In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (25 page)

32. THEY KNOW I’M HONEST

R
epresentatives of all Britain’s main political parties attended the press conference, at which each declared his support for a campaign sparked by five company secretaries working in the head office of Colt Ventilation and Heating Ltd in Surbiton. The women had offered to work one Saturday morning a month for no extra pay, profits or overtime.

This gesture was made against the grim backdrop of a stalling economy, compounded by an increasing deficit in the balance of trade, a damaging spate of strikes, the six-day war in the Middle East, a devalued currency and rising bank rates. What had spurred the secretaries to act was a letter written to
The Times
by the Conservative MP John Boyd-Carpenter in which he had suggested Britain could alleviate the economic stagnation being experienced under Harold Wilson’s Labour government if those ‘in responsible positions’ set such an example.

The initiative taken by the women at Colt snowballed to the extent that by 5 January 1968, when the MPs from both sides of the House convened, it had become a national effort. Operating under the slogan ‘I’m Backing Britain’, companies from all over Britain signed up, thousands of Union Jack lapel badges were produced, and ordinary citizens even began to send money to the Treasury to reduce the national debt. The Duke of Edinburgh was sufficiently impressed to send a telegram of encouragement.
¹

Jimmy Savile had nothing to offer the drive to increase exports – his fame was a uniquely British phenomenon – but he had no intention of missing out on what he saw as an opportunity for easy
publicity. After offering his services as a volunteer porter at Leeds General Infirmary, where he already recorded inserts for the hospital radio station, he ensured the newspapers were on hand to record his first day on the job. By giving nine days over a two-month period, he told them, he calculated he was contributing the equivalent of £1,600.

One paper reported that he turned up in his Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and wore a white porter’s jacket over a Union Jack waistcoat. Another described him as a ‘Plain man’s philosopher, everybody’s friend, nobody’s fool’ before revealing ‘He chatted up, charmed, kissed, saluted, or hailed anything that moved.’
²
Sir Donald Kaberry, MP for North-West Leeds and chairman of the hospital governors, said, ‘He will be treated as an ordinary worker.’
³
Mr E.N. Hill, the assistant house governor, was more effusive; claiming his effect on the patients was ‘quite magical’.
⁴

Jimmy Savile insisted this was no publicity stunt. Instead, he saw himself as a figure around whom Britain could rally. As he told readers of the
People
the very next Sunday: ‘There’s bags and bags of spirit … in this country. I know as I see it all over. What is needed is a Winston Churchill to gather it all up, point it in the right direction and … Boom! All those clouds lined with devaluation and unemployment would blow away, and quickly.’
⁵

As an example of the sort of pluck that might yet save the UK from financial ruin, he cited Jimmy Corrigan, his friend from Scarborough. Clearly, the Pop Civic Ball in Otley was still on his mind because he revealed he had outlined similar terms for a charity event in Bingley, only this time he and Corrigan would sleep in a tree house in Shipley Glen. The conditions? ‘As usual, my wages of fun bodyguards – six local girls.’
⁶

An outbreak of foot and mouth disease foiled the plan, and the girls were spared the fate that befell their counterparts in Otley. Instead, Savile and Corrigan spent the night on a raft in the middle of a river in flood. ‘My pal could have bought the town,’ he wrote, ‘but he wouldn’t have dreamt of backing out just because everything wasn’t sweet. That’s what I call spirit.’
⁷

On that same Sunday, Michael Parkinson commented on Jimmy Savile’s burgeoning persona, one that now amounted to more than being a fast-talking, bizarrely dressed figure of fun. In a
Sunday Times Magazine
special edition on Yorkshire, Parkinson’s profile, headlined ‘Honest Jim’, described an enigma, albeit one with a shrewd head for business and a rare social conscience. In it, Savile aptly summarised his place in society: ‘To most people I am a question mark.’ It was a status that never changed.

The interview took place in the studios of Radio Luxembourg, and at one point Parkinson reported a telephone call coming through from Leeds General Infirmary. Savile claimed the call was from a dying 11-year-old boy who wanted a chat as a birthday treat. Such calls were a regular occurrence, the producer of the show told Parkinson, who went on to describe the DJ, TV star and charity fund-raiser as, ‘Savile the Social Worker’.

At the end of the piece, Savile offered his own reasons for why he was able to do what he did, although it better explains how he was given such access to the sick and vulnerable: ‘I think the majority of people like me and I think they like me because they know I’m honest.’
⁸

Even once the allegations about his erstwhile friend had surfaced, Dave Eager still maintained that hospitals offered Savile the sort of unconditional emotional engagement that was lacking in the rest of his life. ‘When he was starting in the hospital wards, he said to me, ‘Dave, how could I possibly stop doing it? If you wheel somebody down to the theatre and they ask whether you’ll be there when they come round, it gives me something to look forward to.’

Eager also recalled the pull was even stronger when Savile knew the patient was dying. ‘He’d know when somebody had not got long to live,’ Eager confirmed. ‘They’d look at him and say, “Jim, can I ask you something? When I die, can you wheel me down to the mortuary?” He’d say, “If that is showing someone love and respect, and they’d like that, there’s no way I won’t be there to wheel them down because that is the promise I’ve made.”’

What’s more likely is that hospitals provided Jimmy Savile with both a captive audience and easy pickings. Where better to satisfy his longing for adulation, especially at a time when his age was beginning to show and his allure as a frontline pop star was fading, than in an environment where everyone was confined to a bed? And in being required at the most vulnerable, precarious moments in the lives of some of those people, he was enabled, both in terms of the ready access he was afforded and in the way those charged with patient care could be manipulated. It was a devastating mix, and one that he intuitively grasped.

Jimmy Savile’s standing as a volunteer and fund-raiser for the sick, the disabled, the old and the young grew apace. In 1968, a patient at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital wrote to him, asking whether he would open a fete for the hospital’s League of Friends. A gift was sent with the invitation: a Brazil nut set on a wooden plinth. Underneath, on a silver plate, was inscribed the legend: ‘NUTTERS INC – Jimmy Savile.’

‘I dropped a line back saying I would only go if the boss asks me,’ Savile told me at our first meeting. ‘I got a letter from the boss so I went. I had an immediate affinity with the place.’ It was the start of an association with the Berkshire hospital that would continue for decades.

It did not take long for Jimmy Savile to progress from pushing old ladies in wheelchairs at Leeds General Infirmary to being invited into the operating theatre to witness heart surgery. ‘There in front of me was life with a capital L,’ he wrote, ‘and my life can never be the same after such an experience.’ When the patient came round from the anaesthetic, he celebrated by going off to ‘a dance at the nurses’ home’.
⁹

In May, by which time the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign had wound down amid widespread apathy and press criticism, Savile was invited to spend a week in Dublin, Belfast and Cork at the request of Lady Valerie Goulding who admitted approaching him about helping her to raise money for the new Central Remedial Clinic with ‘some trepidation’. Savile took along his mother and
his white Rolls-Royce and was responsible for raising around £3,000. And according to the
Irish Times
, he bestowed ‘a kiss on every adult female whom he chanced upon’.
¹⁰

Later that summer, he led 500 teenagers on a sponsored walk to pay for the Margaret Sinclair Centre in Rosewell, played football in a half Rangers, half Celtic jersey for St Joseph’s Hospital and gave a sermon at a teenagers’ mass in Tunbridge Wells. In 1968 alone, he claimed to have raised £58,000 for ‘backstreet charities’.
¹¹
‘My conscience is clear,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken a lot I know, but I’ve given a lot as well.’

*

Jimmy Savile set his course for the centre of the British establishment with the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign. It won him kudos and respect, which allied to his apparently selfless desire to help those less fortunate than himself, made people begin to reappraise a man who up until that point had divided opinion. His stature was growing within the BBC as well, a fact underlined with the news that he had been signed up by Radio 1.

The BBC’s new station for pop music had been launched in a bid to fill the void left by pirate radio. By the time the government moved to outlaw them, the pirates, led by stations such as Radio Caroline and Radio London, and operating from rusting ships or disused sea forts in international waters, had changed the listening habits of the nation. It was in response to this demographic shift that the BBC decided to reorganise its radio output, ditching the Home, Light and Third Programmes in favour of four national networks, complemented by a chain of local stations.

As the controller for Radios 1 and 2, Robin Scott’s first task was to assemble a team of DJs and presenters on a tight budget. His second task was to assuage fears within the corporation. Many on Scott’s roster of disc jockeys had only recently come ashore, and there was consternation about these wildcards broadcasting on the BBC without the safety net of pre-approved scripts.

As Jeremy Paxman put it to the Pollard inquiry, the BBC had been ‘aloof from popular culture for so long. Pirate radio comes
along and all these people in metaphorical cardigans suddenly have to deal with an influx … of people from a very, very different culture. And they never got control of them.’
¹²

Dawn broke on this brave new world at 7 a.m. on Saturday, 30 September 1967 as Tony Blackburn, formerly of Radio London’s pirate ship MV
Galaxy
, welcomed listeners ‘to the exciting new sound of Radio 1’ before cueing in ‘Flowers in the Rain’ by The Move.

Like Blackburn, many of the names on Radio 1’s first roster of DJs had built their followings on the pirate airwaves: Kenny Everett, John Peel, Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, Chris Denning and Emperor Rosko, to name a few. ‘They have invaded the corridors of the BBC,’ thundered the
Daily Mail
. ‘What Radio 1 is doing is to introduce a new and potentially vicious competition among the men who make up the new disc-jockey team. They have been given short contracts and great deal of weeding out is yet to be done.’

Alongside the edgier pirate DJs who doubtless gave the retired Lord Reith palpitations were a cadre of more familiar names: Pete Murray, Alan Freeman, David Jacobs and Jimmy Young, as well as a new talent imported from Ireland, Terry Wogan. But despite being named DJ of the Year by numerous publications over the preceding three years, Jimmy Savile was not recruited for the launch of the new pop station. ‘I think they don’t want me because I earn three times as much as the other jocks,’ he said at the time.
¹³

That all changed with one phone call from Robin Scott. A show that played records between pre-recorded interviews with ordinary people Jimmy Savile met on his forays around the country was scheduled to start on Radio 1 on Sunday, 2 June. Its host celebrated by ordering himself a £13,500 Rolls-Royce with 22-carat gold handles, and negotiated a boot full of Green Shield stamps into the bargain. He later claimed his deal with the BBC included being bought a brand new Roller each year.
¹⁴

Johnny Beerling, who produced
Blackburn’s Breakfast Show
in the early days and would go on to become Radio 1’s controller,
saw the timing of the move as significant. ‘Jimmy had never wanted to be just another DJ on the station and was canny enough to wait … to see how it was doing before he joined. [He] was also shrewd enough to realise there was more mileage in joining as a solo turn than at the same time as all the others.’
¹⁵

Four decades on, Jimmy Savile admitted as much to me: ‘There was Tony Blackburn, DLT, the guy who got the sack with the helicopter and the beard [Noel Edmonds]. They were all characters, household names and we were all friends. But we were also in fierce competition with each other. I was the man who never tried. I used to float in and float out, never went to any parties and never once went to the BBC Club. That marked you as a double oddity.’

Jimmy Savile was spending less and less time in Manchester by this stage.
Savile’s Travels
, his new show on Radio 1, was predicated on his increasingly nomadic lifestyle, while
Top of the Pops
required him to be in London more and, it seems, still provided a ready source of teenage girls. On the band’s first appearance on the show, Status Quo’s 18-year-old frontman Francis Rossi was invited to Savile’s dressing room with the words, ‘Come and see me tarts. Some fucking tarts we’ve got in.’
¹⁶

The average age of the studio audience at
Top of the Pops
rose following the move to London, but girls under the age of 18 still found it easy to get in. Now in colour, the show became a weekly window onto the latest fashions. ‘I like clothes that show what a girl is really about,’ remarked producer Johnnie Stewart. Asked whether that included see-through blouses, he replied, ‘There’s nothing wrong with them, and I’d let the girls in, but I would make sure they didn’t get in shot.’
¹⁷

Stanley Dorfman, Stewart’s co-producer and director, insists that he never saw Jimmy Savile with a girl at
Top of the Pops
. He also says Savile rarely, if ever, joined the stars, producers and members of dance troupe Pan’s People in the BBC bar afterwards. ‘He was an absolute enigma,’ says Dorfman. ‘It was like he’d come in every week playing the part of Jimmy Savile. I had no indication of what he was like at home and I didn’t bother to find out.’