In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (18 page)

‘Savile’s offending behaviour before that was horrendous,’ he says, ‘but it didn’t get to the level whereby I started to understand him as an offender. Up until that stage he was more distant … But when [one of the
Top of the Pops
victims] talked about the force
that he used, the power that he used, the violence that he used, the coercion that he used, that for me was the point when I [concluded], “This is a really nasty offender, and this guy has offended against an awful lot of people.”’

One of the women from
Top of the Pops
revealed Jimmy Savile had raped her in his motor caravan outside BBC Television Centre. The other said he had sex with her on a number of occasions in his BBC dressing room. She was 15 years old at the time.

‘There were different groups,’ Williams-Thomas says of the witnesses and victims from
Top of the Pops
. ‘Some of them knew each other because they might have occasionally bumped into each other through Savile, but they were a bit distant from each other. We needed independence; we needed to separate Duncroft from Stoke Mandeville from
Top of the Pops
. It got to the position whereby the more independence we had, the stronger the individual allegations from the victims and witnesses were,’ he explains.

Williams-Thomas is convinced Jimmy Savile was protected by his celebrity status. ‘He was untouchable in the era in which these things happened, and because of that he gained greater and greater confidence. The reality is that if you do something wrong in front of somebody and you know that you won’t get picked up for it, you’ll do it again and again. Nobody ever picked him up, from what we found out, and therefore he grew in confidence and arrogance. [He thought] If nobody is going to report me or stop me from doing it, I will just carry on.’

Despite the progress they’d made with ‘Project DJ’, both Williams-Thomas and Gardiner remained acutely aware of the possibility the investigation could blow up in their faces, and the public could turn against them and ITV for sullying the reputation of a national hero. They were ‘taking on an icon’. ‘I said to Lesley, this is going to be the hardest project we’ve ever done but I also said if we get it right, it has the ability make a big difference.’

The next key step was to validate victim testimonies. ‘We went into individuals’ backgrounds,’ Williams-Thomas says, ‘and
substantiated [evidence] to such a degree that we validated them far, far beyond any police investigation would do; to the degree whereby we would date things through photographs, looking at bricks on walls, things in the background.’

It was just as well because while ITV remained supportive, News Director Michael Jermey advised the film would only proceed to broadcast if the evidence could be used if Savile were still alive.
¹⁰

PART THREE

23. NOSTALGIC MEMORIES

J
immy Savile’s last will and testament was in probate when Georgina Ray’s lawyers contacted the executors of his estate. They said their client would be taking a DNA test in an attempt to prove she was his daughter. If conclusive, it would pave the way for a possible claim under the Inheritance Act of 1975. As the only child of the late Jimmy Savile, albeit a father she never met, Georgina Ray could make the argument that she was entitled to the entire estate.

Jimmy Savile was worth £7.8 million at the time of his death. He had £4.3 million in his bank accounts, a £2.5 million property portfolio made up of flats in London, Leeds, Scarborough and Bournemouth, plus a cottage in Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands. He was also estimated to have a further £1 million in assets.

Other than the £600,000 he placed in a trust to be shared among six people, and the £18,000 to be divided equally between a further eighteen friends, he made provision for all of the proceeds from his estate to go into the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust, which was set up to help ‘poorly people in hospital beds’. The trust showed a balance of £3.6 million, soon to be increased by the proceeds from an auction of all his remaining belongings.

In late June 2012, details about the auction of his belongings were released. The sale comprised 550 lots; a museum of Jimmy Savile’s life, one that he had diligently curated and stored over the course of 84 years. His flats were packed with curios, mementos and tat; on the last occasion I stayed with him in Leeds I had
almost been buried under an avalanche of platform-soled boots and colourful outfits when opening a cupboard in his spare room.

The sale was set for late July and was to be held at Savile’s Hall in Leeds, a conference and exhibition centre at the Royal Armouries Museum that had been renamed in his honour in 2007. Standout items from the sale were put on display at Dreweatts auctioneers in London before transferring to Leeds. They included his red chair from
Jim’ll Fix It
; the yellow BMW Isetta bubble car he bought himself while appearing at the Top Ten Club in Manchester in 1965 (and once used to collect the Duke of Edinburgh from Aylesbury Railway Station); his 18-carat gold and diamond encrusted Rolex Oyster watch; his 9-carat gold bracelet featuring 55 brilliant-cut diamonds; and his 6.7 litre silver Rolls-Royce Corniche, one of a limited edition of 56 ‘last of line’ Corniches built at the company’s plant in Crewe.

But beyond headline-friendly lots such as these, the sheer size and scope of the sale spoke of his extraordinary need to be surrounded by the inanimate articles of his legend. This is what he’d talked about: the things that don’t live. The hundreds of items represented so many bricks in the wall.

The auction of these 500 and more items was a final chance for Jimmy Savile to burnish his myth, and Georgina Ray was anathema to everything the collection represented. As the doors of Savile’s Hall opened onto the museum of his life and times, there was no place for a 41-year-old, blonde divorcée from Cannock. DNA analysis on cigar butts, a hairbrush and bedding from the flats in Leeds and Scarborough had failed to produce samples that matched her own.
¹
Ray was said to be ‘crestfallen’ and her solicitor Richard Egan responded by highlighting his ‘serious misgivings’ about ‘anomalies and inconsistencies’, including the fact analysts had not been able to find a single strand of Savile’s bleached blond hair on the hairbrush.
²

For Georgina Ray, the auction might have been the closest she ever came to gaining an understanding of the man she believed to be her father. For there, among the shell suits, the vests, running
shorts and medals, the endless boxes of cigars, the jewellery and the Disc Jockey of the Year awards, were more revealing artefacts from a life still being celebrated, by the wider public at least, as one of giving, goodness and grace.

An Oscar Egg lightweight 10-gear racing cycle with turquoise frame, leather saddle and his original ‘Express Tour of Britain’ entry tag, along with his original rider number, 48, from the race; a deerstalker hat with accompanying black and white photograph of Oscar ‘The Duke’ Savile during his days as a race commentator; an engraved cigarette box given to him when he left the Mecca Locarno for Ilford in 1955; the Mecca Dancing gold cup; unopened parcels of
Teen and Twenty Disc Club
circular medallions; a patchwork shirt by Lord John of Carnaby Street with accompanying photographs of Savile on a hospital visit with his mother; the red satin padded bedspread with gold ‘JS’ monogram he used to cover the single bed in the Duchess’s room in Scarborough; snaps of Savile with brides and flirting with nurses, and Savile with his brother Johnnie; the reproduction of a signed photograph of Winston Churchill; the suit, shirt, tie and white slip-on shoes he wore when he stood alongside Prince Charles and Princess Diana as they opened the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville in 1983; the race numbers and medals from his two decades of marathon running, an era in which he tried to control one addiction through another; the leather upholstered armchair and matching footstool from which he held court in his Roundhay Park penthouse.

More interesting were the associations some of the items disclosed. A whole section of the sale was devoted to ‘The Royal Family’, which was a revelation given he had taken pride in refusing to talk about his relationships with them during his later years. There were thirty-five lots in total, among them numerous gifts and cards from Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson: a pair of silver and blue enamel cufflinks by Asprey & Garrard, given as an 80th birthday present by Prince Charles, as well as a pair of commemorative American cowboy boots. There were Christmas cards from Charles and Diana;
Prince Charles, Princess Diana and their sons; Prince Charles and his sons; and Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall, signed off with ‘kindest regards’, ‘warmest good wishes’ and ‘affectionate greetings’. They were souvenirs from his journey to the very centre of the establishment that gave away nothing of what he had done when he got there.

Then there were the other gifts and tokens of esteem: the signed sketches by Rolf Harris; a Brazil nut mounted on a plinth from the patients at Broadmoor; a white onyx table lighter engraved ‘To Jimmy Savile from his friends at the Fraud Squad’; a Metropolitan Police helmet inscribed in blue ballpoint pen ‘To Jimmy Saville [sic] from Marylebone Police Station’; the plaques and presentation pieces from forces all over Britain; the engraved drill sergeant’s swagger stick from the senior non-commissioned officers’ mess at the Royal Marine Commando Training Centre at Lympstone, and a bronze statue from the sergeants’ mess; a stainless steel tray engraved ‘To Jimmy Savile OBE. With thanks for a great walk Easter Monday, 1976. From Aquila Youth Centre Jersey’.

Before the sale, I was contacted by Luke Lucas, a trustee of both Jimmy Savile’s charitable trusts. He had known Savile for 42 years, worked for him full-time for the first seven years and described him as his ‘best friend’, although he refused point blank to talk about him. ‘I was involved in everything, believe me, and if I wanted to tell the 42 years of stories it would need to be a very thick book,’ he said. ‘Thicker than the Old Testament.’

He told me a bit about Savile’s attitudes towards his relations, and discussed the ongoing Georgina Ray situation. In a subsequent call, Lucas informed me that boxes of Jimmy Savile’s private papers were to be deposited with Leeds University where it was hoped they would be held as a Jimmy Savile archive. He said the papers revealed the true picture of his friend’s place in, and value to, the establishment. He also insisted access would be impossible until claims on the estate had been settled.

On 30 July 2012, that prospect moved a step closer with the sale of his belongings at Savile’s Hall. The first lot, his Highland suit
complete with Lochaber tartan kilt, went under the hammer at 10.30 a.m. and sold for £280. The tone for the day, however, was set with the second item, an ash shepherd’s crook-type walking stick with a plaque engraved ‘James Savile OBE’. The stick sold for £500 against a guide price of £50–£80. From that point on, almost every item in the sale obliterated its estimate.

The 2002 Rolls-Royce Corniche convertible with personalised ‘JS 247’ number plate went for £130,000, almost twice its guide price. The three-wheel bubble car fetched £22,000, bought by Angela Swift, the managing director of a care home company who said it would be parked inside a residential home in Barnsley. ‘Many of the residents have dementia so this will hopefully provide them with some nostalgic memories,’ said Swift, who also bought a gold Nike tracksuit for £500, four times its guide price.
³

Roger Bodley, another of Savile’s trustees and a former radiologist at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, bought a Highland sword and shield presented to the star in 1973 when he was named chieftain of Lochaber’s Highland games. Bodley said it would be returned to the Glencoe cottage that the trustees were now planning to turn into a Scottish retreat for the disabled.

A former patient at Stoke Mandeville, George Ridgeon, spent £350 on some marathon medals. He had travelled from Gloucester in his wheelchair. ‘It wasn’t easy but I had to be here,’ he said. ‘I want something to remember my old friend by.’ He was even more pleased to be presented his items by a ‘pretty girl’ because, he explained, ‘just like Jim, I’ve got an eye for the ladies.’
⁴

Towards the end of the sale, an original
Jim’ll Fix It
badge went for a staggering £2,000. After following the sale all day, I bought a Stetson hat that Savile told me Elvis Presley had given him, and a bag of assorted medals and trinkets. I knew what was coming and this was the final farewell.

After nearly 13 hours, the last item was sold: Jimmy Savile’s favourite ashtray and a Romeo y Julieta cigar that prompted one bidder to pay £140. The team of auctioneers had worked in relay, hundreds of people had attended and many thousands more
followed the auction online. Every single one of the items went, apart from a certificate for an honorary doctorate awarded by Bedfordshire University that was withdrawn. The organisers had said they hoped to make around £200,000 for the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust. The final total was over £320,000.

His life had been celebrated again, and sold off for charity: the last positive publicity Jimmy Savile would ever generate. It was, indeed, good while it lasted.