In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  ‘In the months leading up to that point I had been forced to think about my health problems more and more often,’ he explained. ‘My stamina was decreasing, and part way through runs or uphill climbs I’d be out of breath and often unable to complete them. I knew something was wrong and my body was letting me know it was getting worse.’

  He contacted Hall and arranged a visit to Killingbeck Hospital where he underwent a series of tests. Hall’s radical new treatment was not a suitable course of therapy in his case but a relationship nevertheless developed between the two men, and Savile decided to put himself in the young consultant’s hands.

  He only told one friend, his old cycling pal Dave Dalmour, that he was going into hospital, and even then he didn’t say what it was for. They had stopped off en route at one of his favourite cafés for a bacon sandwich washed down with a cigar.

  When the time came to be wheeled down to the operating theatre, Jimmy Savile maintained the façade of supreme confidence: cracking jokes with the porters as he went. But the truth was he was scared. He insisted on wearing his Royal Marines Green Beret before the surgery, and instructed Hall to place it back on his head before he woke up.

  The operation took three hours, and was conducted by the surgeon Kevin Watterson who was assisted by Hall. After being put under, Savile was wired up to heart and lung machines and his chest was opened along the breastbone using a circular saw. Three incisions were made in his left leg, through which a vein was removed. This vein was then cut into four pieces and stitched onto the arteries at the point of the blockages.

  Afterwards, he was taken back to the ward where he was attached to an ECG machine and ventilator. He was not taken to the high dependency unit because it was thought he might disturb the other patients. It proved to be a wise decision. ‘The first thing I remember when I came round,’ he said, ‘was a nurse leaning over me with her ear to my mouth and asking if I was alright,’2 And Savile’s first reaction to discovering that he had made it and was still alive? He reached up and grabbed the nurse’s breast. The incident was duly hushed up.

  Within five days he started exercising and after six was allowed to go home. He left the hospital in running shorts and cap, waving to the battery of press photographers and film crews waiting outside. Dave Dalmour picked him up in the Rolls-Royce and they stopped off at the same café for a bacon sandwich on the way back to the flat overlooking Roundhay Park. When news broke of his operation, messages from well-wishers had flooded into the hospital. They included personal calls from Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

  Being sawn in half, as he liked to describe it, was perhaps the most serious setback of his retirement, but it was by no means the only one. Indeed, Jimmy Savile’s twilight years were to be plagued by problems of his own making.

  In 1994, three years earlier, two former pupils at Duncroft School had gone to the Sunday Mirror with their accounts of being sexually assaulted by the star in the 1970s. Paul Connew, the newspaper’s editor at the time, said he believed the women. But he decided not to publish because they both insisted on remaining anonymous and he feared losing a costly defamation case. ‘A star-struck jury would have been impressed by Savile’s protestations and the fact that we were actually not producing two frightened women in the witness box,’3 he told a lecture audience in London in the summer of 2013.

  ‘In truth, at the time, post-Maxwell, the Sunday Mirror had limited resources [and] we were having to lose staff,’ Connew continued. ‘We just didn’t have the resources or the evidence to mount an investigation. You couldn’t [use] a child of the age that Savile was seen to prefer and you couldn’t find a journalist who would fit that bill.’

  There is no question that Jimmy Savile would have sued. In his dotage, his lawyers were kept increasingly busy firing off letters to those their client saw as launching attacks on his reputation, challenging his control or conspiring to bring about his downfall.

  The Christmas after the Sunday Mirror had thought better of exposing him, Biddle & Co. send a strongly worded letter to the BBC to explain that their client was seeking ‘substantial damages’ after Chris Morris announced Jimmy Savile’s death on his Radio 1 show. Six months earlier, the satirist had read out a similar spoof obituary for Michael Heseltine.

  The publicity surrounding Savile’s heart operation stirred the deeply unpleasant memories carried by the woman, now in her early thirties, who he had raped in the television room at Stoke Mandeville when she was 12 years old.

  ‘As I matured I came to know that Savile was a national hero,’ she said, ‘someone who was held in high esteem by society. And this sickened me. During the summer of 1997, I was going through a low period following the death of my father and I began to dwell on what Savile had done to me. I therefore decided that I wanted to speak out,’ she says.

  She wrote a letter to Savile’s secretary Janet Cope: ‘Dear Janet. In 1977 Jimmy Savile raped me.’ She included her telephone number, mobile number and address. ‘I took the letter by hand to Stoke Mandeville Hospital,’ she said, ‘and I asked where Savile’s office was. I was given the directions and I went to the office. No one was there so I put the letter in what I believed to be his secretary’s in-tray. I was very disappointed not to receive a response.’

  After a week, the woman decided to try again, writing a second letter identical to the first. Once more, she took the letter by hand to the hospital and left it in an in-tray in Savile’s office. ‘Again I received no response to the letter,’ she reported.

  Finally, she decided to send a letter to Savile himself. The letter started with the words, ‘You raped me in 1977’, and again she provided her name, telephone number and home address. This time, the woman chose a framed picture of a dog and a cat and pushed the letter into the back of the frame. She then wrapped it up to make it look like a present, and took it to the same office. ‘On this occasion,’ she recalled, ‘there was a lady sitting in the office when I arrived. I told her I had a present for Savile and she told me to put it on a filing cabinet that was situated next to a fax machine.’

  There was no response. ‘I feel very let down by Janet Rowe [who had remarried by this time and become Janet Cope],’ said the woman. ‘I felt sure she, as his secretary, would have read my letters.’ (In 2012, the woman maintains she Googled the name Janet Rowe and saw a photograph of Savile’s secretary: ‘This was indeed the woman I spoke to on the third occasion that I visited his office at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.’)

  Janet Cope confirmed to me that she answered all mail addressed to Jimmy Savile at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. She said there were ‘a lot of crank letters but we just chucked them in the bin’. Most were begging letters, she insisted, and she maintained that she never saw anything sinister or that gave her cause for concern.

  When I repeated the allegation made by the woman who says she was raped as a 12-year-old, and asked whether Cope had any recollection of such a letter, she replied, ‘No, none whatsoever.’ I then asked her whether if she had, she would have dismissed it as a crank letter. ‘I can’t even imagine what I would do … in that position,’ Cope replied. ‘Instinct would be to tear it up and chuck it away because it was a crank. But I never received anything like that, ever.’

  Cope refuses to believe that Jimmy Savile was guilty of the hundreds of allegations made against him, even though she was forced to write a letter of her own, this one containing a grovelling apology to the man she had idolised and served so loyally. In 1999, Jimmy Savile had instructed Biddle & Co., his firm of solicitors, to seek damages from his former secretary following an interview she had given to a national newspaper in which she’d expressed her dismay and deep sadness at being unceremoniously sacked after 28 years of loyal service.4

  Since first meeting Savile at Stoke Mandeville in 1971, Cope had come to regard herself as a cross between surrogate mother and wife. As well as dealing with all his correspondence, which increased dramatically during the campaign to build the National Spinal Injuries Centre, she
made herself available on the phone to him every day. She’d cleaned his quarters at the hospital, done his laundry and regularly invited him to her home for his favourite meal of minced beef and mashed potatoes. He rarely thanked her for these acts of quiet generosity, but she put up with his thoughtlessness all the same. She liked to joke that with them, it was a case of ‘till death do us part’.

  Speaking to the newspaper reporter in her fastidiously neat bungalow, Cope recalled how Jimmy Savile had become ‘the man in her life’ after her first husband died of cancer. When she married for a second time in 1990, Savile had given her away and even paid for the reception. But then quite suddenly, in early 1999, he terminated the relationship in the most callous manner.

  Cope had retired from the NHS two years earlier and been made a member of staff on the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust. ‘He was having a lunch meeting with consultants and a new trustee,’ she said of the day she found out her services were no longer required. ‘The connecting door to his room was open. I’d taken in some sandwiches and sat on the sofa. Jimmy put his feet up on the desk and declared, ‘I’m going to take it easy now. I’m letting these new people take over.’ Then, motioning at Cope, Savile had said, ‘And she’s out.’

  Other than for taking the uncharacteristic step of standing up to him over his decision to sack two maintenance men, Cope claimed to have no understanding of why he had suddenly cut her adrift. She said that she never saw him again. She heard from his solicitors though, who called seeking a full retraction and apology for what their client considered to be ‘false and damaging allegations’.

  Mavis Price from Leeds General Infirmary, the wife of the consultant cardiologist who first diagnosed Jimmy Savile’s heart problems, subsequently took over the day-to-day administration of his life.

  *

  Just over two weeks after Jimmy Savile emerged from his heart operation, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. He was invited to the funeral service at Westminster Abbey but was too weak to attend.

  In our final interview, I asked Savile again about his relationships with the royals. ‘What you’ve got to realise is how many books have been written about them by people who don’t really know them,’ he said. ‘Paul Burrell and people like that.’ I put it to him that having worked as Diana’s butler for ten years, Burrell must have surely known her better than most.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ said Savile, suddenly changing his tune. ‘I helped him get out of his court case.’ In 2002, Burrell was charged with the theft of items belonging to the Princess of Wales but the trial collapsed when it emerged the Queen had spoken to him and a public interest immunity certificate was presented to the court. ‘That was something else,’ smiled Savile, leaning back in his chair, eyes tightly closed as if mentally picturing the next brick being laid on the wall.

  ‘Nobody could get him off the hook. The entire world had him on the hook. He fell out with [Diana’s] trustees … Paul was very upset about this and because he was so upset, he was a danger, you see. So they invented this thing that he’d half-inched some of her gear, which he hadn’t.’ (In April 2014, Janet Cope showed me a 1998 letter from Paul Burrell in which Diana’s former butler said how much he was looking forward to ‘spending some quality time with Jimmy. I need some sound and wise advice from him as he always knows the right answer.’)

  Savile pointed to my tape recorder and told me to turn it off. It was the only time in all our meetings that he requested me to do this. He then proceeded to explain how he’d collected all the soft toys that had been left by mourners at the gates of Kensington Palace. He’d taken them away and had them laundered. He said they were now in bags at his lock-up at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. It’s a story that Janet Cope insists was exaggerated.

  He then went on to tell me a little about the time in 1999 when Prince Charles came for lunch at the three-bedroomed cottage he’d recently bought near Glencoe. Savile said he first clapped eyes on the building when he’d cycled through the Highland glen during World War II. More than half a century later, he bought it, paying the previous owner, the celebrated mountaineer Hamish MacInnes, £125,000 for the privilege.

  When Savile learned the Prince of Wales was to visit the area and present a minibus to a mountain rescue team, he issued his invitation. His friend, Julie Ferguson, was asked to source local salmon, lamb and a bottle of Laphroaig whisky, which he knew the prince liked.

  Special Branch arrived ahead of the prince to conduct a sweep of the building, before Jimmy Savile greeted his special guest. He was wearing a kilt of Lochaber tartan, a green military-style shirt and his Royal Marines Green Beret. Ferguson and two friends acted as waitresses, each in monogrammed aprons bearing the letters ‘H’, ‘R’ and ‘H’ respectively – a special touch Savile was especially pleased with. They served Savile and his guest the lamb and the salmon, which, Ferguson later revealed, had been obtained from a local poacher.

  Savile paused for a moment to dig out a photograph of him and Prince Charles in the local post office, a photo opportunity that a royal aide confirms Savile orchestrated. ‘He’d never been in a post office in his life so I took him to where I drew my pension,’ Savile chuckled. ‘[Charles] said, “Does this happen very often?” And I said, “Yeah, every week.”’

  I asked him whether it was true that he had been a mentor to Charles, as his first wife had once said. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But the new mentor has taken over now, you see: Camilla. I’m quite pleased not to be the mentor and I’m quite happy to be a friend because it’s less restricting.’

  Did he see anything of Prince William and Prince Harry? ‘No,’ said Savile. ‘They know me and know of me, and they know that I occupy a very strange place in the life of their mother and the life of their father. And what they can’t work out is why I’m so different. I don’t bother with them, I keep my distance, but they know if push comes to shove that I could be as useful to them as I was to their mum and to their dad.’

  So it was just as Louis Mountbatten had said: ‘If there’s a problem, Jim can fix it’? ‘Yes, yes,’ he replied.

  What he could not seem to fix, however, were the persistent rumours that continued to dog every interview and now threatened to eclipse the standing he had acquired as a philanthropist, businessman and friend to the nation.

  In late 1999, filming began on a one-off documentary which followed the filmmaker and journalist Louis Theroux as he attempted to prise off Jimmy Savile’s famously protective outer shield and get to the real man underneath. Theroux is celebrated for his ability to get his subjects to reveal themselves, but with Savile, who he visited in Leeds, Glencoe and Broadmoor (although the footage from the latter did not make it into the final edit), he found it impossible to get his quarry to admit to anything beyond his inherent oddness.

  When Louis Met Jimmy went out on the evening of 13 April 2000 and became an instant talking point for everyone who saw it. It has been voted one of the 50 best British documentaries of all time, chiefly because of the memorable way it depicts what Anthony Clare had discovered nine years earlier: namely that Jimmy Savile took pride in making it impossible to see beyond the towering walls of his self-constructed mythology.

  ‘We can talk about anything,’ proclaimed Savile at the outset. ‘You’ll find out how tricky I am.’ The duelling with Theroux was an exercise in control, and one that he seemed to relish. But as the filmmaker fought against the fast-running tide of Savile’s word-for-word repetition of stories he had told thousands of times to thousands of different people, what emerged was a picture of a man who simply refused to open up for anyone.

  ‘I was always aware he was someone with secrets and I think he enjoyed having those secrets,’ Theroux told me. ‘I think he enjoyed being perceived as someone with secrets. He wanted it known that he had secrets because he knew that intrigued people. He was constantly dropping dark hints that there was more to him than you knew.’

  Theroux recalled one evening they spent together in Leeds whi
ch was not recorded for posterity. ‘I was trying to get that little morsel of something that might lead me to some greater understanding,’ he said. ‘As a conversational opener I asked him whether he had been following the Myra Hindley story. I think she was dying of cancer at the time. He just said, “I am the Myra Hindley story.” And he left it at that. I didn’t even want to gratify that with a follow-up question because I knew he would just shut it down. But it was a typical Jimmy-ism where, I now think, he was suggesting that he either knew her better than anyone or that he embodied the darker impulses that she had acted out.’

  In the face of Theroux’s dogged refusal to give up, Savile at one point hissed, ‘You can make it as negative as you like. See you in court. I’ll take a few quid off you the same as I’ll take a few quid off anybody.’

  Towards the end of the documentary, as they drove back from Scotland to Leeds, Theroux asked Savile about the rumours he had sex with underage girls, and pressed him on why he insisted he hated children. ‘We live in a very funny world,’ he reasoned, ‘and it’s easier for me as a single man to say, “I don’t like children” because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt.’

  Theroux responded by asking him whether this was a form of self-defence against accusations that he was a paedophile.

  ‘How do they know if I am or not?’ Savile shot back. ‘How does anybody know whether I am?’ He stated again this was his policy, nothing was going to change it, and that ‘it worked like a dream’.

  After the film came out, Savile tried to laugh it off, describing it as ‘an exposé with nothing to expose’.5 While privately he might have been thrilled at having won the duel with his interrogator, he cannot fail to have been concerned about the light the film had shown him in.

  For now, despite his royal connections and continued fund-raising activities – as patron of the Leeds Institute for Minimally Invasive Technology; supporting a DNA library to explore genetic links to heart disease; backing a Centre for Adolescent Rehabilitation run by an old contact from the Royal Marines; giving £40,000 to fund research into MRSA at Hope Hospital, Manchester – it was the background noise of speculation and gossip that seemed to concern those who still deemed Jimmy Savile worthy of press coverage. And the documentary had done nothing to silence the whispers.