Dexter that Savile could have been abused as a child. ‘He never had a proper girlfriend,’ he replied. ‘He loved his mother. He should have really been in care. Instead he created millions and millions of pounds of charity for lots of other people because he really didn’t know who the fuck he was.’

  Not long after his difficult encounter with Jimmy Savile for the In the Psychiatrist’s Chair series, Anthony Clare wrote a newspaper article about the hold powerful mothers can have over their sons: ‘The denigrating, rejecting mother can breed in her son a view of women as controlling and castrating that survives into adult life and affects and contaminates his relationship with women. Such a son may spend a lifetime taking revenge or trying to win the approval that eluded him in childhood. Either way, it is the women in his life who will bear the brunt.’11

  Savile preferred to see it another way: ‘[The Duchess] doesn’t nag me to get married and settle down, but in any case there is no question of it. If I fell into the arms of some other woman, I wouldn’t be able to look after my Mum so well, and that wouldn’t be fair.’12

  29. AN OLD MAN EVEN THEN

  With its limited capacity, the Upper Broughton Assembly Rooms was only ever going to be a staging post until something bigger came along. Fate intervened just 12 days after the first episode of Top of the Pops when the building was gutted by fire. Everyone was forced to flee the building, including 40 people preparing for a wedding party on the floor below. A night porter had to be plucked from the roof by firemen.

  Savile had already moved on. The Belle Vue complex was Manchester’s self-proclaimed ‘Showground to the World’, containing myriad attractions including hotels, pubs and theatres, zoological gardens, a fairground and a speedway stadium. It also boasted Europe’s largest ballroom, the New Elizabethan. Sam Mason was its general manager, and hired Savile to bring his crowd-pulling skills to Sunday nights at his vast venue.

  Savile went to take a look around. He was not overly impressed by what they saw. Belle Vue’s team of joiners were instructed to build a revolving stage tiered like a wedding cake, with a DJ box flanked by two specially commissioned 6ft by 4ft speakers containing huge bass bins. When the stage revolved, the guest groups would appear from the other side.

  Forty years later, Savile told me that he regarded Mason’s invitation to fill the 3,500-capacity dancehall as a challenge: ‘I’d never do anything from a purely egotistical point of view,’ he maintained. ‘I’d do it for money, I’d do it to get a crowd going for a charity do, yes.’ He took on Belle Vue, he explained, ‘just to see if the brain still worked’.

  Posters and newspaper advertisements for the new-look Top Ten Club promised ‘Fabulous Top Recording Groups and Artistes’ plus ‘Top international DJ Jimmy Savile with his unique Sound Power Disc Deck’. Curiously, Savile was pictured alongside holding a small chimpanzee from the zoo. ‘It’s a Gas! It’s a Ball! It’s Like Crazy Man!’ screamed the text, and the teenagers of Manchester seemed to concur.

  On Sunday evenings, the Top Ten Club’s star attraction pulled up either in his Rolls-Royce, E-Type or bubble car, which would be parked outside the entrance for the young patrons to gawp at. And when the stage revolved bringing him to the front, he signalled his entrance by blowing on a hunting horn. A conspicuous adornment to the specially commissioned DJ box was a framed picture of Savile shaking hands with Elvis Presley.

  Alan Leeke remembers his first visit to the Top Ten Club in 1963. He was living with his parents in Gorton, just a 10-minute walk from the venue. ‘[It] was membership only to get round the Sunday laws at the time,’ he says. ‘You had to be 16 to go but lots of people, myself included, altered the date of birth on the membership card. It was only typed on. I was probably 15 when I started going.’ He describes the clientele as ‘completely teenage’.

  Leeke recalls that Savile came on last, after the featured band had played, and that none of the other DJs were allowed to play records from the current Top 20. Leeke also says he witnessed Jimmy Savile regularly going off with girls from the Top Ten Club in his car, either before he went on stage or after he came off. ‘He’d go off and come back 20 minutes later or half an hour later. He always had girls from their mid to late teens, from what I could see.’ Leeke says it was well known that Jimmy Savile liked them young.

  When I ask how he thinks he got away with it, Leeke replies, ‘Because a lot of the girls thought they were the only ones that it happened to. I think they realised afterwards it wasn’t, but by then it was too late to say anything … [Savile] loved them. That was his attitude. The more he could get the better he liked it.’

  As a young man, Leeke admits to being ‘star struck’ by the famous DJ, and reveals he was among a group of youngsters invited back to the Black Pad one night after the ballroom closed.

  Another visitor confirmed there was a steady stream of people coming to the flat: ‘Girls came round to the pad to have a coffee and a tea and a chat. They’d stay f
or a while … and then they’d go away smiling having enjoyed themselves.’

  He went on to say that when Savile wasn’t working or doing gigs at dancehalls, girls would start arriving from lunchtime. ‘Then when they’d gone another group would come round at four o’clock. And they’d have a nice time and go away. And then at about six o’clock, another couple of girls would come round for a cup of tea. And they’d go away smiling. It was nice, friendly things.’

  I asked what was meant by ‘nice friendly things’. The reply? ‘Tea and friendliness.’ When I asked what sort of girls Jimmy went for, the answer was: ‘I think Jim preferred girly girls rather than smart girls. When the girls lost the giggle, it’s gone; that sort of girl. Girls who are prepared to do a cartwheel and jump and dance and have a giggle and a laugh. Not the ones that go to work and be dead straight and sensible. He liked fun girls, show girls.’

  *

  In 1964, Jimmy Savile was advertising his taste for teenage girls in his weekly newspaper column. There were numerous mentions of ‘Miss Twinkle’, otherwise known as Lynn Ripley, who was only 16 and dating Dec Cluskey of The Bachelors when she entered the charts in November that year with ‘Terry’, a teenage tragedy song recorded for Decca about the death of a boyfriend in a motorcycle crash. The record was banned by the BBC who considered it to be in bad taste. Savile wrote about ‘Miss Twinkle’ calling round, most probably to the Aaland Hotel, and seemed to be very interested in the state of her love life.

  As well as being Savile’s reliable hunting ground for teenage girls, the Top Ten Club was also where the BBC recruited youngsters for the studio audience of Top of the Pops. Cecil Korer was an assistant producer on the show who although only 29, looked considerably older; so much so that he wore a wig during recordings to disguise his balding head among all the dancing youngsters. One of Korer’s duties was to go talent spotting on Sundays at Belle Vue and hand out tickets for the next week’s show.