In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (8 page)

MacKean reveals that Keri spoke frankly about not feeling any sense of shame at the time about what she had to do to secure such treats from Savile. A few of the ex-Duncroft girls told MacKean that as they got older and had children themselves, their view of what went on had changed. ‘That is when they felt the anger,’ she confirms, ‘much more anger towards Jimmy Savile than what they appeared to feel at the time because of this subtle process that went on.’

If Savile was regarded as a lecherous old man, albeit one who bestowed occasional benefits, Keri had very different recollections of Gary Glitter, who she met during a visit to the BBC Television Centre to watch an episode of
Clunk Click
being recorded in early 1974. A forerunner to
Jim’ll Fix It
, the show featured Jimmy Savile talking to a variety of studio guests, with filmed segments in between. Children from a number of institutions Jimmy Savile was involved with sat on beanbags on the set, including, on occasion, girls from Duncroft.

Keri told MacKean that Glitter made them feel uncomfortable, and none of them wanted to be left alone in a room with him.

In her evidence to the Pollard inquiry, MacKean also revealed that she had been told the singer had offered the girls ‘a safe house’
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if they were ever in trouble with the police or had run away from Duncroft. ‘They entirely mistrusted his motives,’ she said. They felt there was ‘something dangerous about him’.

The filmed interview with Keri was a turning point in the
Newsnight
investigation. ‘By the end of it we were all convinced that [Keri] was genuine, that what she was saying was overwhelmingly true,’ says Meirion Jones. ‘As I left she told me that she didn’t believe the BBC would broadcast it – they’d cover it up. I assured her that once we found some corroboration – which we did with the
Clunk Click
footage and the other girls’ accounts – we would run with the story. There would be no cover-up.’

On the drive back to London that evening, Jones, MacKean and Livingston were in buoyant mood. It was then that they heard the news that the BBC were planning to broadcast a Christmas Special of
Jim’ll Fix It
, to be presented by Shane Ritchie.

‘We were in the car, hearing it on the radio and almost giggling,’ recalls MacKean. ‘We were going, “Oh my God, they’re going to have to cancel [it]. That’s awkward; we’re making it awkward for the BBC.” It was perfectly obvious what had to be done,’ she says. ‘To us, it was always one or the other. And then it seemed that the whole weight was against us and for the tributes.’

8. THE POWER OF ODDNESS

I
n late October 1944, Jimmy Savile turned 18 and received his call-up papers. In his autobiography, he wrote about an interval in the war when for him ‘the question was, what to join’.
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He said he couldn’t join the Royal Navy like his brothers because he couldn’t swim; he was unsuited to the army because he was too weak; and his hopes of joining the RAF were thwarted by failing a sight test. Instead, Ernest Bevin, the minister of labour and national service in Winston Churchill’s wartime coalition government, made the choice for him: the last digit on his national service papers corresponded with the number drawn out in the fortnightly ballot and, like one in 10 men aged between 18 and 25, he was ordered to report to the coalmines.

During his time as a conscript miner, or ‘Bevin Boy’, Savile claimed to have realised that opportunities existed in being different, or as he liked to put it, he recognised ‘the power of oddness’. And like the hardships he endured as a ‘Not again child’ during the depression in Leeds, his experiences in the deep mines of the Yorkshire coalfields can only have contributed to the man he became. Unfortunately, the details remain equally elusive.

As in other areas of his life, he steadfastly refused to allow a chronology to be established for this phase in his development. His standard response whenever I asked for clarification on the specifics of date or place was, ‘How the fuck should I know? 1642.’ It was a tactic he employed often: obfuscation – occasionally coupled with menace – that erected a dead end for channels of enquiry he didn’t much care for.

Up until this point, the war hadn’t caused Jimmy Savile too much additional discomfort, and though he always protested that he loved mining and would have remained at the pit had he not been injured, the experience can only have been the most brutal introduction to the realities of physical labour. He preferred to describe the period as one in which he learned about himself and, ironically for one who was confined to dark, sweaty tunnels a mile underground, about the world beyond his native Yorkshire.

As far as it’s possible to tell, Savile worked at three Yorkshire collieries. The first, the Prince of Wales Colliery in Pontefract, was a training centre for new conscripts, one of 13 in the country. South Kirkby Colliery in South Elmsall was where he was posted after completing his basic training, and was one of a string of mines in the area north of Barnsley, Rotherham and Sheffield. Waterloo Main at Temple Newsam in Leeds was his third and final posting, and the scene of the accident he claimed finished his mining career.

Pontefract was a bleak, unforgiving place: a racecourse, pit and not much besides. Like Savile, Herbert A. Purnell was a Leeds boy who had trained with the Air Training Corps from the age of 15, been called up as a Bevin Boy and sent for training at Pontefract in late 1944. ‘A lot of the lads there lived in a hostel because they were from all over the country,’ he remembered. It chimes with what Savile wrote in his autobiography about his fellow recruits being the ‘most incredible and bizarre types’. Among his intake, he said, were ‘doctors, auctioneers, farmers, officer cadets, clerks’.

On their first day, the conscripts were kitted out at the stores with a pair of sturdy boots with steel toecaps, a safety helmet and a belt from which to hang a safety lamp. Four weeks later, at the end of ‘Stage A’ training, the rookie miners were then sent underground for the first time.

For many, memories of the first ‘big drop’ remained vivid. ‘You went into the cage with trepidation,’ remembered Warwick Taylor who was put to work at a coalmine in Wales and later became chairman of the Bevin Boys Association. ‘It was supposed to
descend at 30 foot per second, but they let it go at 70 foot per second … The pressure on the eardrums was intense. Some of the lads got nosebleeds on the way down. Most of us couldn’t wait to get out.’ At the end of his first drop, Jimmy Savile remembered, ‘Twenty-five white, wobbly-legged flowers of British youth emerged like cattle to the abattoir.’
²

Stage B Training took place at the mines the recruits were assigned to. Savile was sent 20 miles away to South Kirkby Colliery, known for containing the finest steam raising coal in Yorkshire and being the deepest mine in the county. He and his childhood friend Joe Baker were initially billeted in a temporary miners’ hostel in Featherstone, where they received orders to present themselves in work clothes at the pithead baths no later than 6 a.m.

On a normal day, a miner’s shift began with undressing and placing his everyday clothes in a locker. He would then be given a bar of soap, scrubbing brush and towel and told to move naked along a short corridor, past the shower room and into the dirty area containing further lockers containing work clothes. Once changed, he’d move on to the lamp room where a ‘tally’, one of two numbered brass discs, was exchanged for a freshly charged hand lamp. Each tally was placed on a hook in the lamp room and served as proof that a miner was in the pit.

But rather than join the queue for the cage, Jimmy Savile claimed to have been put to work at the pithead. This was a noisy, brutal arena in which the incessant din was created by shunting engines, hammers on steel and giant spoil buckets tipping muck that piled up into an ugly scar across the surrounding countryside.

Savile was assigned to the screens, the long, steam engine-powered steel trays that shunted backward and forward allowing graded lumps to fall through into railway trucks below. It was a common posting for new Bevin Boys who took up position alongside elderly or disabled miners on either side of the conveyor belt.

For all his later claims that he was unlike the other recruits because he actually enjoyed being a miner, even Savile admitted working on the screens was ‘a job reserved for the young, the old
and the damned … The noise, the dark and dust and the torn fingers created an impression of Hell that I will carry to the grave.’
³

In time, he secured work underground but only because it was a job that nobody else wanted. The pit bottom at South Kirkby was a subterranean cathedral from which roadways, or maingates, took the men to the various mining districts. Savile’s new job was in one of these tunnels, working for the Corporal, the man in charge of all haulage work in the mine.

‘There was no doubt I was odd,’ he told me during our first meeting in Leeds. ‘I was always odd. People would say, “You’re a funny one, you are lad.”’ And the job he was given reflected that. He was stationed two miles from the pit bottom and a mile and a half from the face. Forced to perch on a narrow bench in a manhole chiselled into the wall of the tunnel, he spent his eight-hour shift alone. His task was to lever coal trucks back onto the tracks whenever they derailed. ‘The job used to drive everyone bonkers – no lad would do it,’ he said. ‘They would imagine ghosts and all sorts. I loved it.’

He told me about the pocket he had stitched into his coat and smuggling in books on astronomy, languages, people and travel. ‘I learned down South Kirkby colliery,’ he explained. ‘You can’t get a better learning place in the world than a pitch dark hole underground with only a lantern for company.’ He said he remained ‘King of the Corner’ for three and a half years.

Hemsworth and the surrounding villages of South Kirkby, South Emsall, Fitzwilliam and Kinsey were home to tough, tight-knit communities that looked after their own and in which favours were rife. Jimmy Savile said he did not fit in: ‘I’d never go to the pub for a drink with the lads, it wasn’t my scene. I was quite prepared to go home and sit and think.’
⁴

He pinpointed one day when ‘they drew apart from me and I started to draw apart from the normal world’.
⁵
He arrived late for work, still dressed in his blue suit, white shirt, navy tie and suede shoes from the night before. There was no time to go through the bathhouse and change into his work gear so as he came skidding
into the yard, he just managed to exchange his tally for a lamp before squeezing into the cage. He was still dressed in his Sunday best and clutching a newspaper.

Ignoring the looks and comments from the other miners, Savile said he smiled and looked ahead as if nothing was out of place. ‘The deputy sat at the bottom to check the lamps,’ he recalled. ‘When I turned up in a sharp suit, he checked the lamp and his eyes went up the suit. It freaked him.’

He talked of feeling the eyes on him as he walked off in his suit to his position on the dark bend in the tunnel. Once at his manhole, he took off his shirt, jacket and trousers, folded them up in the newspaper and settled down to read his latest book, occasionally stopping to shoulder a wayward tub back onto the rails. He said he worked naked and saved enough water from his canteen to wash down his face and hands at the end of the shift. Then, when the eight hours were up, he unfolded the paper and climbed gingerly back into his folded suit and shirt and headed back to the pit bottom. He claimed that he arrived looking as immaculate as when he had left: ‘The effect was electric.’

This was a story he told on many, many occasions, and it was the same ending every time: ‘In the history of coalmining nobody ever went to work at the coal face in an immaculate suit and came back clean,’ he claimed. He insisted the other miners didn’t want to stand next to him in the cage. Miners were superstitious by nature, and in the queue someone had said he was a witch. Jimmy Savile didn’t care. For the first time in his life he realised being odd had an effect on people.

‘I wasn’t sure what it did but it did develop my out-of-the-box thinking,’ he told me 60 years later. ‘I didn’t do it for any reason, I just realised that going back clean would freak people out, and it did. Underneath the clothes I was as black as night. But I realised that being a bit odd meant that there could be a payday.’

*

When victory over the Germans was declared in September 1945 there was a sharp rise in absenteeism among the Bevin Boys.
⁶
The
country still needed coal but there was little motivation for the conscripts to return to work when they could see servicemen being welcomed home as heroes. Under the terms of the Emergency Act, however, periods of extended leave or absence still had to be registered with both the pit and the labour exchange.

Savile had been mining for less than a year and, I strongly suspect, had become a repeat absconder by this time. For example, he claimed to have been one of the first tourists to cycle through France after the war, obtaining a transit visa that allowed him to travel by train to Switzerland via France. He said he spent his first night in France ‘in a shelter with 300 homeless people’ before setting off for Le Touquet, the fashionable seaside resort some 40 miles away. There, he found beautiful villas with furniture smashed to smithereens inside. ‘No birds flew about it and the feeling of unreal macabre was overwhelming,’ he said.
⁷

When he returned from France, stocked up with spare bike parts he intended to sell on at a tidy profit, Jimmy Savile discovered he had been transferred to Waterloo Main colliery in Leeds. In his autobiography, he stated that by this time he had done ‘nearly four years at South Kirkby’ which would have made it late 1948, some months after the last of the Bevin Boys had been demobbed.

On my last visit to see him at his Scarborough flat, he had on display his miner’s lamp, a snap tin used for food and a thick slab of coal mounted on a wooden plinth that was presented to him when he returned to South Kirkby in the 1980s. As one of the most famous men to be recruited under Bevin’s scheme, his photograph had dominated a display at the National Mining Museum of England in Wakefield. It hung in a glass case above the items now arranged on his mantelpiece.

I asked him how he felt about going back underground once the war had been won and troops were returning home. ‘I’d learned enough not to necessarily go down the pit,’ he replied, hinting at the wheeling and dealing he was doing on the side. ‘I knew I could always get a quid or two one way or another. But unfortunately you didn’t get a ration book. I had to go down the pit to get a
ration book to eat, so of course I went.’ He also admitted that he was put on night shifts as punishment for going AWOL.

The upside to be being assigned to Waterloo was that he could move back in to Consort Terrace. Each morning, he said he’d rise at 3 a.m. and walk for half an hour in his clogs to catch the train that took him to the pit. But rather than being left alone with his books on a quiet stretch of tunnel, he spoke of Waterloo teaching him to ‘enjoy the delights of manual labour’. Such delights were to indirectly lead to the accident that resulted in him leaving the mines; another significant brick in the facade of his mythology.

He said he was lying on his side in an eighteen-inch high tunnel, shovelling dust off the belt between shifts. He was working alone and should have had his safety lamp placed in a position so its light shone down the coalface to let others know he was there. Instead, when the shot-firer looked down the face and saw nothing, he detonated his charges. A split second later, the roof of the tunnel came crashing down on the concealed figure up ahead. ‘There was no sound,’ Savile recalled, ‘just a localised “WHUMP”.’

Concussed and covered in debris, including one large piece of stone that had fallen onto his back, he said he called out and was pulled clear by his fellow miners. He remembered being totally unmarked, ‘but my legs moved in a funny sort of way.’
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At the surface, he was told to lie on a pile of coal until the end of the shift.

During the next few days he recalled that his aches and pains gradually disappeared, all except for the one in his back. He went to Leeds Infirmary where neither X-rays nor a physiotherapist could locate the source of the problem. As a last resort, heated electrical pads were placed on his thighs.

Savile maintained that as the pain got worse, he kept returning to the hospital for regular check-ups. He was eventually fitted with a surgical webbing corset fortified by steel rods, which left him incapable of lifting his feet more than an inch. When he asked what his prospects were, a nurse is supposed to have taken his name card from a filing cabinet and coldly informed him that he would never walk again without sticks.