In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  She went on to recount how she had phoned the BBC to tell them about the second DJ. ‘I gave them the man’s name,’ she said. ‘I asked if they realised [Claire] was a child of 15, and I said something had to be done about it to save other girls from the same sort of thing. I demanded to speak to “the man right at the top” but they said quite abruptly that this was impossible.’

  Sometime later, Vera McAlpine said she did finally receive a call from the BBC. It was explained to her that the DJ in question had been spoken to and had flatly denied the allegation so there was nothing more to be done. The BBC did not interview Vera McAlpine or her daughter, who had appeared on Top of the Pops on four occasions. Neither, she said, did the BBC contact the police: ‘They simply shrugged it off as though nothing had happened.’7

  There are two small but potentially significant details in what Vera McAlpine told a reporter from the Press Association. The first is one of the disc jockeys had offered Samantha a ‘contract which would make her famous’. The second was her daughter had taken part in two television programmes in Yorkshire.8

  After her death, two of Samantha’s friends came forward to recount their own experiences on Top of the Pops. Donna Scruff was just 13 and yet had appeared as a dancer in the audience on three occasions. ‘We are supposed to be 15,’ she said, ‘but most of the girls are much younger and lie simply to get in.’9

  She spoke of how Claire, or ‘Samantha’ as she was known to them, told people she was 23, and her only goal was to be on television. If that meant sleeping with a disc jockey, so be it. Donna Scruff also recalled that Claire was invited back to the Top of the Pops presenter’s dressing room and had subsequently gone out with him on a couple of occasions. Of the other man mentioned in Claire McAlpine’s diary, Scruff said he was a disc jockey who picked her up after a broadcast of The Rosko Show on Radio 1, before taking her back to his flat. They’d had sex, but only once; he’d made her do the washing-up while he watched boxing on television.

  Samantha had told her that two other girls, both aged 15, also went to the flat from the show, a detail corroborated by 14-year-old Janine Hartwell. ‘I know a group of 15-year-old girls who slept with him after his shows,’ she said of the DJ in question.

  Vera McAlpine’s lament is indicative of the prevailing attitudes at the time. ‘I now realise I should have telephoned the police,’ she said, ‘but I thought they would be more severe with my daughter than they would be with the pop stars.’10

  Officers with Hertfordshire Police took possession of Claire McAlpine’s diary, before passing it on to Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Booker of Scotland Yard. Booker had been chosen to lead the wider investigation into activities at the BBC.

  Lord Hill, chairman of the BBC Governors, launched his own private inquiry, headed by Brian Neill, a highly respected QC. The heavily redacted results of his investigation were not publicly revealed until some 42 years later.

  On 5 April 1971, the BBC announced plans to introduce a minimum age limit for girl dancers in the audience of Top of the Pops, a system of adult chaperones and a requirement for written permission from the girls’ parents. The corporation’s official reaction to the death of Claire McAlpine was typically non-committal: ‘This would seem to be a matter for the police and the coroner’s court and the BBC has no comment to make.’11

  It is interesting to note that it was Jimmy Savile, one of two regular presenters of Top of the Pops, who decided to comment on these measures the very next day. In fact, he spoke to a number of newspapers, indicating that the BBC had put him forward as a spokesman.

  Savile protested the show was ‘remarkably free of seductions and drug taking but there are lots of dates made by everybody’. After seven years presenting Top of the Pops, he claimed, ‘I have lots of girlfriends. I’ve visited their homes and count their parents as friends too.’12 It was a textbook alibi from a man who had perfected the art of seducing parents before abusing their children.

  He went on to liken Top of the Pops to a ‘high class discotheque’ saying that ‘with 250 people involved you could always find scandal if you dug deeply enough’. He insisted he could not remember Claire McAlpine, despite the fact she had danced on a show he presented and his admission that he had ‘an eye for a pretty girl’. He said he was ‘upset’ and hoped the inquest would reveal any association with the programme, before stating his understanding that there was a minimum age of 16 for girls in the audience. ‘But it’s not surprising if anybody gets in who is younger,’ he added. ‘Who knows these days if a girl is 14 or 17?’

  In fact, Jimmy Savile seems to have treated Claire McAlpine’s death as an affront. He appeared on the popular magazine programme Pebble Mill, surrounded by teenage girls, and spoke of the high standards governing everybody who worked on Top of the Pops. Then, on the eve of the inquest into Claire McAlpine’s death, ‘bachelor disc jockey Jimmy Savile’, as he was billed in the Daily Express, went further still. ‘Many a time I have dated a good looking girl I have met on the show,’ he confessed. ‘But what I say to them is “Ask your folks if I can come round for tea.” I much prefer being with a family, with a pretty girl in the centre, than a session in the back of my car. For one thing, you can’t see how pretty the girl is in the back of my car.’13

  What’s staggering is how little Jimmy Savile tried to conceal what he was doing. Even in a culture that had been altered, if not transformed, by the sexual revolution, albeit a culture that still celebrated the leery comedy of Benny Hill and his ilk, it’s impossible not to be shocked by the fact that one of its biggest stars could openly talk about charming a girl’s parents before molesting her in the back of his car. That Savile then spelt out exactly how and where he did this, is even more astonishing.

  ‘My dressing room at Top of the Pops is a weekly meeting place of 20 to 30 people,’ Savile went on. ‘Half of them are teenagers, the other half are parents. The parents are not there to chaperone their daughters. They are there because they are as interested in me as their children are.’

  He said there was ‘a popular misconception’ that young girls were only interested in sex. ‘Well,’ he joked, ‘19 and 20-year-olds with some experience of the world may look at me as a sexual object. But the younger ones, the 14 to 16-year-olds, don’t even think about sex. In fact they would be most offended if you suggested anything sexual to them.’

  To the Daily Mirror, he explained, ‘I’ve met young crumpet that would knock your eyes out. Fourteen-year-old girls with bodies on ’em like Gina Lollobrigida. I love ’em, but not in the going to bed sense.’ He claimed that girls went to ‘great lengths’ to find out where he lived and often camped out on his doorstep. ‘Once,’ he declared, ‘a big sack arrived at my home with “A present for Jimmy” marked on it. Well there was this chick inside it. She was just seventeen. We had a cup of tea together and whiled away an hour together chatting.’14

  So here was Jimmy Savile putting it all out there once again, ensuring his unorthodox, high-wire alibi was released into the public domain, while simultaneously reminding the nation of what a trustworthy, family-friendly figure he was. It was becoming dogma, an insurance policy: admit to just about everything, even his modus operandi – charming the parents, taking girls for a ride in his car, having teenagers in his flat. It was now a game, a twisted thrill. Nobody was going to touch him; he was worth too much to the BBC, and too much to the needy of the nation.

  One can only speculate at how Vera and David McAlpine felt as they prepared for the inquest and read quotes such as these in the morning papers. More hurtful was the postscript to one of stories which suggested detectives were now considering the possibility their daughter was a fantasist.

  On 7 April, nine days after Claire McAlpine’s death, coroner Marcus Goodman recorded a ‘suicide’ verdict. A police constable read out the last entry in Claire’s diary from the morning of 29 March. ‘I can’t take it anymore, I am just a dreamer and none of my dreams will ever come true.’ The 15-year-old had sw
allowed two bottles of her mother’s sleeping pills and eaten bread to keep them down.

  At the inquest, she was described as being ‘in a world of her own’15 and effectively dismissed.

  More than 40 years on, the diary is unaccounted for, although Claire’s half-brother Mark Ufland insists Jimmy Savile was one of those named in its pages. ‘Savile was the one who was mentioned primarily,’ he says.16 ‘As far as I know, Jimmy Savile was interviewed as a witness. The diary was dismissed as delusional. It was the word of a 15-year-old with emotional problems against the word of the BBC.’17

  According to a BBC source spoken to by the Telegraph, James Crocker, a solicitor on Brian Neill’s inquiry team, questioned Jimmy Savile. At the interview, Savile refused to cooperate and was said to have mocked the entire process.

  ‘Savile came before Crocker but just made fun of him,’ the BBC source explained. ‘He sent Crocker up, and Crocker complained bitterly to the BBC. He went to the head of the BBC’s legal team, Richard Marshall, who had set up the inquiry, but there was nothing he could do about it. This all remained private within the BBC.’18 Internal BBC correspondence from the time demonstrates that the decision not to make the report public went right to the top: Director General Sir Charles Curran wrote to BBC Chairman Lord Hill to recommend as much.

  In 2013, a Freedom of Information request finally brought into the light of day the 64-page document completed by Brian Neill QC in 1972, albeit with vast swathes redacted. In it, Neill acknowledged that Top of the Pops presented ‘certain problems in that it introduces into the labyrinthine TV Centre a substantial number of teenage girls’ before urging the BBC to issue ‘clear guidelines’ as to who was to be ultimately responsible for the behaviour and control of ‘audiences of this kind’.

  Bill Cotton, who had become the BBC’s head of Light Entertainment after the death of Tom Sloan in 1970, was interviewed and appears to have succeeded in persuading Neill that instances of immorality on the show were rare. ‘The girl [Claire McAlpine] had come to see [Cotton] on several occasions,’ the report states, ‘and had invented stories for the purpose of getting access to him. He said she seemed to him in a sort of fantasy world but that she had not made any sexual advances of any kind.’19

  It is tempting to speculate what specifics those ‘invented stories’ Cotton spoke of might have contained. What is clear, though, is that Jimmy Savile’s boss at the BBC was not prepared to listen to anything that might possibly tarnish one of his brightest stars. It was just as Savile had figured. He had picked his target carefully, and covered his tracks with ruthless efficiency.

  Later, in another of the non-redacted passages from the Neill report, an executive makes a point of praising Jimmy Savile at a BBC management board meeting for offering an ‘effective defence’ of Top of the Pops.20 For the BBC, this was all that mattered. And Jimmy Savile recognised as much.

  By March 1972, less than a year after Claire McAlpine’s death, he evidently felt comfortable enough to take a reporter from the Weekly News into his dressing room at Top of the Pops. It was described as being ‘full of girls’21. They included four girls from Halifax that Savile had met ‘during church discussions’, a ‘lonely’ American he encountered on Speakeasy, a Scottish girl he met through Belfort Hospital in Fort William and a young TV actress who was playing a schoolgirl when Savile first noticed her as a 16-year-old. She had walked across the Top of the Pops studio floor wearing a ‘lurex crochet suit’. Savile stopped her, recorded an interview for Savile’s Travels and then wined and dined the girl’s parents that night. According to the paper, he had become ‘a friend of the family’ who ‘pops up to their Ipswich home whenever he has the time’.

  36. A BLOODY SAINT

  Jimmy Savile’s response to escaping unscathed from the payola scandal and the suicide of Claire McAlpine was to throw himself more conspicuously than ever into his charity work. He was photographed with a crew of Scarborough lifeboat men ahead of a major national walk to raise money for the RNLI, spent a week touring the country for the National Association of Youth Clubs and led a crowd of 30,000 in the fourth annual walk for the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin. At the end, he was reported to have ‘delighted the crowd by stripping to the waist and flinging his shorts into a screaming throng’.1

  In the autumn of 1971, a journalist tracked Savile down to his motor caravan, parked as usual in a seedy area by a refuse tip close to King’s Cross station. ‘I tramp around the country like a grey timber wolf,’ he explained, after being served tea from a transport café by his driver. ‘I’m a wild animal, aware of the world and its surroundings and aware of my own needs.’2 He then boasted of having raised £60,000 for charity that year with the intention of making £100,000 by the time he was done.

  He talked of the two days a week he worked as a volunteer porter at Leeds General Infirmary and of the similar role he performed at Stoke Mandeville where he also had a key role with the hospital’s League of Friends. Then there was his title of ‘Honorary Assistant Entertainments Officer’ at Broadmoor, with a secondment to Rampton, its sister hospital in Nottinghamshire. Just a couple of months earlier, he had taken 10 patients and a number of staff from Rampton on a coach trip to Scarborough.

  It is noteworthy that the article commented on the fact that some people ‘put his charity work down to publicity, tax-loss, a guilty conscience or all three’. Naturally Savile shrugged such doubts off: ‘“I’m a good Catholic,” he said. “I go to church whenever I can and I talk to God. Sometimes I ask God if I am doing the right thing; if I should continue helping where I can.”’

  David Winter was a BBC producer who occasionally filled in for Roy Trevivian on Speakeasy, and later became head of Religious Broadcasting. ‘I once listened bemused as Savile expiated at length in the BBC canteen on the reasons why St Peter wouldn’t dare bar him from heaven,’ he said. “What do you mean he’s led an immoral life?” God would say to him. “Have you any idea how much money he’s raised for charity? Or how many hours he’d put in as a porter at that hospital? Get them doors opened now, and quick!”’3

  Now a Church of England priest and a columnist for the Church Times, Winter recalled trying to tell Jimmy Savile that religion didn’t quite work like that. ‘It’s a million miles from the Christian concepts of sin and grace,’ he said. ‘Savile, a practising Roman Catholic, was in fact echoing a whiff of a medieval idea – supererogation. I do more good than is strictly required in order to offset faults and sins – mine, or other people’s.’4

  The BBC sacked Roy Trevivian in 1972. As producer of the Thought for the Day programme he had allowed a speaker to launch an attack on Prime Minister Edward Heath’s handling of the escalating problems in Northern Ireland. When added to his drinking and occasional outbursts, it was judged the time was right to let him go. Producing duties on Speakeasy were largely taken over by Reverend Colin Semper, then head of Religious Broadcasting for BBC Radio.

  In light of the scandal, I asked Semper how he viewed Jimmy Savile’s relationship with his faith. ‘That’s a very, very difficult question,’ he replied. ‘He had a kind of delight in saying that he went to church. But the going to church was not in any way a community thing. It always seemed to me that he was in and out. It was episodic in a way … His faith might have been abundant to him but the coherence of it was very difficult for me to understand.’

  Another aspect of Savile’s life that Semper found hard to fathom was his relationship with his mother. ‘My success has extended her life,’ Savile told one newspaper,6 before explaining how it was impossible for him to fall in love while she remained his responsibility. ‘There was a kind of exclusivity to it, there really was,’ Semper offered of his bond with the Duchess. ‘I don’t think I ever had a conversation with him where he didn’t quote her or talk about her or say he was going to see her.’

  By the end of 1971, Jimmy Savile was being described as ‘the spearhead of [the BBC’s] Christian attack’.7 He was chosen to present the Top of the Pops
leading up to the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day, and on Boxing Day, two hours were put aside to allow him to tell the story of his life. ‘Jimmy Savile is the BBC’s not so secret Christmas formula,’ stated the Sunday Times, ‘with new added RELIGION.’

  Savile had also been invited to join Lord Longford’s 52-strong commission of inquiry into pornography, which had been inspired by Mary Whitehouse’s campaign to clean up the British media. Longford was determined to challenge claims that Soho’s red light area and the proliferation of adult magazines did no harm to the moral fabric of the nation. Jimmy Savile joined high court judges, clergymen, psychiatrists, professors, and, bizarrely, Cliff Richard on the commission. He described it as a ‘worthy and well-meaning attempt to sanctify Sodom before it’s too late’.8

  *

  On the first day of 1972, Jimmy Savile’s stealthy progress towards the centre of the establishment was recognised when he was named in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list. The award of an OBE was in recognition of the many thousands of pounds he had raised for charity and his tireless work for hospitals.

  He said that he opened the letter from Prime Minister Harold Wilson late one night in Leeds and was so excited he phoned his brother Vince before driving to Leeds General Infirmary in his van. ‘Somebody had just died,’ he told me. ‘An old lady of 80 … so I’m pushing her from the ward to the fridge and it brought everything back to square one.’

  A stretcher-bearer at Leeds General Infirmary was asked to comment on the news and said, ‘They often say he’s a bit of a twit. Us, we think he’s a bit of a bloody saint.’9 Such an endorsement might have had something to do with the fact he was offering porters free holidays in the caravans he kept on the coastlines of North Yorkshire, Dorset and Devon.

  Jimmy Savile was now openly boasting about being able to ‘claim Lords, Ladies, Earls, Ministers, Cardinals and branches of the royal family as friends and acquaintances’.10