In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Duncan was a big noise locally, the fifth generation of his family to run William Ackroyd and Company, a textile company established in 1836 that had once employed the majority of Otley’s adult population. As mayor and head of the council, he wanted to do something different with the town’s gala social event, the annual Civic Ball.

  He told the local newspaper that by rebranding what had traditionally been a staid affair, and calling it a ‘Pop Civic Ball’, he hoped to appeal to ‘the young and young-in-heart amongst our townspeople’.1 The event, which was to be held in a marquee on the grounds of the local rugby club on Friday, 6 October, would feature live music supplied by Chris Barber and his jazz band supported by local outfits, The Mouldy Warp and Ellison’s Hog Line. It would also have a celebrity guest of honour.

  Knowing that Jimmy Savile was well-known in Otley thanks to his cycling and his early DJ engagement in the Wharfedale Café in the town centre, Duncan decided to write to the star of radio and television and invite him along as his ‘chief guest’. He also recruited an old friend of Agnes Savile, who was also a regular visitor to Otley, to make contact to see if she could apply some gentle persuasion.

  Jimmy Savile didn’t bother writing a letter of reply; he simply scribbled his thoughts on Duncan’s letter and sent it back to him, using the same envelope. ‘He responded to say yes, he would like to come,’ Duncan told me, although further research proved the deal wasn’t quite as simple as he said. In fact, Jimmy Savile outlined a set of six conditions for the councillor, as reported in the local newspaper:2

  Make sure that my normal fee of £200 goes to an Otley charity – [Duncan’s] Answer: The £200 fee will go to an Otley charity. Ta very much indeed.

  I wish to sleep the night on the Chevin, in a tent, which you will organise, plus sleeping bag and large torch – Answer: I will personally organise a tent on the Chevin, plus sleeping bag and large torch, for you to sleep overnight, and moreover will hold you to it.

  A guard of honour of six young ladies – in another tent of course – to keep me safe – Answer: I’ll organise the guard of honour of six young ladies but I won’t be held to their compliance, or your safety!

  A trip round Otley hospital the next lunchtime (Saturday) – Answer: The Matron is delighted by your suggestion of a visit on Saturday and I look forward to accompanying you.

  The presentation of some Otley honour – framed drawing or painting of Otley – Answer: I shall organise a framed drawing or painting of Otley for you, and I am exploring the possibility of conferring upon you the Freedom of the New Market Conveniences.

  Some cigars and matches – Answer: I’m stocking up with cigars and matches – bring outsize ashtray.

  If Jimmy Savile’s demands for girls were barefaced, what’s also notable was his insistence on being given access to the local hospital. According to Liz Dux, a lawyer representing scores of Jimmy Savile’s victims, it became one of his regular conditions for making personal appearances in the decades that followed: ‘Whenever he arrived at a new place that he hadn’t been to before, he’d ask where the hospital was.’

  In his autobiography, Savile boasted that his unusual demands ensured that the tickets to the Otley ball sold out in record time: ‘My ultimatum of “no tents, no girls, no me” meant the council had to go through with it,’ he wrote.3 He also claimed that a notice for female volunteers brought in ‘well over a hundred young lady applicants’.

  Council records show that the 12 members of Otley District Council met on Monday, 11 September 1967 and Duncan referred to arrangements that had been made both for the Pop Civic Ball and ‘for the reception and convenience of his official guests’,4 which presumably covered Savile and the six young women he’d demanded as his fee.

  ‘Some of the members only then realized what they were doing,’ claimed Savile in his book, ignoring the fact he wasn’t present at the meeting. ‘[They said] “We can’t have a council meeting to decide which six of our girls sleep with this man.”’ He maintained the council members were ‘more bewildered than outraged’, yet claimed half of them still got up and left the meeting.

  Ronnie Duncan remembered it rather differently: ‘Some of the blue-haired Tories were not exactly in favour of having a Pop Civic Ball but their distaste was levelled at me and not at Jimmy Savile.’

  Six girls were finally selected: Andrea Barber, Alma Lucas, Lynn Mitchell, Ann Simpson, Catherine Spence and Jennifer Woodhead. When I asked Duncan how old they were, he replied: ‘I don’t think we are talking about sub-teenage. I imagine they were all over the age of 16 but I have no reason to know.’

  It is clear from a local newspaper article, however, that there was considerable unease in Otley over the event, and Jimmy Savile’s demands. In the build-up, the BBC Home Service sent a reporter to interview John Herdman, the chairman of the Pop Ball committee. In a subsequent newspaper article, Herdman admitted, ‘the interview touched on some topical and controversial points’.5

  Ronnie Duncan did not attend the Pop Civic Ball for the simple reason that he was getting married on the same day. Jimmy Savile arrived wearing a Union Jack blazer, strings of beads round his neck and a sou’wester on his head. He also had a friend in tow.

  Jimmy Corrigan was king of Scarborough’s seafront amusement arcades and a member of Savile’s informal running club in the North Yorkshire seaside town. When we spoke, however, Duncan was adamant the Jimmy Corrigan in question was James Lord Corrigan, owner of the recently opened Batley Variety Club and a string of bingo halls around Yorkshire. The two men not only shared a name; they were first cousins.

  On the night of the Civic Ball, the six young women were kitted out in identical patterned shift dresses. As Jimmy Savile recalled, ‘They looked good enough to eat.’

  According to Savile’s account, one of the girls’ fathers arrived and ‘hauled her off home. She protested loudly but dad would have none of this preposterous situation.’ Corrigan, who Savile described as his ‘millionaire pal’, clearly couldn’t believe his luck: ‘When he saw the crumpet his eyes shot out a mile and his total conversation for the evening was an incredulous “Are we kipping with them?”’6

  Jimmy Savile was not required to do anything at the ball other than bide his time. At the end of the night, he recounted how he, Jimmy Corrigan and the five remaining girls were driven up to the Chevin, a local beauty spot overlooking the town, where two tents were waiting for them in a clearing in the trees. ‘Needless to say,’ he added with a sickening inevitability, ‘the girls’ tent fell over and we all had to finish up together.’

  Savile’s account of the night was typically upbeat: ‘Dawn came and with it the council chairman and his cars. It was seven totally exhausted campers that fell back down the hill to a breakfast we couldn’t eat because we had laughed too much.’

  The photograph in the following week’s paper tells a different story. Jimmy Savile and Jimmy Corrigan are pictured with the six girls. Only Andrea Barber appears to be laughing. It looks like she has just said something to Lynn Mitchell, who unlike the forced smiles worn by the other girls, looks decidedly grim-faced.

  ‘To my knowledge [Jimmy] behaved perfectly sensibly,’ protested Duncan, who said he was impressed with the way Savile conducted himself on the hospital visit the following day. ‘The revelations that have come upon us since then are an amazement to all of us, I think … I had got no suspicions of any sort that he’d be taking advantage of the girls. My view was here is a man who has got nothing to sell but himself, and therefore what he wished for in terms of publicity and newsworthy comment is the price that I’m paying.’

  I put it to Ronnie Duncan that six girls was a highly unusual payment for a personal appearance. ‘I just thought it was one of his gimmicks, you know, that would make good publicity for him,’ he replied. ‘I saw absolutely nothing sinister in it. Maybe I should have done but I didn’t.’ He also maintained there were no complaints from any of those who camped on the Chevin.

  I was able to track d
own and speak to one of the women who stayed on the hillside with Jimmy Savile and Jimmy Corrigan that night, although she asked not to be identified. Her account is rather different from Duncan’s.

  She was 17 at the time, and insists she was not the youngest of the six girls selected. Moreover, she also claims there was no selection process, as most of the girls were the daughters of, or known to, local councillors and prominent local businessman. Indeed it was Andrea Barber’s father, who ran the tobacconist’s shop in town where Jimmy Savile bought his cigars, who forbade his daughter from going.

  She also told me the Jimmy Corrigan in question was a good deal younger than Jimmy Savile, making it highly unlikely that it was James Lord Corrigan of Batley Variety Club fame, despite Duncan’s insistence. Jimmy Corrigan of Batley was born in 1925, making him a year older than Jimmy Savile. He was also known throughout his life as James rather than Jimmy. Jimmy Corrigan of Scarborough, on the other hand, was born in 1939, putting him in his late twenties at the time of the ball.

  Perhaps most significant is the revelation that they did not in fact spend the whole night on the hillside. And this was not due to one of the tents collapsing, but because it was attacked by a group of local youths.

  The woman recalled it was bitterly cold when the girls got into their sleeping bags in the separate tent that had been set up for them in the clearing. It was at this point, in the early hours of the morning, that Jimmy Savile, who had been plying them with vodka all night but not drinking himself, came in and ‘tried it on’ with each of the girls.

  Although the woman refused to elaborate on what had happened on the grounds she didn’t think it fair on the others in the tent that night, she did describe Jimmy Savile as ‘a disgusting old man’ and ‘a pervert’.

  Her version of events was that they ‘were saved’ when youths from the rugby club shot out the paraffin lamps with air rifles. ‘They had followed us up there,’ she said. She described the girls huddling in the tent while a fight broke out between Savile and the youths. ‘[Savile] was violent, really nasty once he turned,’ she added.

  When I asked her about the newspaper photograph taken the next day, she sighed. ‘I was just thinking, “Get me out of this shit.” I was out of my depth. It was horrible.’

  *

  If Jimmy Savile was confident enough by 1967 to ask local government officials for payment in girls, it was possibly because he had recently dodged a bullet. According to George Tremlett, who worked weekend shifts on the news desk at the People from 1961 to 1968, the newspaper’s crack team of reporters carried out an investigation into Jimmy Savile.

  When I asked Tremlett whether it was an investigation into Jimmy Savile’s preference for underage girls, he replied: ‘Without a shadow of a doubt. And it was specific. They had names. The standard practice with the People … was everything had to be evidenced with statements that needed to be agreed by lawyers and so on. That was standard drill.’

  The People, then a broadsheet, was a paper with a pioneering reputation in the field of investigative journalism.7 In the 1950s it had broken the story of the Messina brothers’ prostitution ring in Soho, which Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the rival Daily Mirror and Sunday Pictorial, described as ‘the most courageous exposure of its kind’.

  So why did the People’s findings never see the light of day? Editor Sam Campbell had hired Jimmy Savile as a columnist in a bid to attract a younger readership, chiefly on the advice of his daughter who listened religiously to his Radio Luxembourg shows. She was a boarder at Roedean School in Sussex at the time, and like millions of other teenagers across Britain, listening to The Teen and Twenty Disc Club was a guilty pleasure, one that was best enjoyed, at Savile’s behest, ‘under the bedclothes’.

  ‘The reason that he spiked it was that Jimmy Savile wrote a weekly column for the paper,’ claimed Tremlett. ‘I was about eight or ten feet from the [Campbell’s] desk because he used to sit in the same room as the editorial staff. I was there when somebody walked past me to the desk and they were told that [the story] was killed. They walked back and grumbled. It wasn’t what I would call a rebellious grumble; people expected the editor to edit the paper, and Sam Campbell was one of the great Fleet Street figures.’

  In 1966, Sam Campbell died suddenly from a heart attack, aged 58. In January 1972, shortly after Jimmy Savile had been awarded an OBE in the New Year’s honours list, the second instalment of a major four-part series was published in the People. Its banner headline screamed: ‘Me and My 3,000 Birds – At last! Jimmy Savile’s own story’.8

  32. THEY KNOW I’M HONEST

  Representatives of all Britain’s main political parties attended the press conference, at which each declared his support for a campaign sparked by five company secretaries working in the head office of Colt Ventilation and Heating Ltd in Surbiton. The women had offered to work one Saturday morning a month for no extra pay, profits or overtime.

  This gesture was made against the grim backdrop of a stalling economy, compounded by an increasing deficit in the balance of trade, a damaging spate of strikes, the six-day war in the Middle East, a devalued currency and rising bank rates. What had spurred the secretaries to act was a letter written to The Times by the Conservative MP John Boyd-Carpenter in which he had suggested Britain could alleviate the economic stagnation being experienced under Harold Wilson’s Labour government if those ‘in responsible positions’ set such an example.

  The initiative taken by the women at Colt snowballed to the extent that by 5 January 1968, when the MPs from both sides of the House convened, it had become a national effort. Operating under the slogan ‘I’m Backing Britain’, companies from all over Britain signed up, thousands of Union Jack lapel badges were produced, and ordinary citizens even began to send money to the Treasury to reduce the national debt. The Duke of Edinburgh was sufficiently impressed to send a telegram of encouragement.1

  Jimmy Savile had nothing to offer the drive to increase exports – his fame was a uniquely British phenomenon – but he had no intention of missing out on what he saw as an opportunity for easy publicity. After offering his services as a volunteer porter at Leeds General Infirmary, where he already recorded inserts for the hospital radio station, he ensured the newspapers were on hand to record his first day on the job. By giving nine days over a two-month period, he told them, he calculated he was contributing the equivalent of £1,600.

  One paper reported that he turned up in his Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and wore a white porter’s jacket over a Union Jack waistcoat. Another described him as a ‘Plain man’s philosopher, everybody’s friend, nobody’s fool’ before revealing ‘He chatted up, charmed, kissed, saluted, or hailed anything that moved.’2 Sir Donald Kaberry, MP for North-West Leeds and chairman of the hospital governors, said, ‘He will be treated as an ordinary worker.’3 Mr E.N. Hill, the assistant house governor, was more effusive; claiming his effect on the patients was ‘quite magical’.4

  Jimmy Savile insisted this was no publicity stunt. Instead, he saw himself as a figure around whom Britain could rally. As he told readers of the People the very next Sunday: ‘There’s bags and bags of spirit … in this country. I know as I see it all over. What is needed is a Winston Churchill to gather it all up, point it in the right direction and … Boom! All those clouds lined with devaluation and unemployment would blow away, and quickly.’5

  As an example of the sort of pluck that might yet save the UK from financial ruin, he cited Jimmy Corrigan, his friend from Scarborough. Clearly, the Pop Civic Ball in Otley was still on his mind because he revealed he had outlined similar terms for a charity event in Bingley, only this time he and Corrigan would sleep in a tree house in Shipley Glen. The conditions? ‘As usual, my wages of fun bodyguards – six local girls.’6

  An outbreak of foot and mouth disease foiled the plan, and the girls were spared the fate that befell their counterparts in Otley. Instead, Savile and Corrigan spent the night on a raft in the middle of a river in flood. ‘My pa
l could have bought the town,’ he wrote, ‘but he wouldn’t have dreamt of backing out just because everything wasn’t sweet. That’s what I call spirit.’7

  On that same Sunday, Michael Parkinson commented on Jimmy Savile’s burgeoning persona, one that now amounted to more than being a fast-talking, bizarrely dressed figure of fun. In a Sunday Times Magazine special edition on Yorkshire, Parkinson’s profile, headlined ‘Honest Jim’, described an enigma, albeit one with a shrewd head for business and a rare social conscience. In it, Savile aptly summarised his place in society: ‘To most people I am a question mark.’ It was a status that never changed.

  The interview took place in the studios of Radio Luxembourg, and at one point Parkinson reported a telephone call coming through from Leeds General Infirmary. Savile claimed the call was from a dying 11-year-old boy who wanted a chat as a birthday treat. Such calls were a regular occurrence, the producer of the show told Parkinson, who went on to describe the DJ, TV star and charity fund-raiser as, ‘Savile the Social Worker’.

  At the end of the piece, Savile offered his own reasons for why he was able to do what he did, although it better explains how he was given such access to the sick and vulnerable: ‘I think the majority of people like me and I think they like me because they know I’m honest.’8

  Even once the allegations about his erstwhile friend had surfaced, Dave Eager still maintained that hospitals offered Savile the sort of unconditional emotional engagement that was lacking in the rest of his life. ‘When he was starting in the hospital wards, he said to me, ‘Dave, how could I possibly stop doing it? If you wheel somebody down to the theatre and they ask whether you’ll be there when they come round, it gives me something to look forward to.’

  Eager also recalled the pull was even stronger when Savile knew the patient was dying. ‘He’d know when somebody had not got long to live,’ Eager confirmed. ‘They’d look at him and say, “Jim, can I ask you something? When I die, can you wheel me down to the mortuary?” He’d say, “If that is showing someone love and respect, and they’d like that, there’s no way I won’t be there to wheel them down because that is the promise I’ve made.”’