In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (10 page)

MacKean remains in no doubt, however, that the police letter and the CPS line were mere side issues. ‘It didn’t make any difference. The really important thing was that people like [Keri] and others we’d spoken to had never been to the police. So the police
letter was only a very narrow context, it wasn’t the single thing that made or broke the story because Meirion and I had more than the police. So whether the CPS dropped [the case] because he was too old and infirm, which they were never going to admit and what was being claimed, or whether it was dropped through lack of evidence, which is the usual thing, we still had more than the police.’

She says they knew the tide was running hard against them when Rippon announced his overnight change of mind. ‘We knew he wasn’t getting much support on the programme and we knew there was this view among some senior people, like Liz Gibbons, who thought it was in bad taste. We knew it didn’t take much to raise the white flag.’
¹³
Indeed, when Jones and MacKean confronted him on the day of his turnaround, Rippon is reported to have given the surrender sign and said that he ‘was not willing to go to the wall on this one’.

Jones told his editor that if the story was pulled and word got out, the BBC would be accused of a cover-up to protect the Christmas tribute shows and the BBC’s reputation. MacKean says she felt Rippon was unwilling to challenge his bosses if they had concerns about the Savile report.

On the morning of 1 December, Jones sent himself what he calls his ‘Red Flag email’, setting out in detail his thoughts on why the story should run and the serious consequences to the BBC if it did not. He felt the journalistic bar suddenly put in place by Rippon was illogical and unnecessary. MacKean urged him to send it to Helen Boaden, partly because she knew Rippon had spoken to her. Jones demurred.

Later that day, Jones received an email from Rippon enquiring again about the letter from the police: ‘I think we should stop working on other elements until we know for sure what we are likely to get from them because we don’t really have a strong enough story without it.’ Rippon added that he’d cancel the editing suite that had been booked for the report.

Jones went into Rippon’s office and reiterated he was putting an artificial bar on the report and that if the CPS had dropped the
case, they were hardly likely to risk embarrassment by saying anything other than it being through lack of evidence. He listed the confirmation the police had taken the allegations seriously enough to investigate and pass a file to the CPS as being hugely significant, as was the fact that they had more evidence than the police because Keri had never been spoken to. He finished by saying it was a story that would make the front pages of every national newspaper and they would be accused of a cover-up if any of the victims went to the press, which he thought very likely.

The artificial bar of the CPS line and the police letter, if indeed it ever existed, is what MacKean describes as Peter Rippon’s ‘fig leaf’. ‘I just thought, “This is wrong,” she says. ‘It’s as simple as that. We had more than the CPS, we bypassed them, and we had more than the police had. We had wider testimonies.’

Despite ongoing conversations and protestations of the strength of what they had, MacKean says she was by this stage resigned to the fact the story would never see the light of day. ‘It was the definition of futile,’ she recalls. ‘There was no way we could go back to it after the tributes [had run]. How could the BBC then go back and say, “We could have revealed this”? Plus the victims knew and we thought it was only a matter of time before they told other journalists.’

On Friday, 2 December, while Meirion Jones was filming reconstructions for the Savile report with a rented Rolls-Royce at Duncroft, a group of senior BBC executives, among them Peter Rippon, Stephen Mitchell, Helen Boaden and George Entwistle, sat down for lunch at an event to honour Women in Film and Television.

The director general, Mark Thompson, was soon to leave the BBC, and Boaden and Entwistle were the favourites for the top job. The testimonies given to the Pollard Review by Boaden, Mitchell and Entwistle are conflicting on whether at that point it was considered likely the report would go to air.
¹⁴
But at some point during the lunch, and some nine days after being advised to do so by Stephen Mitchell, Helen Boaden mentioned
Newsnight
’s investigation into Jimmy Savile to George Entwistle, and referred to
how it might impact on his Christmas schedules. She told Pollard this was the first opportunity she had had to speak to Entwistle, having been away on holiday and then missed him ‘at least twice’
¹⁵
when she called by his office.

Mr Entwistle’s account to Pollard was that he could not even recall asking Boaden what the
Newsnight
investigation was about.
¹⁶

The bitter irony of them being at an event to celebrate women while the women of Duncroft remained unheard, is not lost on MacKean. ‘A 10- or 12-second conversation is a disgrace. These people had big careers. For one of them it was about to get a lot bigger with the Director General contest.’

‘It was that, I think, that created the huge embarrassment. And it’s why they were at pains to emphasise
¹⁷
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

‘
W
e 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?