In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (9 page)

He was signed off on sick pay: ‘two walking sticks were added to my survival kit and hey presto I was released into the free world, after seven event-filled years underground.’
⁹
Of course, seven years underground would make it 1951 or 1952, a period in which Jimmy Savile was making a name for himself as a racing cyclist rather than as a shuffling invalid.

Trying to confirm the dates when he was mining is like trying to nail smoke. In 1994, Savile showed a reporter the rudimentary surgical support jacket he once wore. ‘I keep this … as a reminder of an accident that changed, and nearly wrecked, my life,’ he explained. ‘I was 24 and had been working in the pits for six years when I was blown up underground … I was like a zombie for three years, with two sticks and that boned jacket.’
¹⁰

According to this timeline the accident must have happened in 1950, or more probably early 1951. But if his recovery did indeed take three years, one small but rather significant fact is ignored: in August of 1951, he took part in the very first Tour of Britain cycle race. And in the official race brochure he was listed as ‘Oscar “The Duke” Saville’ [sic], a ‘company director’.

In 2008, over lunch at the Athenaeum Club, the story changed again. He told me, ‘I did seven years as a Bevin Boy, two extra than I was meant to have done.’ The most plausible timeline was given to a newspaper 30 years previously: ‘So there I was, a young man just turned twenty with two sticks and about half a mile an hour as top speed.’
¹¹
If he’d just turned 20, the accident would have happened in late 1946 or early 1947.

But even if Jimmy Savile was signed off sick in 1947, the speed of his recovery can have been nothing short of miraculous. Why? Because in the spring of 1948 a young and extremely fit Jimmy Savile appeared as an extra in the British film,
A Boy, a Girl and a Bike
starring Diana Dors and Honor Blackman. The story is based around a fictional cycling club, and Savile and a pal landed work and moved into digs in Grassington as the production moved between locations. The film climaxes in a prestigious Yorkshire road race, in which, for a second or two, the unmistakable figure
of a 21-year-old Jimmy Savile can be seen. He looks lean and healthy, and is pedalling his racing bike like the elite competitor that he surely was at the time.

The dates are not the only inconsistencies in his story, however. During the miners’ strike of the 1980s, Savile gave an interview to the
Sun
in which he expressed his sadness at the state of the industry. The article stated: ‘In 1948, Jimmy was finally allowed to leave the pits when a chest cold showed up on X-ray.’
¹²

More perplexing still is a throwaway quote from a 1981 newspaper article in which he hit back at critics who accused him of being too hungry for publicity: ‘When I was James Wilson working down the pits for £2 a week for six shifts, it didn’t matter to anyone,’ he retorted.
¹³

It is unlikely that this was a typo, given that Wilson was one of Jimmy Savile’s middle names. So why did he refer to himself as James Wilson, and was it an uncharacteristic slip of the tongue? He once told me that he was named after a cousin, Jimmy Wilson, who died in a car crash at the age of 22. Could it be that Jimmy Wilson died much later than this and Jimmy Savile was using his late cousin’s papers to evade work? Unfortunately, records of the Bevin Boys were destroyed in a fire in 1950 and only around 500 members of the Bevin Boys Association are alive today, making corroboration of any of this impossible.

*

The Bevin Boys were, as the title of Warwick Taylor’s memoir attests,
The Forgotten Conscripts
. They had to wait more than 50 years before being presented at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day. Taylor’s long campaign for public recognition finally came to fruition in 2008 when he led a delegation of former Bevin Boys to 10 Downing Street to receive medals from Prime Minister Gordon Brown. ‘This is wonderful news for a brave group of men who have been forgotten and shelved for years,’ said Taylor afterwards. ‘We have finally surfaced in the national consciousness.’
¹⁴

I met Jimmy Savile that very morning outside the Athenaeum Club before he joined the former Bevin Boys at Downing Street.
But as Taylor later explained to me, the association had not invited Savile. Jimmy Savile was invited by Downing Street. Taylor recalled that a member of Downing Street staff had told him to ‘think of the publicity’ that his presence would generate.

Taylor also told me that he’d approached Jimmy Savile at the reception and invited him along to one of their regular get-togethers. He did not get the response he had expected: ‘Savile said nothing and just walked away from me,’ recalled Taylor. ‘He didn’t want to get involved.’

Taylor’s theory is that Jimmy Savile wasn’t a Bevin Boy at all. He said that he knew of no other conscripted miners who had been sent to work at South Kirkby or Waterloo. While the terminology Savile used when describing his mining career, and Joe Baker’s confirmation that he trained with him at Pontefract and worked with him at South Kirkby would seem to suggest otherwise, it is very unlikely that he was a Bevin Boy for as long as he variously claimed. The possibility that he was using another man’s identity papers in order to dodge work and further his career on the edges of the black market is, of course, another intriguing alternative.

This period in Jimmy Savile’s life remains as murky as the environment he claimed to have worked in. Most of the pits where the Bevin Boys served have long since closed. The gates of South Kirkby colliery were padlocked in 1988 and it was demolished soon afterwards, while golfers now roam the landscaped grounds where Waterloo Main Colliery once stood. Among the 164,000 and more records stored by the Coal Mining History Resource Centre, I could find no evidence of a shot-firing accident at Waterloo Main between 1944 and 1950 although, as Warwick Taylor pointed out, one miner was killed every six hours and another was seriously injured every six minutes. ‘It’s unlikely the accident would have been reported,’ he conceded.

9. OLD AND INFIRM

A
ttitudes towards the Jimmy Savile investigation within the
Newsnight
offices seemed more positive in the wake of the successful interview with Keri, even if the spectre of the planned
Jim’ll Fix It
tribute show at Christmas remained a background worry for those working on the story. The BBC received more than 12,000 applications for tickets for the recording of the show, though Jones and MacKean didn’t know this at the time. Jones was concerned enough, however, to voice his reservations about the scheduling of the tribute to
Newsnight
’s editor and their executive editor on the Savile report, Peter Rippon.

Keri had given the team a potential lead on the identity of the Duncroft girl who encountered Gary Glitter in Jimmy Savile’s changing room in 1974, and Hannah Livingston, who had by now established that the programme was
Clunk Click
, continued to follow up. By 17 November, Liz MacKean had emailed Jones and Livingston to say that she had heard from six ex-Duncroft girls but was still no nearer to being able to confirm whether there had been a police investigation and if so, whether letters existed explaining why it had been dropped.

Jones contacted Mark Williams-Thomas to give him an update on the police angle, confirming that most of the women spoken to believed they had been interviewed by the police around 2009, before receiving a letter that confirmed the Crown Prosecution Service had declined to proceed on the grounds that the individual was too old and infirm. Jimmy Savile’s name was not said to have appeared on the letters.

If the Savile investigation was to be broadcast it would have had wider implications for the corporation, particularly for BBC Television which George Entwistle ran as director of Vision.

On 21 November, Rippon had a meeting with his line manager Stephen Mitchell in which they discussed the implications of the investigation for the Christmas
Jim’ll Fix It
tribute programme. Mitchell told Rippon it was not an issue and that he should ‘follow the evidence’
¹
on his story.

Following this conversation, the Jimmy Savile report was taken off the
Newsnight
Managed Risk Programmes List at Mitchell’s behest, although he could later provide no adequate reason for his decision.

One plausible reason is that Mitchell believed Peter Rippon had grasped the meaning of his oblique language regarding the ‘Vision issues’.
²
It was the same term Liz Gibbons, who was responsible for the Managed Risk Programmes List for
Newsnight
, had used in a contemporaneous email. Contrary to what the Pollard inquiry concluded, ‘Vision issues’ could have conceivably meant the potential awkwardness of the clash with tributes to Jimmy Savile that had already been scheduled.

Later that day, Rippon also met in his office with Helen Boaden, the BBC’s director of news. She described it at the inquiry as a ‘very short conversation’
³
in which she was told about the Savile investigation and the allegations involving sexual abuse of underage girls. What Rippon failed to tell Boaden was that there were allegations of abuse on BBC premises.

In this meeting, Rippon is recorded as asking Boaden whether the story was a potential problem in terms of embarrassment for the BBC, to which Boaden replied it was not. She told him to be ‘guided by the evidence’
⁴
and that taste was not an issue. The main thing Rippon recalls of the conversation is ‘[Boaden] talking about … the funeral and the “climate in which he would be making his judgement”. He agreed with her assessment that the story needed to reach a “reasonable threshold of certainty.”’
⁵

Curiously, given what she said about this being a ‘a five- to ten-minute
conversation,’
⁶
the discussion with Peter Rippon led Helen Boaden to miss the prestigious Reuters Memorial Lecture at Oxford. When asked when the meeting took place with Rippon, she replied it was the 21st and ‘the reason I remember it is that looking through the diary I know I was meant to go to Oxford to do a lecture or attend a lecture, and the meeting overran so I literally didn’t have enough time to get on the train and get there’.
⁷

The lecture she missed was given by Baroness O’Neill who, ironically, spoke on the subject of press freedom. It was followed by a high-powered panel discussion chaired by Lord Patten, Chairman of the BBC Trust.

Two days later, Boaden met up with her deputy Stephen Mitchell, who told her that she ought to tell George Entwistle, director of Vision, about the Savile investigation as he might need to change the Christmas schedules.

On 24 November, Hannah Livingston made a breakthrough in finding the relevant episode of
Clunk Click
featuring Gary Glitter. The episode in question closes with Jimmy Savile inviting the glam rocker onto the beanbags where the teenagers are sitting. As he’s invited to sit between two girls, Glitter remarks, ‘I get two?’

‘You get two,’ replies Savile, who mock sighs: ‘I should be giving girls away.’ He then walks further down the line and sits between two other girls.

MacKean says, ‘It’s as plain as day: the tight gripping of the girls [on the beanbags], the embracing. And you see the discomfort of the girls.’

A day later, the investigating team received another major boost when Mark Williams-Thomas told Meirion Jones that a very well-placed contact had confirmed off the record that Surrey Police had investigated Jimmy Savile. This was proof that the police had taken the allegations seriously, as well as underlining the credibility of the accounts of the ex-Duncroft girls.

Rippon’s response was his most enthusiastic to date: ‘Excellent,’ he wrote, before advising that planning should now commence for a transmission date. A Rolls-Royce convertible, like Savile’s, was
hired to film reconstructions around Duncroft and the film was scheduled to be broadcast on Thursday, 8 December.

Liz MacKean had by now set up a filmed, on the record interview with Rochelle Shepherd, who was at Duncroft in the late 1970s, after Keri had left. Meirion Jones was to do the interview. ‘[Shepherd] did not present herself as a victim,’ says MacKean, ‘but she saw the groping, the tongues down the throat. She corroborated and added to the general picture. [We now had] these other vital quotes and testimonies from other victims and witnesses, and when you put it all together with the footage of
Clunk Click
and the fact we did get confirmation of a police investigation, we had a really cracking story.’

What’s more, the team had also received an account that related to abuse at Stoke Mandeville, the hospital Jimmy Savile had worked at as a volunteer before leading the fund-raising drive to rebuild the National Spinal Injuries Centre, which opened in 1983.

‘We’d heard a rumour about Broadmoor [another hospital Savile was closely associated with] but we hadn’t gone anywhere with it,’ says MacKean. ‘And we knew, because of the photograph in the
Sun
[in 2008], that he was at Haut de la Garenne [the Jersey children’s home at the centre of an abuse scandal]. So we were thinking, “Hang on, if we know this now about Duncroft … we are building up a picture and there could be a lot more [victims] out there”.’ Meirion Jones predicted that there might be as many as one hundred. It was an estimate that turned out to be conservative in the extreme.

*

On 27 November, less than three weeks after Jimmy Savile’s funeral had taken place amid rapturous national coverage, Meirion Jones began drafting a preliminary script that would be read as the ‘cue’ for the report. This is what he wrote:

‘When Jimmy Savile died in October, Prince Charles led the tributes to a national treasure. But there was a darker side to the star of
Jim’ll Fix It
.
Newsnight
has learnt that he was investigated by police for sexual assaults on minors but the Crown Prosecution Service decided in 2009? [the question mark is included because they were
still waiting for confirmation from the police and the CPS] that he was too old and infirm to face trial. Now some of the girls who say they were assaulted by him in the 1970s when they were 13, 14 and 15 have talked to
Newsnight
. They say Savile was an evil man who should rot in hell and that his charity work gave him cover to get young girls. They even claim some of his abuse took place after BBC recordings and involved other celebrity paedophiles who appeared on Savile’s shows such as Gary Glitter. Liz MacKean investigates …’
⁸

MacKean was also working on a first draft of the script proper, and parallel discussions were taking place about what Mark Williams-Thomas could add as an expert in child sex abuse cases. A copy of the first draft was sent to Peter Rippon, Liz Gibbons, who was responsible for booking editing suites at the BBC, and Roger Law, a BBC lawyer. On the same day, the Impact Team began gathering information in order to prepare versions of the story that could be rolled out across the BBC network. ‘It is safe to assume there will be a huge amount of interest in the story, I would expect all domestic outlets to want versions,’ said a member of the team in an email to Rippon.
⁹

Liz Gibbons’s reluctance to have anything to do with the story was again underlined when she emailed Rippon to confirm that he would be the executive producer on the report.
¹⁰

At lunchtime on 29 November, Rippon emailed Stephen Mitchell, who was in Belfast, with a positive-sounding update on the state of the
Newsnight
report on Jimmy Savile. Seven victims of sexual assault from Duncroft Approved School had been spoken to, Surrey Police had carried out an extensive investigation, which was recent even though the offences took place in the 1970s, and the women were credible. He added that Sky were also chasing the story so it would be prudent not to ‘sit on it’.
¹¹
It is a telling detail, given that Sky’s interest made it more likely that the story would come out one way or the other.

Mitchell replied 18 minutes later, enquiring as to whether the headmistress of the school had been spoken to, and whether the girls had approached any of the staff. Rippon answered the questions
and sent some cut and pasted sections from the script. That evening, Rippon emailed Mitchell again stating that he would send a script after speaking to Meirion Jones, who was due to interview Rochelle Shepherd the next day. A telephone conversation is then understood to have taken place between Rippon and Mitchell though neither could recall details for Pollard.

Suddenly, on the morning of 30 November, the course of the investigation shifted decisively. MacKean’s background fears about the ‘alternative reality’ within the BBC over the tribute show that had aired and the
Jim’ll Fix It
special planned for Christmas suddenly emerged front and centre when she received an email from Meirion Jones. It was forwarding a message from Rippon in which he stated he now wanted to establish that the Crown Prosecution Service had decided not to press charges because Jimmy Savile was too old and infirm. To Jones, MacKean and Livingston, this represented a ‘journalistic bar’ that had never previously existed. Rippon’s attitude to the story had changed overnight.

In his later statement to the Pollard inquiry, Rippon set out his thinking at the time: ‘The extent to which we had to rely on the testimony from [Keri] was stark. She was the only victim in vision we had and would be the face of our allegations and I remained concerned about how well her testimony would stand up to the scrutiny it would get.
¹²

‘I was also concerned with the way we collected the additional evidence from other victims and witnesses. The women were to remain anonymous. The interviews had all been done on the telephone. Some of them were done by a junior researcher who was with us on work experience who I had never worked with. I was also concerned that the evidence could be potentially undermined because some of the women had already discussed the claims amongst themselves via a social networking site. In my personal experience, the strongest testimony from victims of alleged child sexual abuse has to be collected individually, face to face, on neutral territory, with trained interviewers used to not asking leading questions. This was a long way from what we had done.

‘For these reasons I emailed Meirion on 30th November saying I wanted to pursue the CPS angle on the story to its end before finally deciding on publishing.’

Rippon had previously expressed doubts about the women’s credibility and his desire for the CPS angle to be explored, but his sudden volte-face came as a total shock to the report team. The non-appearance of the letter from the police had suddenly become a major problem. I asked Liz MacKean whether she now thinks the letter ever existed.

‘I don’t know but I have to question whether it did,’ she says. ‘I really wanted to find that letter because clearly it would have been signed, sealed and delivered in terms of persuading
Newsnight
. I believed it did exist, although not necessarily as people were describing it to us. We were led on a complete goose chase [by one former Duncroft girl]. She was the one account that we had the greatest disagreements about.’

This particular woman assured MacKean she had emailed the letter for her to see. On another occasion, MacKean offered to drive to the woman’s house to collect it in person. When the letter didn’t materialise, she began to suspect that the woman was enjoying rather too much the power she had in the whole investigation.

Looking back, Meirion Jones agrees: ‘When you actually got down to people who said they actually had a letter from the police it was only one person. From what we know of the procedure, they would have got letters but the letters wouldn’t have said anything like [Jimmy Savile was too old and infirm]. I think, very likely, that whoever was dealing with them, the police officer or whoever, would ring them up and soften it by saying, “It’s not that you’re a bad witness but he’s very old and he’ll probably be dead by the time we got him to trial”, softening chit-chat so they don’t feel that they’ve just been trampled on.’