by Dan Davies
In the first instalment of a major newspaper series on his life, he talked of his days as a black market operator in Leeds and marvelled at how far he had come. ‘Little did I think, in those super, starving days, that I would finish up dropping cigar ash on the Queen Mother’s carpet,’ he said before regaling readers with how he had taken the opportunity to sit on the throne at St James’s Palace, or ‘that perfect Princess Alexandra’s husband would bash his head on a cupboard in the infamous Savile’s Travels caravan.’
His use of the word ‘infamous’ was another hint at what was really going on behind the scenes. Dennis Garbutt was employed as the driver of Savile’s motor caravan at the time. His wife Lucy told a newspaper that Dennis, who now suffers from dementia, was a patient in Leeds General Infirmary when Savile offered him the job. She said he lasted a year before quitting in disgust.
‘Savile would say to him, “Go and get a cup of tea, Den”, and that was his way of saying he wanted to be alone and it was obvious why,’ Lucy Garbutt said.11 ‘Den would then go to the pictures or just walk the streets for a while. [He] knew what was going on and we regret not doing anything about it at the time. He said Savile would have girls wherever he went.’
She reported that her husband told her how Savile routinely lured young girls onto the double mattress at the back of the motor caravan. ‘I couldn’t say how many, it was all over the country every time they stopped,’ she continued. ‘[Dennis] said, “These girls are barely older than our daughter”, who was 12 at the time. When he stopped he would have young girls … I really regret it now but Den always said he had nothing to prove it, he just knew what was going on.’
In the second newspaper instalment of his life story, Jimmy Savile wrote at length about spending the night with six girls in a caravan. ‘About a thousand arms and legs pinned me to the bed,’ he claimed, describing the scene as looking like ‘a cross between a double-X sex film and multi-legged octopus.’12
He then described the ‘pandemonium’ when knocking was heard at the door of the caravan the next morning. One of the girls rose naked and looked out of the window to see her mother and father outside. In his autobiography, Savile admitted, ‘Escape was uppermost in my mind.’ But after rapidly getting dressed, he called them in and then bluffed that he had been there half an hour without being offered any breakfast. ‘Heaven be praised, the parents stood for it,’ he added.13
This anecdote was followed by another: ‘It was only a little later that fine summer day when trouble loomed again.’14 Savile then described walking along the beach with two minders when a girl wearing a one-piece swimsuit spotted him. He said she looked ‘good enough to eat’. The girl invited him to meet her parents and explained they were staying in a caravan.
Savile wrote that he left his minders with the parents and went back to the caravan with the girl. Inside, he reported the temperature was ‘nearly 100 degrees’ so he sunk into a chair ‘wringing wet with the heat and temptation’. Just as the girl began changing out of her swimming costume, the parents returned.
By putting it in print, Jimmy Savile was, in effect, performing the same mind trick on the readers of his autobiography as he did on the parents of the youngsters he went on to abuse, having first charmed them from the protective clutches of their parents.
Dee Coles experienced this brazen approach in the summer of 1972, when she was a 14-year-old enjoying a holiday with her mother on the island of Jersey. Jimmy Savile had his motor caravan parked in the car park of the hotel where they were staying.
Forty years later, Coles told ITV News that Jimmy Savile didn’t seem like a stranger because he was on television so often. She produced photographs of the star with his arms wrapped round her outside the vehicle.
Coles and her friend accepted Savile’s invitation to step inside. It was only when he locked the door of his motor caravan behind them, she explained, that she felt what she describes as ‘immense panic’. The two girls were made to perform sex acts on the man described as the BBC’s religious ‘spearhead’.
Just like Jill in Worthing, Dee Coles’s hands were thrust down the front of Jimmy Savile’s trousers. ‘It was my first introduction to the male body,’ she recalled, ‘so the whole thing was just an incredible shock. After it happened, he tried to get us back in the van a second time, and my memory is that for me it was the end of the holiday. I just didn’t go near him or the van or see [the other girl] again.’15
When she looks at those photos, Dee Coles thinks back to what a young 14-year-old she was. ‘I think 14-year-olds in the Seventies just were’, she says. ‘There was no way any of my friends or I wore make-up or got dressed up to go out on the town. We were quite naïve. It’s always going to be a shock to anyone being sexually abused but the innocence just disappears as soon as something like that happens.’
‘It saddens me greatly to think that so many other children suffered sexual abuse from Jimmy Savile. As a 14-year-old you don’t have the thought that it might be happening to anyone else.’16
And still the public face of Jimmy Savile remained blemish-free. The same motor caravan in which he had abused so many young people was parked outside Buckingham Palace when the Queen Mother presented him with an OBE. Accompanying him on his trip to the palace were his mother and a porter from the X-ray department at Leeds General Infirmary.
Afterwards, he cavorted for photographers and film crews and began signing autographs, with the addition of its three new letters.
Six months later, Lord Longford published his report on pornography. It concluded that young people were ‘particularly vulnerable to the sex exploiters’ influence, and need special protection’. It also defined pornography as that which ‘exploits and dehumanises sex, so that human beings are treated as things and women in particular are sex objects’.17 Jimmy Savile didn’t utter a word throughout his time on the commission.
37. IT’S OBSCENE
It was Valentine’s Day and I was standing, as per Jimmy Savile’s instructions, outside the Thai Rose massage parlour on Marylebone High Street. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was watching me. He was laughing and pointing with his pals in Ossie’s Café, the greasy spoon next door. It was one of his regular haunts when he was staying at his London pied-à-terre close to Broadcasting House.
I was working on my third major magazine profile piece on Jimmy Savile and he had offered to provide ‘some colour’, which explained why I was standing in a light drizzle outside a dubious-looking establishment on a busy street in central London. As the rain became heavier, Savile eventually poked his head out of the door of the café. ‘Now then,’ he croaked, still pretending to be doubled up with the hilarity of it all. ‘You’re going to catch your death of cold out there.’
Four years after our first interview, I now believed that Jimmy Savile enjoyed the fact that I knew so much about him, or had at least amassed a wealth of material. It pandered to an ego of quite vast proportions; an ego he consistently denied possessing. This story, I had told him in advance, was to be different. I did not want to hear the same old tales – ‘The Not Again Child’, ‘The Pirate of the Dancehall’, ‘The Fun’ and ‘The Brain Damage’. I wanted to write a piece about the hidden Jimmy Savile; the man of influence with unlikely connections and hitherto unseen reserves of power. First, though, there was the small matter of breakfast. He ordered a cup of tea and two fried eggs on white bread.
Savile’s teeth were a mess, a collection of jagged talons chipped into random shapes and differing shades of grey and yellow. I had watched him eat on a number of occasions and it wasn’t a spectacle I enjoyed. With egg yolk dripping from his lips, I concentrated on my own breakfast and tried not to look up.
He seemed particularly happy with himself on this particular morning, specifically about his choice of venues for this latest article: a greasy spoon café, the Athenaeum Club where he was a member, and back to his flat in Leeds, where once again he had suggested I should stay overnight.
As we at
e, I told him I was in the midst of organising a charity event and would appreciate his advice. His response was a lengthy monologue about how he got everyone from the governor of the Bank of England to the Duke of Edinburgh working for him in the drive to build a new National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville. ‘You’ve got to be a bit of a conman to make it work,’ he concluded.
This was just a prelude to what I really wanted to find out about, namely the circles he’d mixed in over the years, and specifically his relationship with Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh’s favourite uncle and a man many believed to be the power behind the House of Windsor. First, though, I had to listen to a 10-minute account of how he earned his Royal Marine Commando Green Beret. As he unfurled his story, I was aware of customers coming in and out, waiters shimmying from behind the counter, and the coffee machine gurgling, spitting and coughing.
‘That was when I first met Lord Louis,’ Savile said, and I snapped back to attention. ‘He was the commandant general. It was the attraction of opposites. He had not the faintest idea of who I was or what I did. All he knew was that I was a freak with long hair. He wanted to know what this long-haired geezer was doing with this crack fighting corps.’
According to Savile, Mountbatten had been the man who sanctioned his entry into ‘the Firm’, the term he regularly used to describe the royal family. ‘Whenever it came to doing anything, he [Mountbatten] would say, “I’ll cut the ribbon but get Savile down. He can do the speeches. He does it better than me.” Coming from Lord Louis, and he was the favourite uncle of the Prince of Wales, it meant I hooked up with the Prince of Wales. It was the respect that Lord Louis had for me. It meant what was good enough for Lord Louis was good enough for him. That’s how I got to know all these people. Lord Louis was the governor.’
Savile recounted how he had once gone to open the new sergeants’ mess at the Marine Commando training base at Lympstone. ‘Lord Louis was going to come down and open it,’ he said. ‘But he said, “I’ll cut the ribbon but get Savile down here to make the speeches.”’
Before I could press him, he caromed off into a convoluted story about how the Marines had raised the money for five ‘amazing crystal chandeliers’ for the new mess. ‘Being a sniffer-abouter,’ he said, ‘I realised the press were going to take them to the cleaners for spending fifteen grand on five crystal chandeliers.’
Eventually, he got round to explaining that Mountbatten had officially opened the new mess before handing over to him to deal with the press. Savile said his deft handling of potentially tricky questions about the expensive new fixtures had greatly impressed the last viceroy of India, former sea lord and ex-head of the British armed forces, and that, he added, was enough to seal his entry into the establishment’s innermost circles.
Such details were revealed only by knowing which stones to look under, but it was tiring, time-consuming work. We had a long way to go so I decided to move onto more familiar ground. Was Savile, as he liked to put it, still ‘birding’?
‘Yes, yes,’ he blathered. ‘But you have to adapt. One of the things that I had to adapt to some years ago was the fact of being older. This year I’m 81.’ He pointed out ‘two birds’ that had come into Ossie’s Café while we had been sitting at our table. I hadn’t noticed either of them looking our way. ‘I’ve got to adapt because at 81 I can’t go pulling. It’s obscene,’ he said. He paused for a moment and looked out at the rain-lashed street. Then he repeated the point in case I hadn’t quite got it: ‘It’s obscene.’
‘I don’t go to clubs, you see, because once you’ve been the boss you don’t take kindly to being a punter. It wouldn’t do for me to go in and start putting myself about a bit. There’s not even a word for a guy of 81 trying to pull a younger woman.’ He stopped again for a moment to chew on a corner of toast. ‘It’s obscene,’ he said for the third time in 20 seconds.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it started. Jimmy Savile slurped on his mug of tea and brightened as quickly as the weather: ‘If they hit me on the head and bundled me into the boot of a car and had their wicked way with me in a lay-by, I won’t object. You’ve just got to adapt at not being able to do it.’
38. THE BEST FIVE DAYS OF MY LIFE
Released in March 2013, the report by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust Forensic Division on Jimmy Savile’s trips to Scarborough in 1971 and 1972 with patients from Rampton Psychiatric Hospital is a disconcerting document. This is not due to the revelations it contains, but because of what is not said, and the language used throughout.
In August 1971, Jimmy Savile organised and led a coach trip for 10 patients and members of staff to Scarborough during which, the report states, ‘they visited an ice-cream parlour, went on a boat trip, had tea with the Lord Mayor, met some Scarborough officials and The Duchess’.1 Note how an inquiry by a mental health institution into a serial paedophile’s activities with psychiatric patients in its care refers to Agnes Savile.
The Lord Mayor of Scarborough in 1971 was Councillor Peter Jaconelli, otherwise known as the town’s ‘Ice Cream King’. Born in Glasgow and raised as a strict Roman Catholic, Jaconelli had lived in the North Yorkshire seaside town since the age of seven when his father moved the family business south in a bid to grab a slice of the lucrative seaside trade.
Jaconelli had trained as an opera singer but his destiny was dollops of ice cream sold to the day-trippers and holidaymakers who flocked to the town in summer. He had married Anna, an Italian woman who worked at a Leeds wafer factory with his sister, in 1960, and over time, set about successfully branching out into restaurants and establishing nationwide distribution for his ice cream and desserts.
Tipping the scales at 21 stone and boasting a 50-inch waistline, Jaconelli was nothing if not an advertisement for his wares. During his first year as mayor he earned a place in The Guinness Book of Records, downing 512 oysters in 48 minutes and 42 seconds on national television. He also featured on an episode of Savile’s Travels, going head to head on the mat at his Ippon judo club with the show’s host and his great friend.
Jaconelli founded the judo club in Scarborough in 1955 and, despite his huge girth and waddling gait, claimed to be a black belt. Boys that attended the club say that he wasn’t anything of the sort, although they report he did enjoy practising a particular throw that involved him pressing his groin into his young sparring partners. It transpires that Peter Jaconelli was well known for more than being the wealthy businessman and prominent local politician who appeared on the town’s tourism posters sporting a knotted handkerchief on his head.
Scarborough seafront was a magnet for young people, especially runaways and strays, and Jaconelli’s ice-cream parlour on the front employed scores of them over the years. Its proprietor was rumoured to be a member of a group of older men known locally as ‘The Club’. It was a set that was said to include Jimmy Savile and his old pal and running mate, the amusement arcade owner Jimmy Corrigan, now dead. Some allege The Club’s members attended sex parties for which local youngsters were procured.
In February 2013, a former member of the Ippon judo club and teenage employee at Jaconelli’s ice-cream parlour wrote to the chief executive officer of Scarborough Borough Council to demand the former mayor be stripped of his title of Alderman of the Borough. The letter, published on the independent local news website Real Whitby, stated that Jaconelli, who died in 1999 having served almost 30 years on the town’s council, ‘was a predatory paedophile who preyed on local children’.2 Councillor Geoff Evans supported the claim, confirming that Jaconelli sexually abused children, and propositioned him as a 14-year-old. Evans went further, suggesting that Jaconelli only escaped prosecution because of his ‘political connections with the Conservative Party and the police’.
In late September 1972, Jimmy Savile organised a second trip for patients from Rampton to Scarborough. This time twelve patients and nine staff joined him on a special train from Retford. The official report, which is brief to the point of being curso
ry, states, ‘During this trip, patients visited the amusements, the zoo and met The Duchess again.’
Jimmy Savile had by now been given his own lodgings at Broadmoor – a disused attic above two offices – and his own set of keys.3 Each week after recording Top of the Pops, he drove to the maximum-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, let himself in and then sat with the patients to watch the show. He claimed that one wall in the TV room was decorated entirely with his photographs, something that baffled visiting MPs and ‘bigwigs’.4
Rampton was opened in 1912 as an overflow for patients from Broadmoor, and as at its sister hospital, one of four ‘special hospitals’ in the UK, Savile claimed, ‘[the staff and patients] stand for me the same’.5 He described how when he visited, ‘the sub-normal patients come and hang off me like presents off a Christmas tree. I gather up great armfuls of them. I have got a great way with sub-normals.’6
In a newspaper article, Savile publicly commended Rampton’s nurses for being ‘only too ready for unpaid off-duty trips if it helps its sub-normal’7 before going on to recount how in September 1972 they had visited the zoo, owned by one of his friends, an amusement arcade owned by Jimmy Corrigan, and a seafood café owned by Peter Jaconelli. The latter was specially emptied for the occasion and is where Agnes Savile joined the party.
A couple of months later, Savile again waxed lyrical about the patients he was given access to at the two high-security hospitals: ‘They are people of incredible tenderness and affection,’ he wrote. ‘They can sit by you and stroke your face with a tenderness you could write beautiful poetry about. Then along can come an electric storm in the brain and the same hand that strokes you can grip you like iron. But they are essentially innocent, and when I say that I love them, the mothers of these boys know exactly what I mean.’
It is not too far-fetched to expect the police in Scarborough to have been informed that Jimmy Savile was escorting patients from a secure psychiatric hospital to the town, and details supplied of their itinerary. Yet when the allegations against Savile spewed forth in late September and October 2012, North Yorkshire Police stated it had ‘carried out extensive searches of force records which did not reveal a local connection’. This despite the fact Jimmy Savile had not only been interviewed and photographed on numerous occasions at the residence he’d owned in the town since the 1960s, but had been awarded the Freedom of the Borough of Scarborough in 2005, before being buried in a local cemetery after one of the most highly publicised funerals in memory, one that had seen his funeral cortège proceed along the Foreshore in front of crowds marshalled by members of the North Yorkshire Police.