In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (20 page)

Three days later, the heavens opened on Benny’s funeral in Manchester. Lewis remembered how people came from all over Britain, while Savile’s recollections centred on how he stole the show. ‘There are no flowers or decorations on the coffin at a Jewish funeral,’ he explained at our final meeting. ‘I turned up with a massive wreath and put it right on top of his coffin … Nobody said a word, nobody objected. The king thing was that I was the meanest man in Manchester, so I stood by the coffin and put a cigar on the lid so he could have a smoke on the way over. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.’

Benny’s heart had given out while being fellated. The girl had been found trapped underneath his dead body. Within hours, though, Jimmy Savile had arrived at the flat where Benny’s body was found. But why he felt the need to be in Bill Benny’s flat so soon after his death, how he got in there and what he might have been looking for will likely remain a mystery.

If not his keen morbid fascination, one possible explanation is that Savile was recovering paperwork from a deal that had seen Bill Benny buy the failing Hulme Hippodrome theatre from the James Brennan cinema circuit for £35,000 in November 1960,
⁵
before selling it to Mecca for £50,000 just sixteen months later.
⁶
This 43 per cent profit was turned without any renovations being done, and no mention of Benny’s name being made in the sale.
Could it have been a moneymaking scam cooked up by Benny and Savile, Mecca’s man on the ground in Manchester?

26. A CROSS BETWEEN A BEATLE AND AN ALDWYCH FARCE CURATE

T
he story of Bill Benny’s death is significant not only because he was Jimmy Savile’s friend but also because of its direct link to his next career spin-off. Savile told me that the reason he became a wrestler was because Benny invited him to referee a benefit contest for a grappler who had died soon after a bout. He claimed to have refused, prompting Benny to call him a ‘miserable bastard’. But Savile wasn’t backing out, he insisted. He wanted to fight.

He had employed a number of wrestlers as bouncers at his dancehalls and been introduced via Benny to the many former grapplers who worked in and around Manchester’s club scene. After surprising Benny with his willingness to climb between the ropes, six weeks were spent training at a local gym with Bert Jacobs, who would go on to coach Britain’s wrestlers at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. The all-male, physical world of wrestling was one that Jimmy Savile felt at home in. It was useful to him in terms of recruiting minders and bouncers, but also for again being able to showcase his physical prowess.

The charity bout was to be staged at the Devonshire Sporting Club in Broughton, a venue previously owned by Bill Benny. The opponent was ‘Gentleman’ Jim Lewis, the undefeated welterweight champion of the world who, according to Savile, had ‘a temper as long as my thumb’.

On Sunday, 15 December 1963, readers of Jimmy Savile’s ‘Pop-Talking’ column in the
People
got the exclusive low-down on his grappling debut. ‘The joint was packed tight, about a thousand
people,’ he wrote, before recounting how he spent seven rounds ‘in the air flying in one direction or the other.’

Lewis took the lead with a body slam in round three before Savile equalised with a forward roll double Nelson in the fourth. ‘Two quick body slams in the seventh’ ultimately clinched the contest for the more experienced man. Savile broke a toe but described it as ‘about the best experience of my life’.

It seems like too much of a coincidence that a benefit event in aid of a wrestler who had died after a bout should take place at Bill Benny’s club just a few weeks after Benny’s own death in identical circumstances. So why was Jimmy Savile so adamant that it was Benny who had invited him to fight and not that it was Benny he was fighting for?

*

In October 1963, seven days before Benny’s death, two boys, aged 11 and 14, appeared at Salford Juvenile Court where they pleaded guilty to stealing a £152 watch from Jimmy Savile’s flat. The 14-year-old was put on probation for two years, the 11-year-old was fined £10.
¹
No mention was made of whether they broke into his flat or were invited inside.

Fifteen months after Savile’s death, a joint report by the Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC recorded that 13 people had come forward to make allegations of being sexually assaulted by the disc jockey and dancehall impresario in the period to the end of 1963. One, a 10-year-old boy, was said to have spotted him outside a hotel, asked for an autograph and been assaulted by penetration.

In March 2013, a review by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) into allegations and intelligence material concerning Jimmy Savile reported that, also in 1963, a male victim in Cheshire reported an allegation of rape by Jimmy Savile to his local police officer the day after it occurred. He was told to ‘forget about it’ and ‘move on’. The officer did not make a report of the allegation and, consequently, an investigation was not undertaken.
²

For all the carnage being wrought in secret – at his flat, in dark corridors and in dressing rooms – Jimmy Savile was doing an
extremely effective job of masking the compulsive side to his nature. Wrestling gave him another physical outlet but, like his work as an increasingly high-profile DJ, it also offered the promise of contact with those he preyed on.

As he began to acquire the riches he’d always craved, the next career milestone on his journey to national stardom was approaching. In the summer of 1963, ITV launched a new weekly pop programme aimed at teenagers. Filmed in London and presented by Dusty Springfield, Keith Fordyce and the teenage Cathy McGowan,
Ready Steady Go
’s combination of mimed performances, interviews and a studio audience of gyrating young hipsters proved to be catnip to the nation’s teens. ‘[It] was doing amazing things,’ said Bill Cotton, then the BBC’s assistant head of Light Entertainment.
³
‘A lot of people were being affected by it.’

Among them was the incongruous figure of Tom Sloan, the BBC’s head of Light Entertainment. Sloan was a disciple of Sir John Reith, the BBC’s first director general, a famously autocratic leader who insisted the corporation’s purpose was to educate, inform and entertain. While the pop world was anathema to Sloan, he could not stand by and let ITV dominate. His response was to task Bill Cotton with making a rival show. Cotton quickly decided it should be distinct from its competitor by being based on the charts. It was a simple but clever plan as the charts were now dominated by British acts.

Cotton’s first choice as producer was Johnnie Stewart who had produced
Jukebox Jury
and a wide range of other music-related programming for the BBC. A long series of planning meetings followed. At one of these meetings, a producer named T. Leslie Jackson suggested Jimmy Savile as a possible presenter of the new show, chiefly on the say-so of his teenage son. The idea was shot down immediately and Jackson went home that evening to inform his son, Paul, that Savile ‘would never work on the BBC’.
⁴

Nearly 40 years later, Paul Jackson, who went on to become a BBC producer himself, recalled what his father had said that evening: ‘Savile was thought to be dodgy, there was a feeling he was heavy, you didn’t cross him, he was a heavy dude.’

Stewart had other ideas. But first he would have to overcome the opposition of Tom Sloan. When Stewart had announced he wanted to use Savile on
Juke Box Jury
, Sloane told him, ‘I don’t want that man on television’. Stewart’s reply was telling, given Savile’s long career and history of offending at the BBC: ‘Sorry baby, but that man is box office.’
⁵

Stewart wasn’t the only figure at the BBC who believed in Jimmy Savile. An ally was found in the shape of Barney Colehan, a producer who had worked on
The Good Old Days
and would go on to produce
It’s a Knockout
. Colehan believed the new show should adapt Radio Luxembourg’s successful
Teen and Twenty Disc Club
format for television and, after some debate, Bill Cotton was finally persuaded that Jimmy Savile should be called in to make a pilot.

It was Stewart who came up with the title of the new show:
Top of the Pops
. His vision included using a quartet of Radio Luxembourg DJs as rotating presenters. Sloan and Cotton were comfortable with Alan Freeman, Pete Murray and reigning
Melody Maker
DJ of the Year David Jacobs. Jimmy Savile, however, remained a problem. ‘The BBC thought he was a bit strange alright,’ said Bill Cotton. ‘They didn’t know quite what to make of him. He seemed to me to be a kind of 20th century clown.’
⁶

But Jimmy Savile wasn’t the only aspect of the new show that made the BBC establishment jumpy. The wider moral panic over pop music and the effect it was having on the nation’s teens was a determining factor in the decision to broadcast the new show from the BBC’s northern studios. It was agreed that a converted church on Dickenson Road in Manchester was a far safer place to house these young ‘undesirables’ than the corporation’s sparkling new Television Centre in west London.

The MP Edward Heath had seemed to speak for a generation when he grumbled about not being able to understand what The Beatles were talking about. The axis of popular music had shifted, as Jimmy Savile discovered in December 1963 when he attended the opening night of The Beatles’ Christmas Show at the Gaumont Theatre in Bradford. Comparing the noise from the audience to
standing ‘on the starting grid at Silverstone Grand Prix car race with 30 Formula One cars revving like mad’, he told me that he went to the rear of the auditorium to see whether it was possible to hear the music. Spotting his blond hair in the distance, Paul McCartney dedicated a song to ‘Jimmy Savile at the back’, sparking a charge from frenzied fans who believed they might be able to pursue their quarry all the way to The Beatles’ dressing rooms.

The next day, Savile dropped in for tea ‘with the lads’ at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool only to emerge to find the building besieged by fans. Thirty police officers were required to hold back the crowds, and a borrowed car was commandeered for the group’s guest to make his getaway.

He told me The Beatles of that time reminded him of ‘four university students that had just graduated’. He then looked up at the picture on the wall of his living room which showed him sat between John, Paul, Ringo and George with all five of them pretending to be asleep. ‘They were quite special but also quite funny,’ he said. ‘When you are on top of the tree like that you become more defensive than funny.’

‘We knew Jimmy and we worked with him, he was a DJ, an MC on some of the shows,’ confirmed Paul McCartney.
⁷
On one occasion in the group’s early days, they offered Savile a lift in their van across the Pennines after playing a gig in Yorkshire.

‘He told us all these stories about his wartime exploits, how he had been buying chewing gum and nylons and all that, and selling them,’ McCartney said. ‘He had all sorts of stuff going on. He was the older hustler guy, and we were very amused by these stories because he was a great entertainer, but we dropped him off at his place outside his house and we said, “Can we come in for a coffee?” and he said, “Oh, no, not tonight lads.”

‘When he’d gone we thought, “Why doesn’t he let us in? What is it, because most people would have let us in that we gave a lift to?” So we always thought there was something a little bit suspect.’

McCartney added they were different times. ‘[In] that post-war boom, girls and guys, it was a much more open scene … free love
and the Pill had just come in, so it was a completely different scene. The other aspect, of course, is that we – though not quite Jimmy – were of the age of the girls.’ In December 1963 Paul McCartney was 21; Jimmy Savile was 35.

‘We were all young,’ McCartney continued. ‘So if you’re now talking about a 17-, 18-year-old boy with a 15-year-old girl, we all knew that was illegal. We knew it and it was like, “No”. But the closer we were in age, of course, the less it seemed to matter. We knew with under-16s it was illegal, so we didn’t do it.’

McCartney insisted they always tried to be certain when it came to girls. ‘We couldn’t always be sure but there was a definite no-no involved in underage kids,’ he said. ‘Hey, listen, we didn’t have to worry. There were plenty of over-16-year-olds.’

Liverpool’s finest were still riding high at the top of the charts on New Year’s Day 1964 as Jimmy Savile introduced the very first episode of
Top of the Pops
. It was a new show for a new era in which beat groups, led by The Beatles, would dominate the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. The powers at the BBC were less convinced, commissioning an initial run of just six weeks.

Savile spent the build-up to the first show working closely with Johnnie Stewart in trying to ‘guesstimate’ what the chart would look like on Wednesday 1 January. It was a crucial calculation; the charts were released at 8.30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, leaving little over 24 hours to have a line-up in place to film. Typically, Savile claimed to have correctly predicted eight positions out of the first Top 10.

‘Everyone’s nerves were sticking out like porcupine quills,’
⁸
he recalled of the day of the first broadcast. All bar one person, that is, for in the very next breath Jimmy Savile claimed to be as relaxed and confident as ever. In fact, he had spent the previous evening in London at the
Sunday People
’s New Year’s Ball, before catching the 4.20 a.m. train to Manchester.

The Rolling Stones, who Savile had promoted extensively on his Radio Luxembourg show, rolled up at the Dickenson Road studios in their pink VW tour van. They were at number 13 in the charts with ‘I Want to Be Your Man’. The Hollies, at number 17 with
‘Stay’, spent the hours before transmission moaning about the chaos masquerading as rehearsals. ‘It was ramshackle,’ confirmed Keith Richards, ‘like people were making it up as they went along. Jimmy Savile’s energy kept it all together. He kept popping in and out, going “All right boys, all right? He energized the whole thing before the show went out.”’
⁹

At 6.36 p.m., the red studio light switched to ‘live’ and the cameras zoomed in on Jimmy Savile. He was dressed in a sober black shirt and seated at a desk in front of a large illuminated board showing the week’s chart. Unlike the other presenters on the show, he did not have ‘disc maid’ Denise Sampey sitting beside him to put the pick-up arm on the record as the cue for the camera to fade up to the band miming on stage. As an experienced dancehall DJ, Savile argued this is what he did every night of the week.

The Rolling Stones opened the show, followed by studio ‘performances’ from Dusty Springfield (‘I Only Want to Be With You’), The Dave Clark Five (‘Glad All Over’), the Hollies (‘Stay’) and Swinging Blue Jeans (‘Hippy Hippy Shake’). In between were pre-recorded items with Cliff Richard with The Shadows and Freddie and The Dreamers. The finale arrived with the week’s number 1 single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ by The Beatles. As the group were on tour in America the song was played over a montage of news clips.

‘Man I lost a lot of flesh … because a first ever show of a series can be murder,’ Savile reflected in the
Sunday People
the following week. Not that much it seems: on leaving the studios on Dickinson Road, he said he dropped into the Three Coins on Fountain Street before catching the 11.55 p.m. train back to London, arriving at 7.15 a.m. the next morning. From there, he went straight to Radio Luxembourg to ‘record five shows and four commercials’. In other words: business as usual.