In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  An example of the latter was the case of Graham Young, ‘the teacup poisoner’, who was released from Broadmoor in 1971. Young went on to poison around 70 more people, ensuring the decision to free him sparked intense, vociferous and widespread criticism. Young was eventually sent to Parkhurst, where he eventually died.

  Life for the staff working within the walls was what McGrath’s son describes as ‘a proper, old established English community’. As superintendent, his father set out to reduce the potential for confrontation with the vested interest groups he worked with, and made a point of being accessible during evenings spent in the social club. It was here that Patrick McGrath recalled first meeting Jimmy Savile in or around 1970.

  ‘I walked in the door and there, at the far end of the bar on a padded sofa-type seat with my mum and dad, was a very incongruous figure, instantly recognisable with his platinum blond hair and the cigar as the extroverted figure we were all familiar with from Top of the Pops,’ he said. ‘What I remember from that encounter was that he was behaving like one would expect him to behave. He was loud and making a big fuss of my dad.

  ‘My dad hated that sort of thing but [Savile] was saying what a great man my father was. I had the feeling my father was tolerating his presence because it probably meant that the hospital would get some favourable publicity as a result. He thought it was a bit of waste of time and I think he instinctively disliked the character of Jimmy Savile.’

  Whatever the private views held by Broadmoor’s bespectacled chief superintendent, in an interview for the 1972 documentary The World of Jimmy Savile, Pat McGrath Snr talked of how Savile would arrive in the middle of the night and sit beside the beds of patients who couldn’t sleep. He described Savile as ‘unselfconscious’ and his interest as ‘very real’, and commended the fact that he helped many of Broadmoor’s long-stay patients to ‘feel a connection with the outside world’.

  McGrath’s son looks back now and believes the opportunities for Jimmy Savile’s offending would have been greatly restricted in an environment where patients were kept under close surveillance and heavy gates were locked every few yards. He did say, though, that the hospital’s famous visitor once offered his younger sister a ride in his Rolls-Royce. She was in her early teens at the time, and McGrath clearly remembered his father’s response: ‘Over my dead body.’

  But as McGrath remarked, his father was also convinced that ‘whatever helped break down institutional isolation contributed to rehabilitation’.13 It explains why he was so enthusiastic about encouraging work experience, cultural excursions and family visits for patients. It also might explain why against his better judgement he was willing to tolerate Jimmy Savile, who soon began organising pop concerts and weekly disco nights at Broadmoor, as well as bringing guests with him when he arrived on a Wednesday evening after recording Top of the Pops. On one occasion, he arrived accompanied by two members of Pan’s People.

  Within 18 months or so of Jimmy Savile arriving at Broadmoor on the invitation of members of ‘NUTTERS INC’, as per the plaque that he kept as a memento, he was claiming that his work at the hospital differed from the role he performed at Leeds General Infirmary. ‘It’s not that sort of place,’14 he said of the Berkshire hospital, although it is significant that he was already boasting about having access to all the wings inside Broadmoor.

  In those early days, he would park his motor caravan in the grounds, just as he did on his visits to Rampton. Rumours quickly started circulating among the staff. In October 2012, the daughter of a principal nursing officer told one newspaper that Savile took ‘trusted patients’ out for rides in his car and ‘liked to have his way’ with young women visiting relatives. She said he would stand at the main gate ‘in his swimming trunks, gold chain and sunglasses’ and entice them into his motor home.15

  Naomi (not her real name) met Jimmy Savile as a teenager. Her mother was a journalist for a local paper who covered Savile’s regular visits to the hospital. In 1975, Savile invited Naomi and a friend to watch an episode of Top of the Pops being recorded at Television Centre in London. Savile then asked her parents whether Naomi could come to watch him at work on his radio show at Broadcasting House. They agreed, chiefly because they considered him to be a family friend but also because their daughter was keen on becoming an actress and they hoped that he might offer her some assistance.

  The teenage girl travelled alone from Surrey and met Savile at his London flat. After the show, they returned to the flat where Naomi claimed he lunged at her and forced his tongue down her throat. When he asked her whether she was enjoying it, the girl said she was not. ‘I think the only reason he stopped when I told him to was because he was worried about my mother and father knowing,’ said Naomi. She told her mother what had happened but said she didn’t seem to grasp how serious it was.

  Former psychiatric nurse Richard Harrison maintains his colleagues were deeply suspicious of Savile because ‘paedophiles gravitated towards him’.16 Another member of staff reported seeing Savile taking a girl of less than 16 to his flat in the grounds, having picked her up at the annual Crowthorne Festival.

  By 1978, Broadmoor had been ‘modernised and liberalised’, as Patrick McGrath recalls. Block 6 had become Monmouth House, the women’s block had been renamed York House and the most dangerous patients were now housed in Norfolk House. New clinical paradigms were being discussed which led to the nursing staff becoming more militant in their response to change.

  Jimmy Savile had not only been given his own small house on the estate, but the use of the hospital’s transport manager, Don Bennett, who claimed the Department of Health gave him double the amount of annual leave so he could chauffeur Savile wherever he needed to go. More significant still is that Savile was now in possession of his own set of keys, claiming that he was allowed to come and go from Broadmoor ‘without let or hindrance’.

  Savile once recalled Dr Pat McGrath asking him why he liked visiting Broadmoor. The answer to the question, he insisted, had come to him only that morning. ‘I had arrived at twenty past two … I drove into the Broadmoor estate and saw the great wooden sign which proclaims “Broadmoor Hospital. Strictly private. No admittance”. But I have the entitlement to drive past that sign, to go in and out. That puts me in an incredibly privileged position.’17

  Entitlement and privilege: these are key words in understanding how Jimmy Savile was given a free rein at the hospitals he frequented.

  Dr Pat McGrath retired in 1981. The role of medical superintendent was divided up among a three-man management team consisting of the medical director, chief nursing officer and administrator. No single figure had any managerial authority over the other two, allowing the Prison Officers’ Association to fill in the managerial vacuum. By 1988 Broadmoor, as the most prominent of Britain’s four special hospitals, had become an outpost cut off from the NHS and the criminal justice system. ‘Utopian indulgences would not bring about change,’ wrote Charles Kaye and Alan Franey, two men who were to be deeply involved in the new order that emerged from the chaos. ‘Deep-rooted attitudes and practices were established realities, thriving on neglect and indifference … In a very real sense the country had the special hospitals it had helped to create.’18

  *

  Edwina Currie recalls a meeting with Jimmy Savile in Leeds in the month of his appointment to the Broadmoor task force. The special hospitals were her responsibility under the auspices of the then health secretary Kenneth Clarke. In her diaries, Currie described Savile’s thoughts on the regime at the Victorian hospital as being ‘intriguing’.

  During their meeting, Savile told her he had discovered millions of pounds missing from budgets. He also highlighted poor use of the hospital’s housing stock, which was monopolised by local families with long associations with Broadmoor. Savile said he suspected some members of staff were inflating their salaries and told Currie he had threatened to pass on information to the tabloid newspapers about any individuals who caused trouble.

  Curri
e believes Savile blackmailed staff in order to stop the Prison Officers’ Association calling a potentially ruinous strike. She said his methods included, ‘going into the office, checking employment records of staff he was targeting and establishing that some of them were up to no good, such as claiming overtime to the tune of £800 a week. He checked accommodation records and found some people occupying them were nothing to do with the hospital but were relatives of staff. I have no doubt that he used a degree of arm-twisting and blackmail to get the staff to do what he wanted. ‘That also suggests to my suspicious mind a modus operandi for other places.’19

  It is now Currie’s view that Savile ‘was finding stuff he could hold over the staff so that if anybody challenged him and said, what are doing in those girls’ rooms, he could say, “Don’t you challenge me. I know you have been overpaying yourself, I know you have been fiddling the books.” And that would mean that people would be much more reluctant to out him or to take any complaints any further.’20

  She claims that she never liked Jimmy Savile but it should be pointed out that her diary entry at the time – ‘Attaboy!’ – sounded an altogether enthusiastic note about the methods he employed.

  Not surprisingly, the staff at Broadmoor took an instant dislike to Jimmy Savile, with some describing how he would walk into secure areas detaining the most dangerous patients in the UK and laugh off their warnings.21 Richard Harrison, who joined Broadmoor as a psychiatric nurse in 1974 and worked there for 30 years, says he and many of his colleagues considered him ‘as a man with a severe personality order and a liking for children’.

  Within a month of assuming control, Savile was at loggerheads with Broadmoor’s 600-strong branch of the Prison Officers’ Association. George Temple, chairman of the POA Broadmoor branch, accused the task force of doing ‘a hatchet job’, insisting ‘they have virtually told around fifteen of our senior nurse managers, people with years of experience, that if they don’t fit in with the new regime they will have to go’.22

  Savile denied the accusations, presumably having threatened those who refused to step into line with exposure in the newspapers. In a subsequent television interview, he reiterated his hard-line stance: those who did not like planned management changes should consider finding a job elsewhere.

  Alan Franey arrived at Broadmoor in October 1988, becoming the seventh member of the task force. He did so in the immediate aftermath of the damning report by the Health Advisory Service Inspectorate. ‘Time is running out for Broadmoor,’ stated the report, before shedding light on ‘an inward looking institution with some very doubtful methods of dealing with disturbed behaviour’.

  The picture it painted was of a regime run on ‘suspicion and fear rather than trust’ in which there was ‘scant regard for human dignity’. Patients were ‘infantilised’ and their rights viewed as a ‘necessary nuisance’. Another of the report’s findings highlighted how ‘the suppression of heterosexual activity has created a situation where homosexuality is implicitly tolerated’.23 Edwina Currie set Franey a target of six weeks to draw up an action plan to implement the 200 and more recommendations contained within the report.

  Fortunately for Franey, he had a major ally in Jimmy Savile, who had already begun ringing around building societies to ask for special mortgage terms for staff. He had also contacted the contractors that built the NSIC at Stoke Mandeville in a bid to solve the chronic delays and overspend in the hospital’s planned building works. He was free to do as he pleased. When asked whether the prime minister had a say in his appointment, Savile replied, ‘Shall we say, if she had been asked I am sure she would not have objected.’24

  In Savile’s eyes, his close ties with Thatcher made him a formidable if not invincible opponent for anyone stupid enough to stand in his way. Her former private secretary Robin Butler had by this time become head of the Home Civil Service and succeeded Sir Robert Armstrong as chairman of the Honours Committee. Thatcher again lobbied for her friend to be knighted, but the outcome was the same: ‘Under the headings Benefactions, we have again considered the name of Mr Jimmy Savile, whom you have of course considered on previous occasions. We have concluded that he should not be recommended.’ Butler referred Thatcher to his predecessor’s correspondence on the matter before again outlining his reasons for turning Savile down.

  ‘Mr Savile’s latest help to the DHSS has been over Broadmoor. None of us would want to denigrate his many services. But my committee and I still fear that his manner of life – on his own confession – has been such that a high award for him would be an unhelpful signal when we are still having to grapple with an AIDS problem which threatens to intensify; and that a knighthood for him would not benefit the honours system in the eyes of the public.’25

  It possibly explains why in early December 1988 the prime minister was so keen to pose for photographers with Jimmy Savile on the front steps of Downing Street. He was there on the pretence of handing over two cheques for £10,000 after conveniently discovering (again) that he had £20,000 left over from his latest fund-raising efforts. ‘I thought if I got the Prime Minister to hand over the money [which went to the Multiple Sclerosis Society and Riding for the Disabled] she would get more recognition than me,’ he said.26 It was an example of toadying and crass opportunism but effective nonetheless. Looked at another way, it was simply a further down payment on the knighthood, which Thatcher now seemed to crave as much as Savile did.

  Less than a month later, it was announced that Jimmy Savile had successfully negotiated with the Home Office and the Department of Health for the movement of 60 patients from Broadmoor, the biggest transfer in the hospital’s 125-year history. ‘We are looking at each case to consider whether there is a more suitable place for them than Broadmoor,’ explained Clifford Graham. ‘It is a gradual process of making [the hospital] more caring without lessening the security.’27

  The Health Advisory Service and MIND both voiced their support for the move, while Professor Michael Morgan, the hospital’s temporary administrator, paid tribute to Jimmy Savile’s unique brand of leadership: ‘Since Jim has taken over, it has enabled me to do things more quickly and taken away a lot of bureaucracy,’ he said.

  Two of the 60 patients to be moved had been sent to Broadmoor for murders, something the tabloid press in particular was up in arms about. ‘Jim Fixes It for 60 Psychos to Go Free’ screamed the headline in the News of the World, followed the next day by ‘STORM AS JIM FIXES IT FOR 60 PSYCHOS’ in the Sun. Jimmy Savile wasted no time in instigating legal proceedings against both papers, for which he received substantial libel damages.

  The tabloids were not the only ones to express their concerns about Savile’s radical new broom. ‘He’s just a frontman,’ grumbled one member of staff, speaking on behalf of colleagues who feared they were being softened up for major job cuts and changes of working practice. ‘It’s who he knows not what he knows.’28

  It was a fair assessment. Thanks in part to the support he now enjoyed from Downing Street, Highgrove House and Whitehall, Jimmy Savile was able to act with impunity. He had one friend, Alan Franey, on the task force, and had his sights set on getting other members of his inner circle involved in the future. Answering only to Clifford Graham, who remained a staunch admirer, and Edwina Currie’s replacement, junior minister Roger Freeman, who was no match for a man who had his opponents running scared, it is little wonder that Savile felt confident enough to pose for a newspaper clutching his set of keys to Broadmoor.

  Having bragged about how the government had brought him in following his success at Stoke Mandeville, Savile, Thatcher’s ‘man on the ground’, showed the press around the hospital’s new wing, newly completed below budget and scheduled for opening in spring 1989. It represented the blueprint for a new Broadmoor that would house far fewer patients. But Savile wasn’t finished there: ‘I am asking the Government to give me a halfway house to run,’ he explained. ‘It will provide all the finishing touches to help our patients get rehabilitated.’29 He add
ed that he hoped to help patients prepare for life on the outside by falling in love, even if sex was still off the agenda within the confines of the hospital. ‘All guys together or all girls together isn’t very healthy. We have got to give our patients some reason to want to be rehabilitated. And falling in love is one of the strongest.’

  Senior civil servants, the press and the unions were all now powerless to stop Jimmy Savile from doing as he pleased – even if the former did, at least, succeed in delaying his knighthood. ‘Nobody can be frightened of me,’ Savile protested. ‘It would be beneath anybody’s dignity to be frightened of someone dressed like this … It is a kind of smokescreen but it is not a gimmick.’30

  53. 50 MILLION, GIVE OR TAKE A FEW QUID

  We were half way across the Bay of Biscay and silence reigned in Jimmy Savile’s cabin. Go on, I told myself, say it. So I did. ‘I want to write a book about you.’

  I knew what his response would be because I had suggested it before. In Scarborough, he had told me about how a tabloid journalist once called him up in the early Seventies and said that because his paper had more cuttings on him than on anyone else, he was going to write a biography. Savile’s response was: ‘No thanks.’ Instead, he wrote As It Happens longhand in a series of exercise books. He said he even negotiated his own publishing deal, before editing and proofing the book himself.

  Nobody would be allowed to apply a different spin to his well-rehearsed version of events. ‘No!’ The tone was always firm and final. ‘If anyone is going to write a book it’s going to be me. Otherwise I’d have to spend the rest of my life explaining how they’d got it all wrong.’ Subject closed.

  Around the time Jimmy was writing As It Happens, he was also running a nightclub complex in Bournemouth. On his trip to Downing Street to collect his Bevin Boy medal from Prime Minister Gordon Brown, he stopped off to have his photo taken outside the Athenaeum Club. While he was doing that, I chatted to his driver, a tall, well-built man who appeared to be in his mid-50s. His name was Luke Lucas.