In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (39 page)

49. I WOULDN’T LET THE SIDE DOWN

I
n February 1981, an industrial tribunal heard a divisional nursing officer at Springfield Psychiatric Hospital allege that Johnnie Savile had sexually assaulted a female patient. Jimmy Savile’s 61-year-old brother had been employed as the hospital’s entertainments officer for six years before being sacked for gross misconduct in April 1980.

As nursing officer John Edwards explained, Mr Savile had been ‘larking about’ and ‘miming to a record’
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in his office when he lifted the woman’s smock and began touching her stomach and breasts. The 37-year-old woman, it transpired, had been admitted to the south London hospital following a drug overdose. Edwards said he did not know of any other complaints against Johnnie Savile, although another former patient subsequently came forward to tell me how he had raped her in his office at Springfield.

Johnnie Savile denied the accusations. ‘I was worried the case might affect Jimmy, but why should I hide in a corner just because I’m his brother,’ he had said on the first day of the tribunal two months earlier. ‘In the end I spoke to Jimmy and he just said, “Go ahead and fight it.”’
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The two brothers did not speak again for eight years.

Dave Eager revealed that on one occasion Johnnie Savile tried to sell a story to the papers about his younger brother. Eager said he could not remember what the story was about, although he did remember what Jimmy had done about it when the
News of the World
phoned him up for a quote: ‘Dave, learn a lesson,’ he said. ‘When they rang me, if I’d said, “No Comment”, they’d have got a
comment. So when they rang me, I said “It will take more than the
News of the World
to come between me and the love that I have for my brother.” He then put the phone down.’

Eager did not like Johnnie Savile. ‘He was pretending to be Jimmy,’ he recalled. ‘Jim did things by psychology, he’d try to weigh you up. You knew he’d done the calculation with what would work – the kissing up the hand and all that. Obviously he got it wrong sometimes. But Johnnie Savile just did it because he felt he could. He’d lech onto people. He’d bowl up to you and make out like he knew you. [He] would say, “I’m Jimmy Savile’s brother,” and he was there in your face the whole time.’

On one occasion Savile sent Johnnie away with Eager on a foreign trip with underprivileged children from a home in Manchester. Eager said Johnnie Savile turned up at the airport wearing a T-shirt with ‘I’m Jimmy Savile’s brother’ emblazoned on the front. They went to Mamaia in Romania. Although Eager claimed not to remember when the trip took place or the name of the Manchester children’s home, he did recall that the home was subsequently embroiled in a scandal.

In 2014, the Department of Education announced it was launching an inquiry into Jimmy Savile’s activities at schools and children’s homes. Among the institutions listed was Broome House in Manchester. Ronald Hall, a former warden of Broome House, was Assistant Director of Manchester Social Services when he was arrested by Manchester detectives in 2001. He was jailed for 11 years for 21 counts of sexual and physical abuse. His deputy at Broome House, Ian Gray, was given a 14-year sentence for serious sexual offences.
³

Soon after Education Secretary Michael Gove commissioned the inquiry, a former resident at Broome House told the
Manchester Evening News
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how Ronald Hall had driven him from the home and delivered him to Jimmy Savile at Piccadilly Station. He said Savile plied him with alcohol and he woke up on the floor of his flat in Salford. He also stated that Savile visited Broome House on a number of further occasions.

Despite the unwelcome publicity surrounding Johnnie Savile’s dismissal, and the feud it sparked, it was never going to be enough to derail the runaway locomotive of Jimmy Savile’s popularity. ‘If there’s going to be any salvation it starts with us,’ was his rallying cry as the Stoke Mandeville total neared £5 million. ‘No sitting around waiting for a skint Government to plug the leaks. No point in writing to papers to complain how best to spend the nation’s housekeeping money.’
⁵

As well as his fund-raising work and a new series of
Jim’ll Fix It
, Savile also managed to fit in monthly presenting duties on
Top of the Pops
and his new show on Radio 1.
Savile’s Travels
and
Speakeasy
were no more, replaced first by the
Double Top Ten Show
on a Sunday afternoon, and then by
Jimmy Savile’s Old Record Club
.

He referred to his studio at Broadcasting House ‘The Surgery’ because of the waifs, strays and unfortunates who flocked to bask in his aura. ‘Anybody looking strange who turns up gets sent down to me,’ said Savile. ‘It’s the same when I do the Fix It show.’
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Paul Gambaccini had worked as a DJ on Radio 1 since 1973 and he’d heard the rumours about his bizarre colleague very early on. The scenes in ‘The Surgery’ only served to fuel such talk, he said. ‘The expression I came to associate with Savile’s sexual partners,’ said Gambaccini, ‘was either one used by production assistants or one I made up to summarise their reports: “underage sub-normals”. He targeted the institutionalised, the hospitalised – and this was known. Why did Jimmy go to hospitals? That’s where the patients were.’
⁷

Gambaccini said that paedophilia was considered ‘so far beyond the pale’ at the time that people simply didn’t believe it happened.

Speculation was also rife, Gambaccini added, that Jimmy Savile’s well-publicised fondness for working in hospital mortuaries was in fact a cover for his necrophilia. Certainly, Savile had never been reticent about advertising his interest in death. ‘I find I’ve got a great aptitude for dead people,’
⁸
he told one reporter in 1972. In his autobiography, published two years later, he spoke
with pride about laying out the remains of an old man who had burned to death,
⁹
and of wheeling bodies away from the geriatric ward at Stoke Mandeville.
¹⁰

‘I just happen not to freak out,’ he said of why he chose to wheel corpses to ‘the fridge’. ‘To be with somebody when they’ve just gone to heaven is an honour and one of the most fulfilling jobs. I take great care of them … If it’s an old person, I’ll be thinking that what I’d like to do is to take a photocopy of all the things they have known. If it’s a young person, I think to myself: you may have missed a lot of good times but sure as anything, you’ve missed a lot of grief.’
¹¹

But still there was no apparent appetite for examining the murkier aspects of Jimmy Savile’s life, not least while he was all-powerful within the BBC, working unofficially for the royals and leading the charge to build a hospital unit for the nation, a project undertaken on the behalf of a reluctant but grateful government.

In January 1981, he met with Thatcher again, this time to show her the architect’s plans for the National Spinal Injuries Centre. He took the opportunity to press her for some form of financial contribution from the government, as a gesture of goodwill and in recognition of the sums raised by members of the public. The prime minister remained non-committal, although documents show that the Department of Health and Social Security were keen that she did not commit NHS funds to the campaign.
¹²

Two months later, during a lunch at Chequers, Jimmy Savile again asked her for government support, making another cheeky request while he was it: inviting the prime minister to appear on
Jim’ll Fix It
.

In a handwritten memo to her private secretary, Mrs Thatcher relayed that she had promised her guest that she would get a ‘government contribution’, and a figure of £1 million was discussed. Savile wrote to Thatcher, stating that they would be grateful for any sum and there was no hurry. Equally, he would understand if no money was to be made available.

When asked by officials how much she had promised, Thatcher said she would discuss it with Patrick Jenkin, then Health and Social Security secretary. The prime minister was more decisive on the matter of
Jim’ll Fix It
, however, telling her guest that she would not be accepting his invitation.

Jimmy Savile’s standing within the establishment can perhaps be gauged by looking at a single day in July 1981. Having spent the morning at Ascot organising the Prince of Wales’s showjumping activities for the Stoke Mandeville appeal, he passed the evening with Margaret and Denis Thatcher. They attended a fund-raising performance of
Anyone for Denis?
at the Whitehall Theatre before repairing to 10 Downing Street. At one point in their conversation, Margaret Thatcher had told Jimmy Savile of her ‘deep worry’ about the violence erupting in inner-city areas of London, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield.

Later, as they sat with their shoes off and their feet up, Savile suggested a contest for schools in the troubled areas that would divert attention away from violence and towards raising more funds for Stoke Mandeville. As a prize, he proposed the prime minister throw a party at either Number 10 or Chequers for selected pupils from each school. Thatcher said she would think about the idea.

She spent the next day touring Toxteth, scene of some of the worst disorder.
¹³
‘I admire the lady enormously,’ Jimmy Savile told reporters. ‘She’s a worker.’
¹⁴

It’s my belief that one of the keys to understanding the mutual attraction between Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher were both outsiders, and recognised this truth in each other. He was the brusque, uneducated northerner who had broken down the doors of the BBC and trampled the old Reithian order underfoot. She was from a similarly unfashionable background and yet made it to the top of the male-dominated political establishment. Both were prepared to do what it took, and neither seemed to care what anyone thought of them.

Savile went on to reveal the government had given him the use of a ‘courtesy room’ at Admiralty House for entertaining leading
businessman for the Stoke Mandeville campaign. The talk, led privately by Prime Minister Thatcher, was when, rather than if, he was awarded a knighthood.

He didn’t have to wait long. In October 1981, the Vatican awarded Jimmy Savile the title of Knight Commander of St Gregory in recognition of his work for charity. In a private ceremony at the Apostolic Delegation in Wimbledon, Papal Nuncio Archbishop Bruno Heim, presented him with a medal. ‘It’s diplomatical [sic],’ Savile told me. ‘They were given the recommendation and assured I wouldn’t let the side down.’

A month later, Savile sat next to the Duke of Edinburgh at a special meal at Stoke Mandeville Hospital. His Royal Highness had laid the foundation stone for the new National Spinal Injuries Centre, and been shown around the site by a man who ignored protocol by addressing him as ‘Boss’.

As the year drew to a close, Jimmy Savile learned that his courting of the prime minister had been successful. Norman Fowler had replaced Jenkin as DHSS secretary in a cabinet reshuffle and a note to Thatcher dated 30 December 1981 states: ‘Mr Fowler has agreed to make available half a million to £1m for the Stoke Mandeville Appeal and he agrees you [Thatcher] should announce this tomorrow.’ According to the documents, the government decided to release the money as the International Year of Disabled People was coming to an end and because it wanted ‘to show our interest in the disabled has not ended’.

Fowler successfully argued that the figure should be £500,000, with an equal amount going to other causes. The cash injection nevertheless took the Stoke Mandeville fund to around £6.5million. ‘I hope this will be an impetus to the appeal, and that the target will be reached very soon,’ said Thatcher. ‘It must not just be one year when we put a spotlight on the disabled, and then do nothing after that.’

‘It is a good job I was sitting down – otherwise I would have fallen over with surprise,’ gasped Jimmy Savile, playing along with the stage-managed announcement.
¹⁵
He then posed for photographers
alongside Norman Fowler, clutching a giant cardboard cheque for £500,000 made out to ‘Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Appeal’. Jimmy Savile would be invited to spend Christmas at Chequers with the Thatchers.

Direct channels were now being opened to the very sources of power. As one of the highest-profile entrants in the inaugural London Marathon in the late spring of 1981, Savile had written to the Queen after the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Maclean, ruled that the following year’s race would not be routed up the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace. In February 1982 it was announced that the Queen had decided to overrule the decision.
¹⁶

*

Jimmy Savile was still dressed in his running gear when he met Pope John Paul II during his historic tour of Great Britain in the summer of 1982. He attended the papal mass at Westminster Cathedral before running the four miles to Southwark to help out at a service for the sick.

‘The Pope didn’t have the faintest idea who I was when he met me,’ he explained one day in Scarborough. Savile went on to say he had given the Pope a blessing on behalf of Our Lady because, in his words ‘he was looking tired’.

A year earlier, Pope John Paul II had survived an assassination attempt after being shot at point blank range: ‘I told him to get some sleep and that he would wake up with the strength of 20 men,’ said Savile pointing to a black and white photo on his wall of the Pope stopping to talk to him on his way out of Southwark Cathedral. The Pope gave Savile a Rosary which he kept permanently in his briefcase.

‘Within a day I had him bang at it,’ Savile gurgled. ‘He used to say to Cardinal Hume, “Is the blond one here today?”’ Savile also bragged to me about being on stage for the papal visit to York, where 190,000 pilgrims flocked to the racecourse on the Bank Holiday Monday. ‘They wanted somebody who could go on and tell the people what to do if they fainted or whatever. So there are all these people waiting for the Pope, and then I came
on. Well, you can imagine … the last person they expect to walk onto the fucking stage is me. You could hear a pin drop. I walked up to the microphone and said, “I am not He … but He will be here in a minute.” Then I walked off one side and he [the Pope] walked on the other.’