In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (2 page)

PART ONE

1. APOCALYPSE NOW THEN

S
hortly before midnight, on a hill overlooking the North Yorkshire seaside town of Scarborough, the wrought-iron gates of Woodlands Cemetery were locked shut. Police officers took up position outside, while beyond, in the darkness and at the highest point of the burial ground, undertaker Robert Morphet and his men removed tools from their truck. Little was said as portable floodlights were assembled and attached to the generator they had brought with them from the Bradford headquarters of Joseph A. Hey & Sons, funeral directors.

The plan had been to arrive early the next morning but public and media interest was so great that Morphet had decided to discuss arrangements again with Scarborough Council. It was agreed to get the job completed as quickly as possible; in the dead of night, safe from prying eyes, telescopic lenses and those with possible vengeance on their minds.

The mood was sombre as the men set about their task with hammers, chisels, wedges, long bars and drills. Removing a six-foot wide, four-foot high triple headstone in black, polished granite was hard, physical and, in this case, demoralising work. For the headstone had taken Robert Morphet and his men eight months to complete, being inscribed both front and back with pictures of the man buried beneath, poems written by his friends, a short biography, a list of charities he’d supported and an epitaph in flowing script along the base: ‘It was good while it lasted.’

Three separate slabs of granite, a base and fourteen hundred letters in total, each one finished in gold; Joseph A. Hey & Sons’
bill was in excess of £4,000. The headstone had been fixed to its concrete foundation stone only three weeks before.

The placing of the headstone, which was wide enough to cover three plots, should have been the concluding act in the biggest funeral ever arranged in the 130-year history of the firm. It had been a national funeral, a celebration of a remarkable life that had drawn crowds to the streets and been reported extensively in news bulletins and papers across Britain.

Morphet had told reporters that he considered it an honour when his firm was contacted soon after Saturday, 29 October 2011, when the body of an 84-year-old man had been discovered by the caretaker of a block of flats bordering Roundhay Park in Leeds. The man had been found lying in bed. There was a smile on his face and his fingers were crossed.
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The police confirmed there were no suspicious circumstances; he was old and had been unwell for some time. The last two months of his life had seen him cut short a round-Britain cruise through illness, and he’d been in and out of hospital. Morphet considered it an honour because he knew of the man; the whole country did.

Reaction to the news of his death had been widespread. On Twitter, comedian Ricky Gervais hailed the deceased as ‘a proper British eccentric’, while author and newspaper columnist Tony Parsons described him as ‘a sort of Wolfman Jack for Woolworths’. BBC Radio and TV presenter Nicky Campbell went further, saying he was ‘so unique, a character so extraordinary, a personality so fascinating yet impenetrable. You could not have made him up.’

The following morning, his familiar face dominated the front pages of almost every Sunday newspaper in the land, while on the inside pages the great and good lined up to pay their respects. A spokesman for Prince Charles, who he had mentored and served as a trusted confidant, said he was ‘saddened by the loss’. Louis Theroux, maker of a memorable film twelve years earlier, described him as ‘a hero’. BBC Director General Mark Thompson said, ‘Like millions of viewers and listeners we shall miss him greatly.’

Even I was interviewed. The
Mail on Sunday
asked me to sum up his character and share a few stories from the times I had spent with him over the previous seven years.

Reporters called up former colleagues from his long career in radio to add their voices to the growing chorus. Curiously, none professed to have any great insight. David Hamilton talked of a ‘very remote figure’ that didn’t mingle much. Tony Blackburn suggested he was lonely and didn’t have many friends. Dave Lee Travis, who had known him for close on fifty years, revealed in all that time they’d never had a meaningful chat. ‘He kept himself to himself and put a shield up,’ said Travis. Broadcaster Stuart Hall told BBC Radio Five Live that he was ‘unique’ but ‘a loner’.
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As a child, Robert Morphet had written to the man whose funeral he was about to arrange. It was at a time when he was a huge national star, possibly Britain’s biggest, famous for his charity work and for hosting a hit television show that made children’s dreams come true. The young Robert Morphet had written in asking to become an undertaker for the day. Like the thousands of other British children who wrote letters in the course of the show’s 19-year run, he had not received a reply. His wish had come true anyway.

Decades on, the funeral director acted on the instructions from the dead man’s family and arranged for the body to be dressed in a favourite tracksuit fashioned from Lochaber tartan, a white T-shirt bearing the emblem of the Red Arrows, running shorts, socks and trainers. An honorary Marine Commando Green Beret was placed in one hand and his mother’s silver rosary in the other; his Marine Commando medal was hung around his neck. Once dressed, the body was placed in an American-style coffin made of 18-gauge galvanised steel and finished in brushed gold satin, along with a single cigar and a small bottle of whisky.

For the first day of the funeral proceedings, the gold coffin was driven to a hotel in the centre of Leeds. There, in the foyer, it was placed carefully on a plinth draped in gold-tasselled blue velvet and adorned with cascades of white roses. When the doors of the
hotel opened the next morning, people were already queuing outside to pay their final respects. Thousands more followed over the course of the day. I was among them.

The following morning, the coffin was opened for close family and friends to say their goodbyes. Make-up had been applied to the man’s face, something he had always refused during his lifetime. He’d always maintained that wearing make-up was like lying.

Two hearses and five black limousines pulled up outside the hotel, and as crowds gathered on the pavement, the gold coffin was loaded before members of the man’s family climbed into the vehicles for a final tour of the city. The cortège slowed in front of the man’s childhood home and the hospital where he had worked as a volunteer for more than half a century. Outside, hospital porters formed a guard of honour in the rain.

From there, the fleet of black limousines proceeded to St Anne’s Roman Catholic Cathedral where cheering crowds lined the approach. Six Royal Marines in full ceremonial uniform waited at the front steps to carry the seven-foot long casket from the hearse. At the doors, the Bishop of Leeds, the Right Reverend Arthur Roche, sprinkled holy water on the lid before it was shouldered to the altar.

I joined the 700 people occupying every available seat inside the cathedral for the requiem mass. Loudspeakers broadcast the service to the many thousands outside, among them television news crews and reporters from across Britain.

Bishop Arthur Roche spoke and reminded those present that this cathedral was where the man had been baptised in 1926. He went on to give thanks for his ‘colourful and charitable life’. It was a life that Monsignor Kieran Heskin later described as ‘an epic of giving’ before concluding that now he would surely be given ‘the ultimate reward – a place in Heaven’.

Friends of the man gave eulogies. One talked of how he had recently told medical staff at a local hospital he had ‘absolutely no fear of dying’ because ‘he had done it all, seen it all and got it all’. The same friend recalled the man’s ‘courage, nobility and trust’,
but still touched on the rumours that had surrounded him: ‘He many times answered the question about what he might be hiding in his private life by saying that the really great secret was … that there was no great secret.’

The third and final day of the funeral saw the gold coffin transported to Scarborough. The cortège began on the Esplanade, outside the dead man’s seafront flat, before stopping briefly in front of the Grand Hotel where another of the company’s funeral directors led the procession on foot along the Foreshore.

Then it was on to Woodlands Cemetery on a hill overlooking the town. In accordance with the dead man’s final wishes, Morphet had arranged for a plot at the highest point and a grave to be dug at a 45-degree angle. It had taken two days to complete and required a laser device to get it exactly right.

I was among the few hundred onlookers that joined the man’s family and friends inside the cemetery. As the coffin was lowered into the grave, coming to rest on a cement ramp at the bottom of the shaft, some moved forward to take photographs down into the hole. I did not require a photograph of the gold coffin, a coffin that would be encased in reinforced concrete once we had all left.

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In the weeks and months after the funeral, the BBC aired tribute shows to the man on national television and radio. Up and down the country, committees were formed to discuss how best to acknowledge his contribution to society, most conspicuously the £40 million he was believed to have raised for a variety of good causes.

The following summer, an all-day auction took place of the man’s belongings. It was hosted in a large function hall in Leeds that had been named in his honour, and raised more than £300,000 for the two charitable trusts bearing his name.

And yet at a little after 1 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, 10 October, 2012, less than a year on from the fanfare of the funeral, Robert Morphet and the men of Joseph A. Hey & Sons could be found packing away their tools and taking down their floodlights. Behind them they had left only a rectangular patch of bare soil.
Across the turned earth were four bedraggled bunches of flowers in cellophane, two still with ink-smudged cards attached; a single white Yorkshire rose at one end and a spray of red carnations at the other.

These damp, wilting stems were all that remained from the small family ceremony less than three weeks before to mark the placement of the headstone. Afterwards, a plaque had been unveiled outside the man’s house on the Esplanade at which Roger Foster, the nephew who had helped to organise the lavish funeral, talked about his hopes that the headstone might become a tourist attraction.

‘He was just an ordinary bloke from the back streets of Leeds but everyone loved him and wants to pay their respects,’ said Foster.
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He added that he wouldn’t be surprised in the future to find an ice-cream stall selling refreshments to fans that had travelled to enjoy the headstone and to offer thanks for the life of his uncle.

Just a few short weeks later, dawn broke over a rectangular patch of bare soil to reveal an unmarked grave and a ruined reputation.

The three 18-inch thick slabs of dark granite it had taken eight months to craft and to polish and to inscribe had been taken to a yard in Leeds where the fourteen hundred letters were ground down and the black granite smashed into tiny pieces for landfill. Nothing was to be left of the headstone and nothing was to be left to mark the spot where the coffin was buried beneath the earth. It was good while it lasted.

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The events leading up to the nocturnal dismantling had been driven by a television documentary. The announcement of the film’s transmission date, its airing on national television a week earlier and the deluge of newspaper revelations that followed in its wake purported to expose what the man had been hiding all along. Like the headstone, the notion of ‘the great secret’ was now smashed into tiny pieces and consigned to a skip.

Just over eleven months after his death, the man had become the biggest story and the most reviled figure in the land. His fall from grace was as sudden as it was shocking.

All across Britain traces of his life were now being systematically erased. At a leisure centre in Glasgow, staff removed a likeness of the man in carved wood. ‘Given the controversy and the seriousness of the allegations, we thought it appropriate to move the statue at this time,’ explained a spokesman for the company that operated the centre.
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The gold-coloured memorial plaque unveiled outside the man’s home in Scarborough was taken down after being defaced. Soon afterwards, the council removed a footpath sign commemorating his place in the town’s life. It had been installed only weeks before.

In Leeds, his name was deleted from a wall commemorating celebrated citizens in the Civic Hall. The chief executive of the city council said it was the appropriate course of action in light of the ‘very serious allegations’.
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In London, Scotland Yard’s response to the aftershocks caused by the television documentary was to assemble a special team of 10 officers to review the numerous allegations, and to process the calls now flooding in from members of the public. Operation Yewtree was the codename given to their investigation. One hundred and twenty lines of inquiry were already being pursued involving as many as thirty victims. Specially trained staff had been seconded from the NSPCC, which itself had reported fielding numerous calls in the first five days after the documentary aired. Twenty-four of these calls had been referred to the police, of which seventeen were directly related to the dead man.

Eight criminal allegations had been formally and posthumously recorded against him – two of rape and six of indecent assault. Details emerged; the majority of the alleged offences had been committed on females aged between 13 and 16. From those who had come forward, there were reports of sexual abuse taking place on the premises of the BBC, at hospitals, at a children’s home in Jersey and in an approved school for girls in Surrey.

Commander Peter Spindler, head of Scotland Yard’s Specialist Crime investigations, described the man as a ‘predatory sex offender’ and said that his pattern of offending appeared to ‘be on a national scale’.
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But the man was dead and could not defend himself. Spindler was asked whether he felt sure of his guilt. ‘I think the facts speak for themselves,’ he replied, ‘as does the number of women who have come forward and spoken of his behaviour and his predilection for teenage girls.’