In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (13 page)

Russell offered a final footnote from the aftermath of his victory in the second Tour of Britain. He was back at work at Ellis Briggs bike builders in Shipley when Jimmy Savile walked into the shop carrying a briefcase. ‘I used to pull his leg a bit,’ Russell recalled. ‘I said to him, “Now then, Jim, let’s have a look at what’s in your briefcase,” because he used to play the part of the suave businessman. He opened his briefcase and all that was in there was his handkerchief.’

14. SMOKESCREEN

I
n January 2012, Helen Deller in the BBC press office was alerted to the fact the
Sunday Mirror
was preparing a story on the axed
Newsnight
investigation into Jimmy Savile. She tried and failed to dissuade the paper from printing it,
¹
and the article appeared on Sunday the 8th. ‘
Newsnight
probe into sex claims against national treasure Sir Jimmy axed by BBC bosses’ blared the headline. Underneath: ‘Programme is scrapped days before Christmas TV tributes’.

The opening ten paragraphs laid out the bald facts of what had happened, although there was no mention of all the ex-Duncroft girls who had been spoken to by
Newsnight
’s reporters. The story then alluded to ‘new reports’ that had surfaced since Savile’s death suggesting he was a recluse who couldn’t stand to be around children.

The article quoted a ‘BBC source’ who had told the
Sunday Mirror
that by interviewing the three women,
Newsnight
hoped to establish the truth of the claims about and details of a 2007 police investigation. ‘But senior BBC executives then halted the investigation,’ it continued. ‘Our source said
Newsnight
reporters were told to scrap it. It clashed with a Boxing Day
Jim’ll Fix It
tribute show hosted by the actor Shane Richie.’

On the day before the story was published, ‘a BBC aide’ also told the
Sunday Mirror
that ‘
Newsnight
were investigating alleged failings within the CPS, and the programme was canned because they did not have enough proof to run the story.’ The lie was now in the public domain.

The full-page story concluded with a further closing of ranks by those close to the dead star. Janet Humble, Savile’s niece, was quoted as saying, ‘It looks like muck-raking. As a family we just wish Sir Jim could be left to rest in peace. He did more good than bad in his life and how many celebrities can say that?’ Stephen Purdew, owner of Champney’s Health Farm and friend for more than 30 years, weighed in with his own rebuttal: ‘Sir Jim was a great man, a legend who should be remembered for all the wonderful things he did for other people.’

That afternoon, Meirion Jones emailed Peter Rippon to say that it sounded like the BBC source was someone who thought they shouldn’t have done the investigation in the first place. The BBC press office was of a different opinion; in other words, that Jones himself was the leak. James Hardy, head of communications for BBC News, seemed to sum up management’s suspicions about
Newsnight
’s investigative reporter when he emailed Deller to say that he was unconcerned by the newspaper story but given the opportunity he would ‘drip poison about Meirion’s suspected role’.
²

The day after the piece ran, I emailed Peter Rippon to say that I had information that could be useful to the
Newsnight
investigation into Jimmy Savile – I had started to find people who had seen and heard of his offending behaviour. He forwarded my email to Meirion Jones with the message: ‘Do you want to have a chat with him? I guess we should stick to just public domain help.’ This email would appear to suggest Rippon was comfortable about Jones speaking to a journalist, even though senior figures within the BBC, including Helen Boaden and Stephen Mitchell, had not sat down with him to get his version of events. This was for the simple reason they considered him to be ‘untrustworthy’.
³

Meirion Jones was still privately furious about Rippon’s decision when I met with him for the first time in February 2012. It was soon after the publication of a story in the
Oldie
by Miles Goslett which revealed the
Newsnight
report contained evidence that Savile abused minors on BBC premises and allegations that
Mark Thompson knew about what a contentious report it was. The story significantly increased what was in the public domain, but Jones still categorically refused to go into the reasons for the report being pulled.

Liz MacKean, it transpires, was equally angry. ‘The BBC immediately began lying, suggesting the story was about the CPS and we’d not stood it up, and not about the thing it was about,’ she says. ‘I challenged Rippon on that. I was thinking that I had contacted 60 people, and I’ve told them we were investigating a story about a celebrity visitor to Duncroft and was there anything they wanted to tell us.

‘But if the BBC is then saying that it was about the police or the CPS, depending on which press office put it out, that makes me a liar, right? It was just outrageous. I was so aware of what [the women] would think. Would they think I was pulling the wool over their eyes? Probably not. [Keri] obviously knew exactly what was happening but it was a very difficult position to be in. The people who make these decisions don’t go out and meet people, they don’t talk to victims, they don’t have anything on the line in terms of trust and that is exactly what they were jeopardising.’

MacKean says she had a ‘very uncomfortable’ conversation with Peter Rippon after the
Sunday Mirror
article ran. ‘His eyes glazed over,’ she says. ‘It was very awkward.’

On 16 January, Miles Goslett had contacted the BBC press office again, this time to ask who had made the decision to axe the report, and when Director General Mark Thompson and the controller of BBC2 had been made aware of it. The BBC refused to comment.

In early February, having tried and failed to get the story picked up by the nationals, Goslett’s piece for the
Oldie
appeared to nail the myth that
Newsnight
’s investigation had been into the police and CPS rather than Jimmy Savile’s activities at Duncroft School and in his dressing room at the BBC. Goslett went on to say that a ‘BBC source’ had told him that the line about it being stopped for editorial reasons was ‘a smokescreen’. The real reasons were it
would compromise the Christmas tribute show. Questions were also asked about whether
Newsnight
had uncovered evidence unknown to the police, and if that evidence had been passed on. ‘The BBC has serious questions to answer,’ Goslett concluded, before warning ‘that the matter is not at an end.’

Peter Rippon’s response did not betray any great anxiety. He emailed Stephen Mitchell and Helen Deller to say, ‘The evidence about BBC premises was anecdotal, second hand and forty years old.’
⁴
When the
Daily Telegraph
followed up by contacting Mark Thompson’s office for comment about whether he was aware of the investigation, Paul Mylrea, the BBC’s director of communications, told them it was being passed to the press office for a response.

After the
Oldie
article was published on 9 February, a number of national newspapers followed up with stories of their own. It was at this point the BBC press office decided it would be helpful to get an official response from Peter Rippon, as
Newsnight
’s editor. ‘The allegations are personally damaging for your credibility as an editor,’ warned Stephen Mitchell. ‘So [it would be] good to put your name [behind] the denial.’
⁵

Rippon emailed Meirion Jones to say he was considering making a formal statement denying the allegations that
Newsnight
had withheld information from the police. He also asked for clarification on whether everything they had was from the same women that had spoken to Surrey Police during its investigation into Savile. Jones replied that it was not: Keri’s testimony was information the police did not have in 2007.

On 10 February, Rippon supplied the BBC press office with a personal statement. ‘It is absolutely untrue that the
Newsnight
investigation was dropped for anything other than editorial reasons. We have been very clear from the start that the piece was not broadcast because we could not establish enough facts to make it a
Newsnight
story. To say otherwise is false and very damaging to the BBC and individuals. To allege that we are withholding evidence from the police is also damaging and false. I note that a
number of newspapers are using the fact we did not broadcast something to put the allegations into the public domain themselves.’

Stephen Mitchell recommended the last line be dropped.

‘I was very mistrustful of the reasons for dropping [the investigation],’ states Liz MacKean, who confronted Rippon again after the
Oldie
ran its story. ‘What I thought was, they don’t care; they’re not interested.’

Soon afterwards, a member of the public contacted Meirion Jones via an email address listed on the
Newsnight
website. The woman explained she was a former BBC employee in the north of England who had witnessed sexual activity between Jimmy Savile and a girl of around 13 or 14 in a BBC dressing room in Yorkshire. Meirion Jones forwarded the email to Mark Williams-Thomas, the freelance child-protection expert who had decided to take on the investigation and was in the process of attempting to get a documentary commissioned by ITV.

MacKean was convinced it was now a case of when, not if, the truth came out. ‘It was obvious that it would come out for no other reason than perhaps [Keri] or one of the others would come forward,’ she argues. ‘We knew … that Mark Williams-Thomas was going to take it elsewhere, with our blessing, because this was a story that needed to be told and the people that wanted to tell it deserved to have it out there.

‘My feelings were variously dismay, anger and resignation. I was very aware of this breach of trust. [It] made me feel extremely uncomfortable. It was obvious to me and Meirion we were the lonely voices. There was a them and us situation.’

Jones and MacKean continued to discuss their grievances in private. ‘I remember saying to [Meirion], “There will be a reckoning.” What’s happened is wrong, particularly in relation to pretending we weren’t looking at what we really were looking at. I don’t know when it will happen, but this is not something that can be kept quiet.’ Meirion Jones agreed. He was very clear about how it would look.

*

Within a month, however, the initial furore surrounding the
Newsnight
investigation into Jimmy Savile had died down. By mid-March, details emerged of how the dead disc jockey had arranged to dispose of his personal fortune. His last will and testament, dated July 2006, put the gross value of his estate at £4,366,178, of which around £3.6 million was earmarked for charity. It was a story that got unanimously positive coverage.

The rest was to be shared out among his family and friends. Eight people, including two couples, were to benefit from the annual interest on a £600,000 trust fund. They included Savile’s nephew Roger Foster and niece Amanda McKenna; Sylvia Nicol, a member of his original fund-raising team at Stoke Mandeville Hospital; Mavis Price, who got to know him through Leeds General Infirmary and went on to manage the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust; Donald Bennett, the former transport manager at Broadmoor Hospital, and his wife Josie; and Roddy and Julie Ferguson, the latter being someone he had befriended in Fort William in 1969 when she was 15.

Julie Ferguson, who wrote the poems on Jimmy Savile’s headstone, recalled first encountering Savile when he climbed Ben Nevis to test a tent in Arctic conditions. She and a friend were invited back to his hotel for a Coca-Cola. She said he was very strict and had high morals when it came to girls: ‘He had a zero tolerance to women behaving badly.’
⁶

Savile also made provision of £1,000 each for a further 18 people in his will. They included members of his Friday Morning Club, trustees of his charitable trusts, his cleaner, two cardiologists from Leeds, companions from his marathon-running days and Sue Hymns. His possessions would be auctioned off for charity at a later date.

‘I am very pleased that the bulk of Jimmy’s fortune will go to his charities,’ said Roger Foster, to whom Savile had also bequeathed his parents’ weddings rings. ‘I was aware [I was getting
them] as Jimmy had lost them and I found them,’ Foster revealed. ‘Jimmy always insisted that it was the Duchess who, from heaven, guided me where to look and as such, when he was no longer here, she would want me to have them.’
⁷

These two tiny gold bands would be about all he did get.

15. DIDN’T DIE, VERY GOOD

W
e ventured outside into the salty air. Savile was wearing his green woolly hat, the ‘disguise’, although he seemed more upset when the disguise worked and people passed him by without a second look.

Progress was slow. He was busy telling me that the experience of watching his brothers and sisters going through the emotional ups and downs of relationships and marriage had soured him for life. ‘If you have a dog you’ve got to walk it; if you have a cat you’ve got to give it a litter to have a shite in; even if you have a plant you’ve got to water it,’ he said. ‘Those are all things that live. If you don’t have anything that lives, 99 per cent of your problems are gone.

‘Imagine taking a human being in,’ he continued. ‘Wow! You have to dedicate 50 per cent of your life to them and they’ve got to dedicate 50 per cent of their time to you. In the old days, mothers looked after their sons; ironed their shirts, mended the holes in their socks. I remember 60 years ago a lad talking to me about how his marriage had gone wrong. He said, “She wouldn’t even clean my shoes.” Now that was because his mother cleaned his shoes and he was taking a female into his life. You can’t blame him for thinking that. What that lad said to me was just one snowflake making up a big snowball.’

It was a curious mental association: marriage and his mother. And the way he had segued from things that don’t live to holes in socks left me confused. This didn’t bother him, he simply launched into the now familiar story about coming home from school to find nobody in the house. As we stopped at some railings beside
the beach and looked out at the sludgy waves of the North Sea, I mentioned my brother and his wife who were sailing across the world in a small boat at the time. I told him about the fears my family harboured about them being out at sea.

‘Living and dying is part of life,’ he snapped. ‘If you live you’re lucky, and if you die, big deal. There’s a lot of it about. When I work in the hospitals 20 die every night.’

I asked him whether he feared death or whether the formative experience of kissing corpses in the old people’s home across the road from his house in Leeds had given him a different perspective. ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ he said, somewhat surprisingly. Jimmy Savile was never less than sure about anything that passed his lips.

‘I prefer to feel my way and it could be that all that has made my attitude to living and dying what it is,’ he added. This was a rare glimpse of something beneath, perhaps a hitherto unseen ability to question himself and on occasion to be surprised by the answers. ‘I have faced death several times,’ he continued. ‘I didn’t even know that I faced death when I was ill as a small child. And then there was down the mine when the shaft collapsed.’

He gestured ahead, to where a few lone souls on the sand were bent against the wind. ‘I came across here, 50 feet from where we are now, in the back seat of a Buccaneer with the Police Air Arm. We just missed the Grand Hotel; took two windows out. We were supposed to refuel in the air but the tanker couldn’t take off. So we ran out of fuel. I’m sitting strapped into this bloody amazing thing.’

He explained the jet had to divert to RAF Honiton. ‘They told us they would put the arrester wires out and we’d see if we could pull those bloody great concrete blocks out of the ground. We hit the ground at 350 miles per hour, because we had no fuel left, and the thing caught on the arrester wire, and the next minute you’re standing still.’ He laughed.

‘It’s all a bit of fun. You’re gonna die, you didn’t die, very good. I had plenty of time to think about it because I was up in the air when we ran out of fuel. It didn’t bother me because I’m a bit odd. One minute you’re here, the next minute you’re not.’

We continued along the Foreshore. Pensioners huddled on benches eating chips from card boxes or leaned against the railings in macs, caps and scarves. Beyond the tired façade of the Futurist Theatre, the flashing lights and bleeps of amusement arcades: Olympia, Gilly’s, Casino, Silver Dollar and Henry Marshall.

We met a man who Savile introduced as the owner of some of the biggest arcades. ‘You see all this stuff here,’ he said, waving an arm at the gaudy seafront, ‘this kid owns all that. Like me, he is shy, retiring, self-demeaning.’

The man smiled and shuffled his feet. ‘Unlike me, he doesn’t have any way to disguise it because he’s worn all the girls out and now he’s married.’ Savile explained that he was close to the man’s late father, Jimmy Corrigan, the slot machine king of Scarborough.

Did he ever want to start an empire, I asked. ‘That was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do,’ he hooted, seemingly delighted at the opportunity to confound any theories I might be working on. ‘In the 42 years of working in the hospitals I have come across so many people who have suffered and died because they didn’t understand the meaning of the word “enough”. They didn’t think they had enough money or booze or silly white powder you stick up your nose. I learned very early on the meaning of the word “enough”. As soon as I had enough of anything I decided to take things easy for a bit.

‘An empire gives you aggravation. If you’ve got enough without that why should you be greedy and want for more? When I wake up in the morning I have got more money than when I went to sleep the night before.’

He proceeded to tell me about ‘a geezer’ who ‘did the empire bit’. One day, the man went into his garage and found his son hanging by the neck. ‘He wished then that he could turn the clock back and spend less time getting far more than he needed in the first place,’ Savile said. ‘Some people are empire builders but as an individual it wasn’t the path that I chose.’

We entered a coffee shop and sat down at a table with a Formica top. In the window was a sign with the word ‘PACE’. Savile called
the owner over and made a comment about it being a ‘Paki shop’. It was a toe-curling attempt at humour. I felt embarrassed and asked her how she put up with him. ‘It does wear a bit thin,’ she replied. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with you,’ she sighed, addressing Jimmy directly.

‘Is there much room in the back?’ he gurgled, and took a loud slurp from his mug of tea.