In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Page 9

  ‘It was that, I think, that created the huge embarrassment. And it’s why they were at pains to emphasise17 that they were investigating Surrey Police. It seemed to let down the sort of people the BBC should surely be there to represent. A 10-second conversation? How is that remotely adequate? And I do think a lot of the BBC’s subsequent chaos did come down to that essential embarrassment that they’d taken their eye off the ball.’

  Three days after that lunch, Surrey Police issued a formal statement confirming they had investigated Jimmy Savile over ‘a historic allegation of indecent assault … alleged to have occurred at a children’s home in Staines in the 1970s.’ Meirion Jones responded with some further questions, to which they replied with the information, ‘the case had been referred to the CPS and it was the CPS who decided not to take it any further’.

  Further conversations with Rippon took place, including one on 5 December in which he is alleged to have pointed out that the girls in question were ‘not the youngest’ and ‘it wasn’t the worst kind of abuse’.18 MacKean was shocked, and pointed out it was exactly this sort of attitude that persuaded victims of historic abuse not to come forward. Rippon also told her he had not warned the controller of BBC1, Danny Cohen, about the story. It seems clear that by this stage Newsnight’s editor wanted to see the back of the story. Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean sat and fumed.19

  On 9 December, the Crown Prosecution Service provided Meirion Jones with a statement: ‘Following the investigation by [Surrey] Police, the CPS reviewing lawyer advised the police that no further action should be taken due to lack of evidence … As this is the case, it would not be correct to say that his age and frailty was the reason for no further action being taken.’20

  Jones immediately forwarded the email to Rippon and they spoke shortly afterwards. Rippon then emailed Mitchell with the news, adding, ‘As a result Meirion has accepted my view and agreed not to pursue anymore.’ To which Mitchell replied, ‘Fair enough’.21

  I asked MacKean how the news was relayed to the ex-Duncroft girls, none of whom had asked for payment of any kind to tell their stories. ‘It was very difficult,’ she says. ‘Meirion and I had a conversation about how to tell [Keri] and Rochelle. We didn’t because we didn’t know how to say it. It just felt that we were in a hopeless position and therefore we didn’t do what we’d normally do in this situation. What were we supposed to say? We just felt that our hands were tied. It was very uncomfortable indeed.’

  Jones says he suspected strongly at the time that Peter Rippon had been leant on from ‘on high’. ‘I think Helen [Boaden] raised the bar,’ he later told the Pollard inquiry. ‘And I think [Rippon] took that as … an indication about what he should or shouldn’t do. So, yes, I do think he was leant on … that was the impression I got.’22 This impression was not shared by Nick Pollard, the former Head of Sky News who led the inquiry, however: ‘I have not concluded that any inappropriate managerial pressure affected Mr Rippon’s decision-making process.’

  10. ‘POWER’ IS THE WRONG WORD

  ‘We didn’t think he’d walk again,’ said Jimmy Savile’s sister Joan. ‘But he were up on his bike, in plaster from hip to shoulder, leaning flat over the bar. You had to admire his guts.’1 If the period after the war witnessed a second miraculous recovery from the ‘chosen one’, it also saw the first stirrings of the persona that would transport him to national fame – and ultimately, infamy. Again, it is one in which detail and dates swirl like smoke.

  Signed off on 16 shillings a week sick pay, Savile said he spent his convalescence in the downstairs front room at Consort Terrace. For inspiration, he tore a picture of a Rolls-Royce from a magazine and pinned it on the inside of the cupboard door. The long days and weeks spent on his back were passed looking at the picture, thinking about how he might one day be able to own a Rolls-Royce. He also listened to new music on the American Forces Network thanks to a long antenna lead trailed from an upstairs window. ‘A bed, a radio, super parents who were poor in pocket but rich in understanding: it was all quiet, peaceful and lovely really,’ he later wrote.2

  He claimed that it was his mother who provided the motivation for beating the hospital’s dire prognosis. One day, he was hobbling to the bus stop when he caught sight of an old man’s reflection in a shop window. The man was on crutches and trying to overtake him. ‘I suddenly realised the shambling figure was me,’ he said. ‘Then I saw my mother, the Duchess, coming across the road. She had one of those faces that lit up when she saw someone she loved. That day her face was sad, and I knew that she’d seen that old man, too.’3 4

  Having survived as the latchkey kid, vied with his older brothers and sisters for his mother’s attention, and finally got her to himself, Jimmy Savile became more desperate than ever for her approval. Her look of sorrow and resignation at his predicament would have cut him like a knife.

  The time spent at home recovering from his back injury represented the point when Savile began claiming Agnes for himself. By this stage, his father had been written off as a malingerer when in fact his body was riddled with cancer. Savile said he saved up to send his father on a holiday to Scarborough while he tagged along with his mother, who generally visited her relations in South Shields.

  So as he struggled to prove to his mother that he could make himself better through sheer force of will, not to mention many hours spent on his bike, he also began stepping into the space vacated by his father, looking after Agnes and, when he could, treating her with the profits of his various moneymaking schemes. In one, he created plaster of Paris ladies’ brooches and sold them on the markets. In another, he told me that he and a partner collected and sold the milled steel wire binding the giant bales of wool that arrived at local mills from Australia and New Zealand. In an early interview in a national paper, he claimed to have been earning £60 a week from scrap metal – a small fortune at the time – before his partner was killed.

  As his back improved and his confidence grew, Jimmy Savile exhibited his resolve to prove his physical prowess. He became known locally for his ability on a bike, and particularly for his bloody-minded approach to tackling the steepest inclines offered by the Yorkshire Dales. He also joined the government-backed ‘Lend A Hand on the Land’ scheme, supplementing his income by working in the fields at summer farming camps around the county.

  It was on one such camp that he said he discovered his talent for hypnotism, surprising himself and those watching by persuading an unsuspecting female victim out of her clothes. ‘A sign of the unpermissive [sic] times was that room emptied in a second,’ he wrote.5

  If this is when he began to understand how his eccentric behaviour and unusual mannerisms impacted on those around him, his all-consuming obsession with money ensured he remained vigilant for possible angles to exploit.

  Again, it was his mother he had to thank for the opportunity that would change the course of his life. According to him, she had heard of a lad in the neighbourhood who had come up with a novel invention. Savile wasted no time in acting on the tip-off. ‘I shuffled round to his house because by then I was walking on two sticks,’ he explained, ‘and there this was this amazing thing.’6

  He was referring to a wind-up gramophone in a flat box that had been modified with a pick-up attached to a valve radio. Rather than the sound coming out of a small aperture in the gramophone box, it came out of the radio which resulted in significantly increased amplification.

  Immediately recognising its potential, Savile struck a deal with the contraption’s inventor, Dave Dalmour, offering fifty-fifty on what he’d already decided would be called a ‘Grand Record Dance’. He borrowed a dozen 78s by big band leaders such as Caruso, Geraldo, Harry James and Glen Miller and hired an upstairs room at a Catholic social club near his home. Agnes was even persuaded to make tea and sandwiches. Jimmy Savile claimed that twelve tickets were sold to friends for a shilling each.

  When the evening arrived, the equipment was installed on top of a grand piano. But once plugged in,
the tangle of wires coming out of the back glowed red-hot and charred the lid. To make matters worse, the modified box also gave off electric shocks to anyone who touched it. By nine o’clock, it had overheated to the extent that a fuse was blown, plunging the room at the Belle Vue branch of the Loyal Order of Shepherds into total darkness. Agnes was called in from the refreshments room to play the piano but was put off by the lingering smell of burnt wood varnish and melted gramophone.

  Despite these technical hitches, Savile said he and Dalmour pocketed five shillings and sixpence each. ‘If nothing else in life, at least I’ve had the ability to recognise an opportunity,’ he later reflected. ‘Even then, as I stood there and played the records, I felt this amazing … “power” is the wrong word. “Control” is the wrong word. “Effect” could be nearer. What I was doing was causing twelve people to do something. I thought, “I can make them dance quick, I can make them dance slow or I can make them stop.” That one person – me – was doing something to all these people. And that’s really the thing that triggered me off and sustained me for the rest of my days.’7

  Before the truth emerged about Jimmy Savile, readers might have been forgiven for thinking he was referring to how music set him on the path to fame and riches. But I believe he was talking about control, which was far more important to him than any record. He was transfixed by his newfound ability to get people do as he pleased, and it was this rather than the idea of making punters dance that lit the fire.

  Dalmour was asked to produce a more robust and portable version of the device, this one consisting of an electric gramophone turntable attached to a two and a half inch speaker.

  While dancing to amplified records was a novelty in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was no indication these disc dances were set to make Jimmy Savile his fortune. He was nothing more than a small-time local grifter with slicked-back hair, two sticks and plenty to say for himself, not to mention the hired help of his father Vince and brother-in-law Ron. On one occasion, he said he staged a record dance in a barn but did a runner when the audience went round the corner for fish and chips during the interval.

  In the late 1940s, Savile met John Swale. They had both been offered some easy money to move a couple of chicken houses in Otley, a market town just five miles from Leeds. It suggests that Savile’s back had healed by this time. The two young men hit it off and briefly joined forces on the scrap metal earner, as well as a series of other entrepreneurial activities. ‘We’d get a band on at the [Otley] Civic Centre and James would be the MC and do the patter while I’d be on the door,’ Swale explained soon after Savile’s death.8

  In 1951, Swale recalled they were asked to put on a 21st birthday party in Otley but couldn’t afford to hire a band. Savile suggested an alternative and the girl ‘quite liked the idea of having this jig around to a guy playing records’. Their fee was to be two pounds and ten shillings.

  The upstairs room at the Wharfedale Café in Market Place was secured, and Swale then set about building a version of the contraption that his friend had first used in Leeds: ‘I went to Neil’s Secondhand Bicycle and Radio Store and bought two old wirelesses and the innards of a gramophone, screwed lampholders onto a board and wired it all together so the lights flashed to the music.’9

  The evening got off to a bad start when they connected the amplifier incorrectly, causing an ear-splitting shriek to erupt from the tiny speaker. Savile told me that things soon improved: ‘I wore my best suit, two sticks, pulled a bird for later’.

  The dates for these first record dances, or disc nights, further muddy the mystery of Jimmy Savile’s mining career and the accident that curtailed it. In 2003, he claimed the Loyal Order of Shepherds record dance took place in 1943 or ’44: ‘I’d be just 18. At the time I’d been rendered hors de combat by the explosion.’10 He gave an almost identical timeline to Anthony Clare in their 1991 interview.

  Even the key building blocks in his story – in this case, the moment he stumbled onto the power and financial potential of playing records for people to dance to – prompt confusion. If he was still walking on sticks by 1951, when Swale claimed they staged the birthday party in Otley, how was it that he came to be on the start line for the first Tour of Britain cycle race, which took place in August that year?

  11. I DIDN’T ASK

  Given the widely held belief that there had never been a regular woman in his life, in death the opposite suddenly seemed true. In the days before his funeral, Janet Cope, Jimmy Savile’s secretary for 28 years at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, became the first to break cover and share her memories of the ‘eccentric whose life wasn’t always quite what it seemed’.1

  The 70-year-old recalled that the pair had met in 1971 when Savile began doing voluntary work at the hospital. As the medical records officer in the National Spinal Injuries Centre, Cope said she agreed to type a letter for him, and the relationship snowballed from there, to the extent where she dealt with all his correspondence during the three-year national appeal to rebuild the unit, and was available to him on the phone at all hours of the day. In 1990, she perceived their relationship was such that she asked him to give her away at her second wedding. She recalled spending the night before the service ironing his white shell suit.

  After driving her to the ceremony in his white Rolls-Royce, Janet Rowe, as she was, reported that Savile took centre stage. ‘When the ceremony started he lay down across four chairs so people would look at him rather than us. Later he gave a speech which outlasted the best man’s.’2

  Cope claimed that working for Savile was a ‘non-stop, seven days a week’ commitment, particularly during the period of intensive fund-raising. In the course of administering the hospital’s Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust and attending to his every whim, Cope claimed to have glimpsed the private man beneath the familiar façade. ‘He never talked about women and nobody asked,’ she said. ‘People knew he was a bit different.’ Interestingly, she added that she saw no evidence ‘he had any other proclivities.’

  According to Cope, Jimmy Savile was a man who loved to be alone and yet lived for the adoration of the public. When he embarked on a round-the-world cruise in 1992, he made her promise to call him at every port. ‘I’d chat to him about what post he’d had, but I think speaking to me was really a reminder he hadn’t been forgotten,’ she said. ‘A lot of the people on the ship were American and they wouldn’t have known who he was, which was hard for him.’

  It is clear that Janet Cope doted on Jimmy Savile, and from her tales of cooking for him, doing his washing, polishing his jewellery and even allowing him to dominate her wedding, a picture emerges of a man who found such emotional entanglement a bind. Theirs was a one-way relationship, to the extent that she gamely went on answering his letters even while she lay in a hospital bed recovering from a mastectomy that caused her to temporarily lose the use of one arm. Savile’s response was to buy her an electric typewriter.

  He took pleasure in irritating her with his smoking, his unwillingness to take his shoes off in a house that she kept fastidiously tidy, and his refusal to thank her for all that she did for him. ‘I could tell that I annoyed him sometimes but he never lost his temper with me,’ she explained. ‘I didn’t mind the way he could sometimes be because there was a lot about him I admired.’

  She also believed he was terrified of getting old, which was why he wore the tracksuits and liked to be photographed with women much younger than himself. ‘He was fearful of the day he wouldn’t be famous anymore,’ was how she put it.

  In 1999, Jimmy Savile decided to cut back on the costs of running his charities and dispensed with Janet Cope’s services. She said it was ‘like a marriage coming to an end’ and told me that she cried for weeks.

  ‘Everybody in the hospital thought it was my fault,’ Cope told me in April 2014. ‘I clearly remember Jim saying to me, “Do not go back in that hospital.” He was frightened of what the staff were going to say to me. He did not want people saying things about him to me t
hat he had no control over … He was quite lethal in lots of ways.’

  The Jimmy Savile that Janet described in the days after his death was a man who always needed be in control. It was, she believed, why he discharged himself from hospital in his final days so that he could die at home, on his terms. ‘I bet he has written his own eulogy,’ said Cope a few days before his funeral, which she did not attend. ‘He’ll want to be in control until he passes through those Pearly Gates.’3

  Less than a month later, Sue Hymns, a glamorous 61-year-old former PA, decided it was time to tell her story. It was printed under the banner headline: ‘I Was Jimmy Savile’s Secret Lover.’4

  Hymns told the Daily Mail they had met for the first time at Leeds General Infirmary in September of 1968. She was 18 years old and on her way to a doctor’s appointment; Savile was 41 and on one of his regular stints as a volunteer hospital porter. Interestingly, on the day before his funeral, the Yorkshire Evening Post had run a short interview with Sue Hymns in which she claimed she was 17 when she had met him in a lift.5

  This could easily have been a mistake, but it could also say something about why she decided, or was urged, to break her silence on a relationship that lasted over 40 years. ‘After much soul-searching,’ wrote reporter Natalie Clarke, ‘[Sue] has concluded it would serve Savile’s memory better to “set the record straight” rather than allow unkind rumour to tarnish his memory.’

  Hymns’s motives for telling her story show that while Meirion Jones and Liz MacKean were battling to get their story on air, Jimmy Savile’s close friends and family were closing ranks as a darker picture began to emerge, one that contradicted the glowing tributes in the period after his death. Hymns’s decision to go public and lift the lid on their unconventional life together was a clear attempt to redress the balance. ‘Our relationship was private for so long,’ she explained. ‘But so much rubbish has been said about him that I think people should know the truth.’