Read In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Online
Authors: Dan Davies
When I asked Semper how he now felt about Savile, he audibly exhaled. He described him as tactfully as he could, calling him ‘an enormously complex character’ and ‘a ruined person’. When pushed to clarify what he meant by ruined, Semper replied, ‘His proclivities overpowered his undoubted intelligence.’
According to the joint report published by the Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC in January 2013, the years 1974 and 1975 mark the nadir of Jimmy Savile’s offending, with allegations of fifteen sexual assaults recorded for both years.
43. THE 1976 TEMPTATION
‘H
e was extremely proud if not boastful about what he could do physically,’ recalled Colin Semper, the producer of Jimmy Savile’s
Speakeasy
show for Radio 1. ‘He talked about it a lot. I’m sure that was partly him bolstering himself against the onset of old age.’
As he neared 50, and the end of his latest test of physical endurance – a 12-day run from Land’s End to London in January 1976 – Savile offered up his own explanation of why he pushed himself so hard, and so publicly. ‘It’s about discipline,’ he said. ‘It takes discipline to run 30 miles a day, and when I get back to London I will apply that same discipline to my work.’
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The 291-mile slog was undertaken to raise £1,000 for disabled people, although it certainly generated plenty more than that for Savile, thanks again to the work of Bob Brooksby. Following behind him all the way was a motor caravan emblazoned with ‘You’re Tea-rific’, the slogan of the British Tea Council. His running gear carried the same branding. ‘Uncle Bob doesn’t work for me but he organises a lot of things for me,’ explained the man who had become an expert at making charity pay. ‘So he gets a lot of the spin-offs.’
2
The Tea Council promotion covered Jimmy Savile’s expenses and more in return for the exposure he guaranteed. The arrangement eventually stretched to providing a specially adapted Range Rover with a bed in the back – in effect a smaller version of the
Savile’s Travels
caravan that had been the scene of so many assaults.
Brooksby, who admitted that he worked on deals for Savile on everything from cars and furniture to clothes and food, offered his own brief clarification of how the relationship worked: ‘A lot of my business involves publicity deals [Savile] helps with. We both make out of it. And I lose all his incidental expenses among my accounts.’ Brooksby had even furnished Savile’s London flat close to Regent’s Park.
Fix It Promotions, the company they established in May 1977, would made money hand over fist, cashing in on the bankability of
Jim’ll Fix It
and the feel-good factor Roger Ordish spoke of. Savile went on to appear in advertising campaigns for children’s shoes, tyre companies and insurance brokers, the latter being a neat fit given what he told one newspaper about his financial problems.
‘The trouble is, you cannot have more than £15,000 in any one society,’ he bragged, ignoring the fact that millions were unemployed at the time. ‘We brusque and dour North Countrymen don’t like stocks and shares. We prefer to put our money into building societies. I also buy whopping great insurance policies.’
3
Sometimes, he didn’t have to do anything at all. On one occasion, Brooksby claimed to have been sent a box containing £3,000 in notes, accompanied by a note from an unnamed woman saying she wanted to buy Jimmy Savile a watch for Christmas. Brooksby spent the money on an 18-carat gold Rolex encrusted with 80 diamonds. In return, the star offered up his old watch as a raffle prize and appealed for the woman to contact his business manager so that he could ‘take her for a trip round London in a charity ambulance and give her a cup of tea’.
4
But the discipline Savile spoke of in relation to his latest, heavily endorsed sponsored run was not only required for the extraction of revenue from any given situation. It is now evident Savile needed to apply it in keeping a tighter rein on his sexual appetites.
Jim’ll Fix It
had pulled in more than 15 million viewers a week in its first season, and in doing so had made its host an icon for daydreaming children everywhere. Allied to the growing fanfare for his charity
work, he now had a lot more to lose from bad publicity or, worse, exposure.
‘I’m wondering … [if he] suddenly saw, particularly with
Jim’ll Fix It
, that there was this immense respectability coming to him, this saintliness,’ reflected Roger Ordish. ‘Maybe he thought, “One day, I’ll get a knighthood so maybe I should mend my ways or at least be a damn sight more careful about how I do these things.”’
As always, managing this vast deceit remained a high-wire act, albeit one that Jimmy Savile appeared to be enjoying. When Lord Justice Lawton sat on an Appeals Court hearing for a 17-year-old part-time disc jockey who had been given a detention order, he offered the opinion that such work could result in ‘indulging in occasions for sin’. An enterprising reporter contacted well-known radio DJs such as David Hamilton, Tony Prince and Nicky Horne, who all took the opportunity to hit back. But not Jimmy Savile. ‘The geezer’s 100 per cent right,’ he said. ‘If you get into clubs and places like that you are coming up against all sorts of temptations – drugs and under-aged birds and things. This is the 1976 temptation. Some of us go down and some of us don’t – it’s the responsibility of the person involved.’
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This was classic Savile, rebuffing allegations with a nod to what he was up to away from prying eyes – smoking cannabis with police officers, coercing underage girls into sex, lulling parents and hospital workers into a trance of compliance – while reinforcing his newly earned credentials as a pillar of society.
That same month, at a Scarborough conference for Young Conservatives, he took another step closer to the inner circles of power after being introduced, in her hotel suite, to Margaret Thatcher, who had recently been installed as leader of the opposition. Savile took his opportunity to make an impression by gallantly clearing the suite when it became clear Thatcher wanted to go to bed. It was a gesture that sowed the seeds for a long and close relationship, the next stage of which was to see her grant him an exclusive one-hour interview for
Speakeasy
, followed by an
item for
Jim’ll Fix It
in which two girls got to ask her questions in her office at the Houses of Parliament.
In March, the
Listener
, the BBC-produced magazine designed to provide ‘a medium for intelligent reception of broadcast programmes’, ran a profile piece that further endorsed Jimmy Savile’s new stature. On the one hand it celebrated the ‘amazing ability of the BBC to absorb, contain and afford expression to the most eccentric and wayward of talents, while remaining true to itself, particularly in the case of Jimmy Savile, OBE’. On the other it pinpointed the ‘curious form of media-inspired solipsism that allows [Savile] to disappear so effectively as a private citizen’.
The most revealing words come in the profile’s concluding paragraph: ‘[Jimmy Savile] has graduated from disc-jockey to “personality”, and now, he just has to be. He serves on advisory hospital boards and rubs shoulders with royalty – a member of the establishment, in fact.’
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His halo was being buffed and polished: a second series of
Jim’ll Fix It
; a gold medal from the Grand Order of the Knights of Malta, a Catholic charitable organisation; and the announcement that he would once again be marching for peace in Belfast, this time alongside Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, the women who had sparked a spontaneous movement in Ulster after Corrigan’s sister lost three children in a confrontation between two IRA operatives and members of the British army. The march, in November 1976, would see Jimmy Savile lead more than 10,000 teenagers from both sides of the sectarian divide from Ormeau Embankment in east Belfast to Crawfordsburn Country Park in County Down.
Entranced by his own omnipotence, Savile took it upon himself to berate the Labour government for its 90 per cent tax bracket on the highest earners in society, shortly before revealing some of the deals that allowed him to play the Inland Revenue like a fiddle. But in the course of his now habitual grandstanding about the size of his personal wealth, he made an uncharacteristically sloppy mistake by reminding Salford Council he was still paying just £10
a week in rent on the flat at Ascot Court on Bury New Road, and using it on only a handful of occasions each year.
‘No, I don’t feel guilty about having a council flat while others are homeless,’ he barked, having just boasted about owning a nightclub complex in Bournemouth, the Maison Royale, that had been valued at over £1 million. ‘I do a fair bit for charity.’
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Days later, as he prepared to celebrate his 50th birthday, Savile opened the papers to discover that his throwaway comment about the council flat had blown up in his face. ‘Morally, he shouldn’t think twice about remaining in the property,’ said a spokesman for Shelter, the homeless charity. His Ascot Court neighbours were equally dismissive. At a time when there were more than 6,000 people on Salford’s housing list, the council’s housing committee chairman described the situation as ‘deplorable’.
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Dave Eager told me that Savile was incandescent. ‘[He] rang me up and said, “Go to the caretaker, get the keys and take all my personal possessions out of the flat.” He told Salford Council they could have the flat back with all the furniture. The idea that a Labour councillor should try to get a story on his back when he’d done nothing wrong, and not even have the courtesy of speaking to him first, well, he found it objectionable. He said he didn’t want anything more to do with Salford.’
If there was one thing Jimmy Savile hated more than being parted from his money, it was being publicly embarrassed. His response was to attempt to spin the story back onto a more favourable trajectory by insisting he would leave his furniture and television, as long as the flat went to a needy couple. It didn’t work. He only had himself to blame.
Soon after moving his belongings out of the 10th-floor apartment in Salford, Jimmy Savile also sold the old family house on Consort Terrace in Leeds.
As Colin Semper said, Jimmy Savile’s natural intelligence (a Mensa test, completed at Broadmoor Hospital under the supervision of a consultant psychiatrist, awarded him an IQ of 150, putting him in the top one per cent in the country) was occasionally
hostage to the darker forces at work in his nature. But in the baking hot summer of the Silver Jubilee year, and the 12 months that followed, such considerable mental power was not sufficient to prevent him from making a series of atypical, and potentially costly slip-ups.
The first came in July. Soon after being interviewed by a newspaper while surrounded by teenage girls in his dressing room at
Top of the Pops
, Jimmy Savile went to stay at Henlow Grange health farm in Bedfordshire. He said it was in preparation for a world record bid on the number of Channel crossings in a day, a stunt that would earn £10,000 for Action Research for the Crippled Child, and doubtless more in advertising kickbacks from the Hovercraft company.
At Henlow Grange, Savile met a 16-year-old trainee beautician named Julie Ball. She said he charmed her and drove her home where he signed autographs for local children and sat up late talking with her family. The very next night, he took the teenage girl to see a play in Letchworth. She said they had to leave early because of the commotion he caused.
On the drive home, Julie Ball reported they cruised around country lanes until Jimmy Savile found a quiet lay-by. ‘He put soft romantic music on the stereo,’ she said. ‘We sat and talked. Then he climbed into the passenger seat beside me … We kissed and cuddled for half an hour and he kept on saying, “This is special.” He was very passionate.’
The 16-year-old told the
News of the World
that she thought she was in love with the star of
Jim’ll Fix It
and
Top of the Pops
, but admitted that ‘it’s too early to talk of plans of any kind’.
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When the newspaper put Julie’s claims to Jimmy Savile, he didn’t flinch. ‘Yes, I took her for a spin in my car. It was, I thought, a treat for her after the kindness her family had shown me. But no way did we stop for a kiss and a cuddle.’ He insisted Julie’s mother had contacted him to explain that a freelance journalist had offered her daughter £50 for the story, and he’d advised her to take it: ‘Julie is a very pretty girl and this is her moment of glory. When
I found out what was being said I didn’t want to leap about and say, “That’s not true.” It wasn’t hurting me and I suppose it was doing something for the girl.’
Daphne Ball believed her daughter’s account of her evening with Jimmy Savile, although she didn’t seem particularly worried about what had happened. ‘After meeting Jimmy I trusted him and liked him,’ she said.
Julie, though, was distraught to learn what the man she had fallen in love with had to say about their tryst. ‘He must be trying to preserve his image,’ she said.
It is another textbook example of Jimmy Savile’s approach: the subtle grooming of the parents, the ride in the Rolls-Royce, the sweet nothings and then the decisive move to claim what he’d wanted from the outset. Then, as he had done in numerous other situations, he rode it out. He even managed to twist the first and only kiss and tell story to appear about him by making the nation feel complicit through sharing what he had been up to with a girl barely above the age of consent.
No more was said about Julie Ball in the days, weeks and months that followed. But it turns out she was not the only object of Jimmy Savile’s lust during his week at the health farm.
Claire (not her real name) was an 18-year-old chambermaid at Henlow Grange. She told a newspaper that Savile asked her to serve him breakfast in his room. Lewd comments about her breasts quickly escalated into groping her until one day she opened his door to find him lying naked on the bed with an erection. ‘I felt disgusted and humiliated,’ said Claire. ‘I tried everything not to be sent back to his room again.’
Two weeks after the Julie Ball story, Savile let his guard slip once again. After breaking his ankle in a charity walk for Belford Hospital in the Scottish Highlands, he was on crutches as he hobbled onto the Mallaig to Glasgow train. At Queen Street station he was met by an 18-year-old model who he described as having become ‘a very close friend’
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over the course of the previous three years.
‘She is probably the most beautiful of the people who are around to meet me when I travel to their part of the world,’ Savile said of the girl. ‘If I was contemplating marriage, I would hope it would be to a girl like her.’ There was no comment about the fact that his ‘friendship’ had started when the girl was just 15.