In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  Savile later told me that Lucas had been sleeping rough under Bournemouth pier when he walked into the Maison Royale nightclub and asked for a job, something that Lucas insists is not true. On that morning in central London Lucas explained he began working for Savile in Bournemouth and never stopped. He was a trustee of both Savile’s charitable trusts and clearly a member of one of Savile’s teams, the small groups of people he could call on in the places he variously called home.

  I decided to ask Lucas about how Savile had been handed the reins of the Maison Royale. Savile had told me that the owners had called him out of the blue and made an offer he ‘could not refuse’. Three years later, when his consultancy deal came to an end, he claimed to have spectacularly transformed the fortunes of the failing venture.

  It was not exactly how Lucas remembered it, though. Instead, he shook his head and commented what a sad story it was: the owner of the Maison Royale being found dead in his swimming pool a couple of weeks after Jimmy took over.

  I began to wonder whether perhaps the great secret lurking behind the impenetrable façade of Jimmy Savile was that he had been responsible for a death, or worse still, he had killed someone himself. The way he talked about the summary justice meted out to those who caused trouble in his dancehalls, of his pride in having former Sonderkommandos under his command, and now the troubling image of a body in a swimming pool all contributed to the darkening cloud of doubt in my mind.

  Some time later I asked Savile about what Lucas had said. He didn’t blink: ‘He fell on his sword, poor bastard.’

  He quickly changed the subject, insisting that Luke Lucas was one of the few people who listened to his advice and acted on it. ‘Now he’s a multi-millionaire and head of one of the biggest security firms in the country,’ said Savile, looking smug. He told me again about how he had turned around the fortunes of the Bournemouth complex before getting out after three years. When I asked why, he said it was because the directors thought they could make more money without him. ‘Six weeks later the place was completely empty.’ Beyond the cigar, a low cackle swilled in the back of his throat.

  I asked Savile what sort of boss he thought he was. ‘Iron fist in a velvet glove. I could stroke your cheek but I could also knock your block off.’ I did not doubt that he was, and certainly had been, a hard bastard. ‘Ah ha, but I was a clever fighter,’ he replied. ‘I knew all the big villains but they knew never to mess with me.’

  Then he was off again, veering into a story about a businessman he knew who made washing machines. This man came to seek Savile’s advice about an offer for a big money takeover of his company. The advice wasn’t heeded and the businessman ended up broke. ‘Some people collect butterflies. Some people collect Georgian brooches. I collect money,’ Savile sighed.

  So how much was he worth? ‘Fifty million, give or take a few quid.’

  Since Jimmy Savile’s death, I have tried to get Luke Lucas to elaborate on his relationship with Savile but he has consistently refused to comment about his friend. ‘I did not discuss Jim at the height of his popularity,’ he says, ‘and nor will I now.’

  54. RUNNERS ARE JUNKIES

  If the opening of the National Spinal Injuries Centre represented Jimmy Savile’s greatest triumph, the moment that he reached the apex of his fame and popularity, it also left a void. The charity appeal closed immediately after the centre opened, even though donations continued to pour into the coffers of the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust. It left the man who had led the campaign casting around for alternative ways to expend his considerable energies.

  His response was to fill the hole with physical exercise. The importance that long-distance running assumed in Savile’s day-to-day existence cannot be underestimated. Having cycled and wrestled competitively, and pushed himself beyond normal limits in earning an honorary Green Beret, he was still consumed by the need to distance himself from the sickly child and bed-bound invalid of his distant past. Running began as a hobby but turned into an obsession, to the extent that one journalist theorised that in ‘its movement and essential isolation, he has found the true expression of his personality’.1

  In 1983 Jimmy Savile ran two full marathons and five half marathons or shorter distance races. In 1984, this increased to five full marathons and four half marathons. A year later, by which time he was approaching his 59th birthday, he completed no fewer than nine full marathons and nine half marathons. In 1986, he took part in the London Marathon for the sixth straight year and managed an additional 13 half marathons. By 1987, the drive to prove himself and keep old age at bay was manifested in five full marathons and 13 half marathons. ‘He’s addicted, and it’s getting worse,’ said Janet Rowe, his secretary at Stoke Mandeville.2

  In training, Savile regularly clocked up over 100 miles each month, with his daily mileage being recorded faithfully in his notebooks. The ad hoc running club of friends and acquaintances joined him on weekend slogs up the Yorkshire Dales and at the big events where they acted as his ‘minders’. Members of this club included Jimmy Corrigan and Alan Franey.

  Sometimes Savile’s thirst for physical exercise was such that he’d jog on the spot while home alone watching television. On other occasions, he’d think nothing of setting off on a 10-mile run to a favourite transport café with only the money for a cup of tea in his pocket. He’d then run the 10 miles back again.

  He relished the belief that people continued to underestimate him, and savoured the feeling of bloody-minded pride when he proved them wrong. The pay was good too; he charged upwards of £10,000 to wear a company’s logo on his running vest because he knew that the cameras would be on him whenever he was in the field.

  But this neurotic hammering of the tarmac was about more than simply cash and egotism. For someone who had publicly railed against the damage caused by drink and drugs, despite what one member of the Manchester City Police says about his fondness for cannabis in the Sixties, in running Jimmy Savile finally discovered his own narcotic of choice: ‘It’s an amazing feeling and once you’ve tasted it nothing else will do,’ he said before the 1986 London Marathon, ‘… the excitement of that fantastic fitness feeling … is a powerful drug. Withdrawal symptoms are acute.’3

  He was interested enough to attend a private medical lecture on the impact all this exercise was having on his physiology. There, he learned how the body’s receptors produced tiny quantities of opiates when pain and fatigue set in. His conclusion was ‘all marathon runners are junkies’, and after three or four hours of pounding the roads ‘we are all drugged up to the eyeballs because our receptors in the areas of pain have demanded this self-manufactured anaesthetic’.4

  After fixing it for the 1986 race to be routed up the Mall, Jimmy Savile was rewarded with a lifetime entry into the London Marathon. He became a regular feature of the television coverage, waggling his cigar at the start and the finish, grinding ever forward surrounded by a phalanx of running pals, and waving to the crowds who cheered him every step of the way. After finishing the 1986 race he even popped into the palace for a shower and a cup of tea with the Queen. ‘This man Savile has the keys to so many doors,’ said marathon organiser John Disley, shaking his head in wonder. ‘I just don’t know how he does it.’5

  A year later, Jimmy Savile offered a rare glimpse into his mind-set as he dragged his ageing body around the 26.2-mile course. ‘At times I feel like strangling every other competitor in the race,’ he confessed. ‘I mean really, truly murdering them. You hate them for being there, you hate yourself for being there, you hate the organisers, the marshals, the spectators, the whole damn shooting match. It happens because your body chemistry gets in a mess because of the fatigue. Then as soon as you cross the finish line, choirs of angels start to sing in your head. You are in love with the world and everyone in it. You weep and laugh at the same time. You want to throw your arms around strangers and hug them.’6

  He was in no fit state to do anything of the sort after crossing the finishing line a
t Westminster Bridge in 1987. On completing the course in three hours and forty-two minutes, a full half an hour faster than his previous year’s time, witnesses reported that Savile ‘was completely out of it – he did not know where he was’.7 He’d had to be carried along by his minders for the last few miles of the race. It turned out that he had fallen asleep on the roof of his London flat a few days before, and was suffering from sunstroke.

  The narrow focus he now applied to his running was, though, much more than a last-ditch attempt to preserve his fading youth. It was, in effect, a safety valve – and one that seemed to be having the desired effect. After the prolific nature of his offending in the Seventies, the number of alleged offences dating from the early 1980s suggests that he was gradually bringing his deviant behaviour under control: two in 1983, and one each in 1984 and 1985.8 Sadly, it was but a blip.

  *

  Jim’ll Fix It celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1985. Along with his Sunday afternoon radio show and sporadic appearances on Top of the Pops, it ensured Jimmy Savile remained a familiar landmark in the cultural landscape of Britain. That said, his profile was most definitely diminishing.

  The contract for advertising British Rail, a deal that had earned him around half a million pounds, was not renewed as the business was divided up between a number of different agencies. Jim O’Brien, BR’s joint managing director, said the ‘Age of the Train’ had done a great deal to raise the image of rail travel but it made people think the railways were in ‘a state of decline’. The same could be said for the man to whom Sir Peter Parker awarded a gold ticket, allowing him to travel first class on any route on the network.

  Savile could be quietly satisfied that among those that really mattered he was now regarded as something more than simply an oddball entertainer. He was moving into the final, most powerful stage of his career, assuming the guise of an elder statesman. At a gathering of Health Service officials at Highgrove House, Prince Charles introduced him as ‘my health adviser, Jimmy Savile’.9

  Stoke Mandeville, where he stayed overnight and had a small suite of rooms, became the nearest thing he had to an office. He felt no compunction about voicing his opposition when his former allies within the Health Service published proposals to charge hospital charities for the use of NHS staff in administering fund-raising schemes. When a shortage of nurses resulted in the closure of beds at the centre he had built and continued to fund through his trust, Savile reacted by subsidising a recruitment drive. No decision, other than medical, was taken at the NSIC at Stoke Mandeville without his say-so. If a new piece of equipment was required, Jimmy Savile signed the cheque.

  He even revealed the appeal had allowed him to foster closer relations with the police. When officers were informed of conmen masquerading as fund-raisers, they informed Jimmy Savile and waited for his decision on what to do next. ‘The law came to me because they didn’t want to bring problems to my charity,’ he explained. ‘They were very pleased when I gave them my answer … “Nick [them] now.”’10 Among the hundreds of items in the auction of his belongings in the summer of 2012 was an ornamental lighter with the inscription: ‘To Jimmy Savile. From all his friends at the Fraud Squad.’

  The Spinal Injuries Centre that he referred to as ‘Jimmy Savile’s country club’, assumed a more significant place in his world. Rather than being another medal on his lapel, or the biggest trophy in his cabinet, Stoke Mandeville was a place he could go to replenish himself. ‘I can’t just cut it off like a guillotine,’11 he admitted after the frenetic period of the fund-raising had passed. ‘It’s not a bad thing to spend a weekend surrounded by lovely patients who’ve got plenty of time to talk.’12

  On another occasion he talked about ‘what a great scene’ Stoke Mandeville represented: ‘Just right for an old dance hall manager like me, who’s used to being up all hours … Where else can you find a captive audience of 1,000 people in need of a laugh and a joke?’13

  Savile particularly liked to prowl the wards at night, looking for sleepless patients who would provide such a captive audience. Janet Cope told me that although he was disliked in the main hospital, Savile would regularly wander down to the gynaecological ward. ‘He would say “I’m going down to see my ladies …”. He thought it was a laugh because bearing in mind what they’d all had done, they couldn’t have children. Jim hated children.’ For his part, Savile insisted that his only motivation was to ‘take away some of the pain’.

  In October 1984, that pain arrived courtesy of the Provisional IRA. Five people were killed and thirty-one injured when a bomb detonated at Brighton’s Grand Hotel during the Conservative Party conference. The device went off at 3 a.m.; its target was the prime minister. Thatcher escaped unhurt but one of her closest allies, Trade and Industry Minister Norman Tebbit, was carried from the rubble on a stretcher having fallen through four floors of the ruined building. His wife Margaret, who was in bed alongside him at the time of the explosion, was paralysed in the fall. They were both taken to Stoke Mandeville.

  Nearly 30 years after the blast that changed their lives, and seven months on from the allegations that destroyed Jimmy Savile’s reputation, Tebbit shared his recollections of the man he had told to ‘bugger off’ because he made him laugh so much that his broken ribs were hurting. ‘I’ve got no doubt Jimmy Savile was a very odd fellow, and I’m pretty sure he was in breach of the law on a number of matters,’ said Lord Tebbit. ‘But I do not know that it’s possible, 40 years on, to do justice in the sense of knowing just how many of those allegations are complete and true. Jimmy did a great deal of good, as well as wrong. And in anybody’s life, you have to look at both sides of the ledger.’

  Tebbit admitted that he always had ‘worries about Jimmy’. When asked what he suspected Savile might have been up to in his private life, he replied, ‘I would not have been surprised to find he was having homosexual relationships with young people.’ His wife confirmed that she felt he ‘had a homosexual air about him’.14

  The Tebbits were not alone in harbouring such doubts. Thatcher was determined her friend, a man who embodied her thinking on how the NHS should be financed and who averted the potential embarrassment of the country’s main spinal injuries unit being forced to close, should be rewarded. In the summer of 1984, she refocused her attention on securing him a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours list. Once again she was left disappointed.

  In a letter dated 1 November and addressed to Thatcher’s private secretary Robin Butler, Sir Robert Armstrong reiterated the ‘continuing misgivings’ of the committee, explaining this time that their view ‘had shifted’.

  ‘I acknowledge both the value of his work at Stoke Mandeville and the new public awareness of what has been done. But we remain worried. It is not just the interview and reports in the Sun and elsewhere in the spring of 1983, though they would, I feel, be quickly recalled. Fears have been expressed that Mr Savile might not be able to refrain from exploiting a knighthood in a way which brought the honours system into disrepute.’15 Perhaps of greater significance is the fact that Armstrong added, ‘The lapse of time has served only to strengthen the doubts’; doubts, he said, that ‘were strongly felt’.

  Thatcher was not to be deterred, and yet the response was the same in 1985. When a further request was then turned down in November of 1986,16 Thatcher’s new private secretary, Nigel Wicks, wrote to Armstrong on her behalf, stressing she was ‘most disappointed’ with the decision. ‘She wonders how many more times his name is to be pushed aside, especially in view of all the great work he has done for Stoke Mandeville. She would therefore like you to consider further the inclusion of his name in this list.’

  For all those who expressed misgivings about Jimmy Savile, or who privately recoiled at the way he talked about his sex life, kissed up the arms of young female patients, whispered suggestions in their ears, and worse, they were outnumbered by those at the National Spinal Injuries Centre who remained devoted to their main benefactor. Dr Isaac Nuseibeh, a consultant
spinal surgeon at the NSIC, had known Savile since 1973 and confessed that when he first met him he thought his interest ‘was a gimmick – to help himself’. Nuseibeh’s opinion had changed, though, to the extent that he waxed lyrical about the happiness he spread, describing him as ‘a super humanitarian’.17

  In 1987, Jimmy Savile paid for a seven-year-old Palestinian boy who had been shot and injured in a Beirut refugee camp to be flown to Stoke Mandeville for treatment. He also fixed it for Princess Diana to visit the hospital to unveil a £750,000 body scanner paid for by his trust. When Diana arrived, he opened his tracksuit to reveal a T-shirt bearing the slogan ‘For Sale’, at which she roared with laughter before giving him a playful slap. ‘Princess Diana was fond of Jim,’ recalls Janet Cope. ‘She’d walk round the wards and then go off for a private chat with him.’18 It was during these chats that Savile is understood to have nurtured Diana’s interest in the work being done at the centre.

  Cope also told me that Diana wrote to Savile regularly. When I asked her what the letters said, she replied they were ‘along the lines of “it was so lovely to talk to you, I feel so much better now. Thank you for your advice, I know where you are when I need you.”’

  Jimmy Savile was sufficiently confident in his standing with senior royals to dispense with protocol. He greeted Prince Philip with his familiar, ‘Hello, boss’ at a Variety Club of Great Britain luncheon, before making him laugh by revealing he had a cigar tucked in his sock. It was something Prince Philip affectionately referred to in his speech.

  ‘It could be misconstrued if I said he was a great friend,’ Savile confessed, ‘but there is no doubt that we have a great rapport. The rapport is the attraction of opposites and we have amazing fun together.’19 Savile also discussed his unusually close relationship with the prime minister, alluding to the secret of his success with those in positions of power. ‘Instinct means I behave differently with different people,’ he said. ‘If I am having a bit of fun with people at the top end of the scale, I’m always careful not to get into any bother. I’m also a specialist in minding my own business.’