Read In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Online
Authors: Dan Davies
One can only speculate at how Vera and David McAlpine felt as they prepared for the inquest and read quotes such as these in the morning papers. More hurtful was the postscript to one of stories which suggested detectives were now considering the possibility their daughter was a fantasist.
On 7 April, nine days after Claire McAlpine’s death, coroner Marcus Goodman recorded a ‘suicide’ verdict. A police constable read out the last entry in Claire’s diary from the morning of 29 March. ‘I can’t take it anymore, I am just a dreamer and none of
my dreams will ever come true.’ The 15-year-old had swallowed two bottles of her mother’s sleeping pills and eaten bread to keep them down.
At the inquest, she was described as being ‘in a world of her own’
15
and effectively dismissed.
More than 40 years on, the diary is unaccounted for, although Claire’s half-brother Mark Ufland insists Jimmy Savile was one of those named in its pages. ‘Savile was the one who was mentioned primarily,’ he says.
16
‘As far as I know, Jimmy Savile was interviewed as a witness. The diary was dismissed as delusional. It was the word of a 15-year-old with emotional problems against the word of the BBC.’
17
According to a BBC source spoken to by the
Telegraph
, James Crocker, a solicitor on Brian Neill’s inquiry team, questioned Jimmy Savile. At the interview, Savile refused to cooperate and was said to have mocked the entire process.
‘Savile came before Crocker but just made fun of him,’ the BBC source explained. ‘He sent Crocker up, and Crocker complained bitterly to the BBC. He went to the head of the BBC’s legal team, Richard Marshall, who had set up the inquiry, but there was nothing he could do about it. This all remained private within the BBC.’
18
Internal BBC correspondence from the time demonstrates that the decision not to make the report public went right to the top: Director General Sir Charles Curran wrote to BBC Chairman Lord Hill to recommend as much.
In 2013, a Freedom of Information request finally brought into the light of day the 64-page document completed by Brian Neill QC in 1972, albeit with vast swathes redacted. In it, Neill acknowledged that
Top of the Pops
presented ‘certain problems in that it introduces into the labyrinthine TV Centre a substantial number of teenage girls’ before urging the BBC to issue ‘clear guidelines’ as to who was to be ultimately responsible for the behaviour and control of ‘audiences of this kind’.
Bill Cotton, who had become the BBC’s head of Light Entertainment after the death of Tom Sloan in 1970, was interviewed
and appears to have succeeded in persuading Neill that instances of immorality on the show were rare. ‘The girl [Claire McAlpine] had come to see [Cotton] on several occasions,’ the report states, ‘and had invented stories for the purpose of getting access to him. He said she seemed to him in a sort of fantasy world but that she had not made any sexual advances of any kind.’
19
It is tempting to speculate what specifics those ‘invented stories’ Cotton spoke of might have contained. What is clear, though, is that Jimmy Savile’s boss at the BBC was not prepared to listen to anything that might possibly tarnish one of his brightest stars. It was just as Savile had figured. He had picked his target carefully, and covered his tracks with ruthless efficiency.
Later, in another of the non-redacted passages from the Neill report, an executive makes a point of praising Jimmy Savile at a BBC management board meeting for offering an ‘effective defence’ of
Top of the Pops
.
20
For the BBC, this was all that mattered. And Jimmy Savile recognised as much.
By March 1972, less than a year after Claire McAlpine’s death, he evidently felt comfortable enough to take a reporter from the
Weekly News
into his dressing room at
Top of the Pops
. It was described as being ‘full of girls’
21
. They included four girls from Halifax that Savile had met ‘during church discussions’, a ‘lonely’ American he encountered on
Speakeasy
, a Scottish girl he met through Belfort Hospital in Fort William and a young TV actress who was playing a schoolgirl when Savile first noticed her as a 16-year-old. She had walked across the
Top of the Pops
studio floor wearing a ‘lurex crochet suit’. Savile stopped her, recorded an interview for
Savile’s Travels
and then wined and dined the girl’s parents that night. According to the paper, he had become ‘a friend of the family’ who ‘pops up to their Ipswich home whenever he has the time’.
36. A BLOODY SAINT
J
immy Savile’s response to escaping unscathed from the payola scandal and the suicide of Claire McAlpine was to throw himself more conspicuously than ever into his charity work. He was photographed with a crew of Scarborough lifeboat men ahead of a major national walk to raise money for the RNLI, spent a week touring the country for the National Association of Youth Clubs and led a crowd of 30,000 in the fourth annual walk for the Central Remedial Clinic in Dublin. At the end, he was reported to have ‘delighted the crowd by stripping to the waist and flinging his shorts into a screaming throng’.
1
In the autumn of 1971, a journalist tracked Savile down to his motor caravan, parked as usual in a seedy area by a refuse tip close to King’s Cross station. ‘I tramp around the country like a grey timber wolf,’ he explained, after being served tea from a transport café by his driver. ‘I’m a wild animal, aware of the world and its surroundings and aware of my own needs.’
2
He then boasted of having raised £60,000 for charity that year with the intention of making £100,000 by the time he was done.
He talked of the two days a week he worked as a volunteer porter at Leeds General Infirmary and of the similar role he performed at Stoke Mandeville where he also had a key role with the hospital’s League of Friends. Then there was his title of ‘Honorary Assistant Entertainments Officer’ at Broadmoor, with a secondment to Rampton, its sister hospital in Nottinghamshire. Just a couple of months earlier, he had taken 10 patients and a number of staff from Rampton on a coach trip to Scarborough.
It is noteworthy that the article commented on the fact that some people ‘put his charity work down to publicity, tax-loss, a guilty conscience or all three’. Naturally Savile shrugged such doubts off: ‘“I’m a good Catholic,” he said. “I go to church whenever I can and I talk to God. Sometimes I ask God if I am doing the right thing; if I should continue helping where I can.”’
David Winter was a BBC producer who occasionally filled in for Roy Trevivian on
Speakeasy
, and later became head of Religious Broadcasting. ‘I once listened bemused as Savile expiated at length in the BBC canteen on the reasons why St Peter wouldn’t dare bar him from heaven,’ he said. “What do you mean he’s led an immoral life?” God would say to him. “Have you any idea how much money he’s raised for charity? Or how many hours he’d put in as a porter at that hospital? Get them doors opened now, and quick!”’
3
Now a Church of England priest and a columnist for the
Church Times
, Winter recalled trying to tell Jimmy Savile that religion didn’t quite work like that. ‘It’s a million miles from the Christian concepts of sin and grace,’ he said. ‘Savile, a practising Roman Catholic, was in fact echoing a whiff of a medieval idea – supererogation. I do more good than is strictly required in order to offset faults and sins – mine, or other people’s.’
4
The BBC sacked Roy Trevivian in 1972. As producer of the
Thought for the Day
programme he had allowed a speaker to launch an attack on Prime Minister Edward Heath’s handling of the escalating problems in Northern Ireland. When added to his drinking and occasional outbursts, it was judged the time was right to let him go. Producing duties on
Speakeasy
were largely taken over by Reverend Colin Semper, then head of Religious Broadcasting for BBC Radio.
In light of the scandal, I asked Semper how he viewed Jimmy Savile’s relationship with his faith. ‘That’s a very, very difficult question,’ he replied. ‘He had a kind of delight in saying that he went to church. But the going to church was not in any way a community thing. It always seemed to me that he was in and out.
It was episodic in a way … His faith might have been abundant to him but the coherence of it was very difficult for me to understand.’
Another aspect of Savile’s life that Semper found hard to fathom was his relationship with his mother. ‘My success has extended her life,’ Savile told one newspaper,
6
before explaining how it was impossible for him to fall in love while she remained his responsibility. ‘There was a kind of exclusivity to it, there really was,’ Semper offered of his bond with the Duchess. ‘I don’t think I ever had a conversation with him where he didn’t quote her or talk about her or say he was going to see her.’
By the end of 1971, Jimmy Savile was being described as ‘the spearhead of [the BBC’s] Christian attack’.
7
He was chosen to present the
Top of the Pops
leading up to the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day, and on Boxing Day, two hours were put aside to allow him to tell the story of his life. ‘Jimmy Savile is the BBC’s not so secret Christmas formula,’ stated the
Sunday Times
, ‘with new added RELIGION.’
Savile had also been invited to join Lord Longford’s 52-strong commission of inquiry into pornography, which had been inspired by Mary Whitehouse’s campaign to clean up the British media. Longford was determined to challenge claims that Soho’s red light area and the proliferation of adult magazines did no harm to the moral fabric of the nation. Jimmy Savile joined high court judges, clergymen, psychiatrists, professors, and, bizarrely, Cliff Richard on the commission. He described it as a ‘worthy and well-meaning attempt to sanctify Sodom before it’s too late’.
8
*
On the first day of 1972, Jimmy Savile’s stealthy progress towards the centre of the establishment was recognised when he was named in the Queen’s New Year’s honours list. The award of an OBE was in recognition of the many thousands of pounds he had raised for charity and his tireless work for hospitals.
He said that he opened the letter from Prime Minister Harold Wilson late one night in Leeds and was so excited he phoned his
brother Vince before driving to Leeds General Infirmary in his van. ‘Somebody had just died,’ he told me. ‘An old lady of 80 … so I’m pushing her from the ward to the fridge and it brought everything back to square one.’
A stretcher-bearer at Leeds General Infirmary was asked to comment on the news and said, ‘They often say he’s a bit of a twit. Us, we think he’s a bit of a bloody saint.’
9
Such an endorsement might have had something to do with the fact he was offering porters free holidays in the caravans he kept on the coastlines of North Yorkshire, Dorset and Devon.
Jimmy Savile was now openly boasting about being able to ‘claim Lords, Ladies, Earls, Ministers, Cardinals and branches of the royal family as friends and acquaintances’.
10
In the first instalment of a major newspaper series on his life, he talked of his days as a black market operator in Leeds and marvelled at how far he had come. ‘Little did I think, in those super, starving days, that I would finish up dropping cigar ash on the Queen Mother’s carpet,’ he said before regaling readers with how he had taken the opportunity to sit on the throne at St James’s Palace, or ‘that perfect Princess Alexandra’s husband would bash his head on a cupboard in the infamous
Savile’s Travels
caravan.’
His use of the word ‘infamous’ was another hint at what was really going on behind the scenes. Dennis Garbutt was employed as the driver of Savile’s motor caravan at the time. His wife Lucy told a newspaper that Dennis, who now suffers from dementia, was a patient in Leeds General Infirmary when Savile offered him the job. She said he lasted a year before quitting in disgust.
‘Savile would say to him, “Go and get a cup of tea, Den”, and that was his way of saying he wanted to be alone and it was obvious why,’ Lucy Garbutt said.
11
‘Den would then go to the pictures or just walk the streets for a while. [He] knew what was going on and we regret not doing anything about it at the time. He said Savile would have girls wherever he went.’
She reported that her husband told her how Savile routinely lured young girls onto the double mattress at the back of the motor caravan.
‘I couldn’t say how many, it was all over the country every time they stopped,’ she continued. ‘[Dennis] said, “These girls are barely older than our daughter”, who was 12 at the time. When he stopped he would have young girls … I really regret it now but Den always said he had nothing to prove it, he just knew what was going on.’
In the second newspaper instalment of his life story, Jimmy Savile wrote at length about spending the night with six girls in a caravan. ‘About a thousand arms and legs pinned me to the bed,’ he claimed, describing the scene as looking like ‘a cross between a double-X sex film and multi-legged octopus.’
12
He then described the ‘pandemonium’ when knocking was heard at the door of the caravan the next morning. One of the girls rose naked and looked out of the window to see her mother and father outside. In his autobiography, Savile admitted, ‘Escape was uppermost in my mind.’ But after rapidly getting dressed, he called them in and then bluffed that he had been there half an hour without being offered any breakfast. ‘Heaven be praised, the parents stood for it,’ he added.
13
This anecdote was followed by another: ‘It was only a little later that fine summer day when trouble loomed again.’
14
Savile then described walking along the beach with two minders when a girl wearing a one-piece swimsuit spotted him. He said she looked ‘good enough to eat’. The girl invited him to meet her parents and explained they were staying in a caravan.
Savile wrote that he left his minders with the parents and went back to the caravan with the girl. Inside, he reported the temperature was ‘nearly 100 degrees’ so he sunk into a chair ‘wringing wet with the heat and temptation’. Just as the girl began changing out of her swimming costume, the parents returned.
By putting it in print, Jimmy Savile was, in effect, performing the same mind trick on the readers of his autobiography as he did on the parents of the youngsters he went on to abuse, having first charmed them from the protective clutches of their parents.
Dee Coles experienced this brazen approach in the summer of 1972, when she was a 14-year-old enjoying a holiday with her
mother on the island of Jersey. Jimmy Savile had his motor caravan parked in the car park of the hotel where they were staying.
Forty years later, Coles told ITV News that Jimmy Savile didn’t seem like a stranger because he was on television so often. She produced photographs of the star with his arms wrapped round her outside the vehicle.
Coles and her friend accepted Savile’s invitation to step inside. It was only when he locked the door of his motor caravan behind them, she explained, that she felt what she describes as ‘immense panic’. The two girls were made to perform sex acts on the man described as the BBC’s religious ‘spearhead’.
Just like Jill in Worthing, Dee Coles’s hands were thrust down the front of Jimmy Savile’s trousers. ‘It was my first introduction to the male body,’ she recalled, ‘so the whole thing was just an incredible shock. After it happened, he tried to get us back in the van a second time, and my memory is that for me it was the end of the holiday. I just didn’t go near him or the van or see [the other girl] again.’
15
When she looks at those photos, Dee Coles thinks back to what a young 14-year-old she was. ‘I think 14-year-olds in the Seventies just were’, she says. ‘There was no way any of my friends or I wore make-up or got dressed up to go out on the town. We were quite naïve. It’s always going to be a shock to anyone being sexually abused but the innocence just disappears as soon as something like that happens.’
‘It saddens me greatly to think that so many other children suffered sexual abuse from Jimmy Savile. As a 14-year-old you don’t have the thought that it might be happening to anyone else.’
16
And still the public face of Jimmy Savile remained blemish-free. The same motor caravan in which he had abused so many young people was parked outside Buckingham Palace when the Queen Mother presented him with an OBE. Accompanying him on his trip to the palace were his mother and a porter from the X-ray department at Leeds General Infirmary.
Afterwards, he cavorted for photographers and film crews and began signing autographs, with the addition of its three new letters.
Six months later, Lord Longford published his report on pornography. It concluded that young people were ‘particularly vulnerable to the sex exploiters’ influence, and need special protection’. It also defined pornography as that which ‘exploits and dehumanises sex, so that human beings are treated as things and women in particular are sex objects’.
17
Jimmy Savile didn’t utter a word throughout his time on the commission.