In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (29 page)

37. IT’S OBSCENE

I
t was Valentine’s Day and I was standing, as per Jimmy Savile’s instructions, outside the Thai Rose massage parlour on Marylebone High Street. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was watching me. He was laughing and pointing with his pals in Ossie’s Café, the greasy spoon next door. It was one of his regular haunts when he was staying at his London pied-à-terre close to Broadcasting House.

I was working on my third major magazine profile piece on Jimmy Savile and he had offered to provide ‘some colour’, which explained why I was standing in a light drizzle outside a dubious-looking establishment on a busy street in central London. As the rain became heavier, Savile eventually poked his head out of the door of the café. ‘Now then,’ he croaked, still pretending to be doubled up with the hilarity of it all. ‘You’re going to catch your death of cold out there.’

Four years after our first interview, I now believed that Jimmy Savile enjoyed the fact that I knew so much about him, or had at least amassed a wealth of material. It pandered to an ego of quite vast proportions; an ego he consistently denied possessing. This story, I had told him in advance, was to be different. I did not want to hear the same old tales – ‘The Not Again Child’, ‘The Pirate of the Dancehall’, ‘The Fun’ and ‘The Brain Damage’. I wanted to write a piece about the hidden Jimmy Savile; the man of influence with unlikely connections and hitherto unseen reserves of power. First, though, there was the small matter of breakfast. He ordered a cup of tea and two fried eggs on white bread.

Savile’s teeth were a mess, a collection of jagged talons chipped into random shapes and differing shades of grey and yellow. I had watched him eat on a number of occasions and it wasn’t a spectacle I enjoyed. With egg yolk dripping from his lips, I concentrated on my own breakfast and tried not to look up.

He seemed particularly happy with himself on this particular morning, specifically about his choice of venues for this latest article: a greasy spoon café, the Athenaeum Club where he was a member, and back to his flat in Leeds, where once again he had suggested I should stay overnight.

As we ate, I told him I was in the midst of organising a charity event and would appreciate his advice. His response was a lengthy monologue about how he got everyone from the governor of the Bank of England to the Duke of Edinburgh working for him in the drive to build a new National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville. ‘You’ve got to be a bit of a conman to make it work,’ he concluded.

This was just a prelude to what I really wanted to find out about, namely the circles he’d mixed in over the years, and specifically his relationship with Lord Louis Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh’s favourite uncle and a man many believed to be the power behind the House of Windsor. First, though, I had to listen to a 10-minute account of how he earned his Royal Marine Commando Green Beret. As he unfurled his story, I was aware of customers coming in and out, waiters shimmying from behind the counter, and the coffee machine gurgling, spitting and coughing.

‘That was when I first met Lord Louis,’ Savile said, and I snapped back to attention. ‘He was the commandant general. It was the attraction of opposites. He had not the faintest idea of who I was or what I did. All he knew was that I was a freak with long hair. He wanted to know what this long-haired geezer was doing with this crack fighting corps.’

According to Savile, Mountbatten had been the man who sanctioned his entry into ‘the Firm’, the term he regularly used to describe the royal family. ‘Whenever it came to doing anything, he
[Mountbatten] would say, “I’ll cut the ribbon but get Savile down. He can do the speeches. He does it better than me.” Coming from Lord Louis, and he was the favourite uncle of the Prince of Wales, it meant I hooked up with the Prince of Wales. It was the respect that Lord Louis had for me. It meant what was good enough for Lord Louis was good enough for him. That’s how I got to know all these people. Lord Louis was the governor.’

Savile recounted how he had once gone to open the new sergeants’ mess at the Marine Commando training base at Lympstone. ‘Lord Louis was going to come down and open it,’ he said. ‘But he said, “I’ll cut the ribbon but get Savile down here to make the speeches.”’

Before I could press him, he caromed off into a convoluted story about how the Marines had raised the money for five ‘amazing crystal chandeliers’ for the new mess. ‘Being a sniffer-abouter,’ he said, ‘I realised the press were going to take them to the cleaners for spending fifteen grand on five crystal chandeliers.’

Eventually, he got round to explaining that Mountbatten had officially opened the new mess before handing over to him to deal with the press. Savile said his deft handling of potentially tricky questions about the expensive new fixtures had greatly impressed the last viceroy of India, former sea lord and ex-head of the British armed forces, and that, he added, was enough to seal his entry into the establishment’s innermost circles.

Such details were revealed only by knowing which stones to look under, but it was tiring, time-consuming work. We had a long way to go so I decided to move onto more familiar ground. Was Savile, as he liked to put it, still ‘birding’?

‘Yes, yes,’ he blathered. ‘But you have to adapt. One of the things that I had to adapt to some years ago was the fact of being older. This year I’m 81.’ He pointed out ‘two birds’ that had come into Ossie’s Café while we had been sitting at our table. I hadn’t noticed either of them looking our way. ‘I’ve got to adapt because at 81 I can’t go pulling. It’s obscene,’ he said. He paused for a moment and looked out at the rain-lashed street. Then he repeated the point in case I hadn’t quite got it: ‘It’s obscene.’

‘I don’t go to clubs, you see, because once you’ve been the boss you don’t take kindly to being a punter. It wouldn’t do for me to go in and start putting myself about a bit. There’s not even a word for a guy of 81 trying to pull a younger woman.’ He stopped again for a moment to chew on a corner of toast. ‘It’s obscene,’ he said for the third time in 20 seconds.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it started. Jimmy Savile slurped on his mug of tea and brightened as quickly as the weather: ‘If they hit me on the head and bundled me into the boot of a car and had their wicked way with me in a lay-by, I won’t object. You’ve just got to adapt at not being able to do it.’

38. THE BEST FIVE DAYS OF MY LIFE

R
eleased in March 2013, the report by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust Forensic Division on Jimmy Savile’s trips to Scarborough in 1971 and 1972 with patients from Rampton Psychiatric Hospital is a disconcerting document. This is not due to the revelations it contains, but because of what is not said, and the language used throughout.

In August 1971, Jimmy Savile organised and led a coach trip for 10 patients and members of staff to Scarborough during which, the report states, ‘they visited an ice-cream parlour, went on a boat trip, had tea with the Lord Mayor, met some Scarborough officials and The Duchess’.
¹
Note how an inquiry by a mental health institution into a serial paedophile’s activities with psychiatric patients in its care refers to Agnes Savile.

The Lord Mayor of Scarborough in 1971 was Councillor Peter Jaconelli, otherwise known as the town’s ‘Ice Cream King’. Born in Glasgow and raised as a strict Roman Catholic, Jaconelli had lived in the North Yorkshire seaside town since the age of seven when his father moved the family business south in a bid to grab a slice of the lucrative seaside trade.

Jaconelli had trained as an opera singer but his destiny was dollops of ice cream sold to the day-trippers and holidaymakers who flocked to the town in summer. He had married Anna, an Italian woman who worked at a Leeds wafer factory with his sister, in 1960, and over time, set about successfully branching out into restaurants and establishing nationwide distribution for his ice cream and desserts.

Tipping the scales at 21 stone and boasting a 50-inch waistline, Jaconelli was nothing if not an advertisement for his wares. During his first year as mayor he earned a place in
The Guinness Book of Records
, downing 512 oysters in 48 minutes and 42 seconds on national television. He also featured on an episode of
Savile’s Travels
, going head to head on the mat at his Ippon judo club with the show’s host and his great friend.

Jaconelli founded the judo club in Scarborough in 1955 and, despite his huge girth and waddling gait, claimed to be a black belt. Boys that attended the club say that he wasn’t anything of the sort, although they report he did enjoy practising a particular throw that involved him pressing his groin into his young sparring partners. It transpires that Peter Jaconelli was well known for more than being the wealthy businessman and prominent local politician who appeared on the town’s tourism posters sporting a knotted handkerchief on his head.

Scarborough seafront was a magnet for young people, especially runaways and strays, and Jaconelli’s ice-cream parlour on the front employed scores of them over the years. Its proprietor was rumoured to be a member of a group of older men known locally as ‘The Club’. It was a set that was said to include Jimmy Savile and his old pal and running mate, the amusement arcade owner Jimmy Corrigan, now dead. Some allege The Club’s members attended sex parties for which local youngsters were procured.

In February 2013, a former member of the Ippon judo club and teenage employee at Jaconelli’s ice-cream parlour wrote to the chief executive officer of Scarborough Borough Council to demand the former mayor be stripped of his title of Alderman of the Borough. The letter, published on the independent local news website Real Whitby, stated that Jaconelli, who died in 1999 having served almost 30 years on the town’s council, ‘was a predatory paedophile who preyed on local children’.
²
Councillor Geoff Evans supported the claim, confirming that Jaconelli sexually abused children, and propositioned him as a 14-year-old. Evans went further, suggesting that Jaconelli only escaped prosecution
because of his ‘political connections with the Conservative Party and the police’.

In late September 1972, Jimmy Savile organised a second trip for patients from Rampton to Scarborough. This time twelve patients and nine staff joined him on a special train from Retford. The official report, which is brief to the point of being cursory, states, ‘During this trip, patients visited the amusements, the zoo and met The Duchess again.’

Jimmy Savile had by now been given his own lodgings at Broadmoor – a disused attic above two offices – and his own set of keys.
³
Each week after recording
Top of the Pops
, he drove to the maximum-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, let himself in and then sat with the patients to watch the show. He claimed that one wall in the TV room was decorated entirely with his photographs, something that baffled visiting MPs and ‘bigwigs’.
⁴

Rampton was opened in 1912 as an overflow for patients from Broadmoor, and as at its sister hospital, one of four ‘special hospitals’ in the UK, Savile claimed, ‘[the staff and patients] stand for me the same’.
⁵
He described how when he visited, ‘the sub-normal patients come and hang off me like presents off a Christmas tree. I gather up great armfuls of them. I have got a great way with sub-normals.’
⁶

In a newspaper article, Savile publicly commended Rampton’s nurses for being ‘only too ready for unpaid off-duty trips if it helps its sub-normal’
⁷
before going on to recount how in September 1972 they had visited the zoo, owned by one of his friends, an amusement arcade owned by Jimmy Corrigan, and a seafood café owned by Peter Jaconelli. The latter was specially emptied for the occasion and is where Agnes Savile joined the party.

A couple of months later, Savile again waxed lyrical about the patients he was given access to at the two high-security hospitals: ‘They are people of incredible tenderness and affection,’ he wrote. ‘They can sit by you and stroke your face with a tenderness you could write beautiful poetry about. Then along can come an electric storm in the brain and the same hand that strokes you can
grip you like iron. But they are essentially innocent, and when I say that I love them, the mothers of these boys know exactly what I mean.’

It is not too far-fetched to expect the police in Scarborough to have been informed that Jimmy Savile was escorting patients from a secure psychiatric hospital to the town, and details supplied of their itinerary. Yet when the allegations against Savile spewed forth in late September and October 2012, North Yorkshire Police stated it had ‘carried out extensive searches of force records which did not reveal a local connection’. This despite the fact Jimmy Savile had not only been interviewed and photographed on numerous occasions at the residence he’d owned in the town since the 1960s, but had been awarded the Freedom of the Borough of Scarborough in 2005, before being buried in a local cemetery after one of the most highly publicised funerals in memory, one that had seen his funeral cortège proceed along the Foreshore in front of crowds marshalled by members of the North Yorkshire Police.

Despite being tissue thin on detail, the Rampton report does reveal a little about Jimmy Savile’s access at the hospital. ‘Two retired members of staff have confirmed JS did enter the secure area at least on three occasions and gave assurance that JS was escorted by staff at all times, had no keys and was not left alone with any patients,’ stated the two-page document instigated by Dr Mike Harris, Rampton’s executive director of Forensic Services and chief officer for High Security Care, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. ‘They re-iterated that during these visits JS was treated like any other professional visitor.’

Of course, Jimmy Savile – or JS, as the report insisted on calling him throughout – was not any other professional visitor. In fact, he wasn’t a professional visitor at all.

The report concluded, ‘JS had contact with some patients at Rampton Hospital’ but ‘no evidence has been found in any documents reviewed or during discussions with retired staff that anything untoward took place involving patients.’

No mention was made of the period in which he had his motor caravan parked in the hospital’s grounds, or the fact he was seen heading to and from the vehicle with a number of different females.

As for the level of access he was given at Broadmoor, in October 2012 a spokesman for West London NHS Trust, which has managed the hospital since 2001, stated the allegations relating to Jimmy Savile were from ‘a time when Broadmoor was a separate, somewhat isolated organisation’.
⁸
The very next day, the
Guardian
reported a Department of Health spokesman as saying, ‘it is far from clear why any such role [at Broadmoor] would have required possession … of a set of keys. We need to establish how he came to have them and on what basis.’
⁹
Both questions were among the terms of reference for the investigation launched by the Secretary of State for Health and overseen by Kate Lampard. It remains to be seen whether the report includes details of the 1977 outing from Broadmoor he led to Bournemouth, which included lunch at his nightclub, the Maison Royale.

*

On the Sunday his account of the Rampton trips to Scarborough was published in the
Sunday People
, Jimmy Savile was to be found in the resort town on the south coast. He had just done a deal to take over a nightclub complex in Bournemouth and was staying in the flat he had secured as part of the package. He told me his plan was to move the Duchess into it so that he could keep an eye on her. It never came to fruition: a telephone call from a friend informed him that his mother had died quite suddenly while staying the night at his sister’s house in Filey. Agnes Savile was less than a month short of her 86th birthday.

In the following day’s
Yorkshire Evening Post
, Savile paid tribute to his ‘beloved Duchess’: ‘She was entirely trustful of me in my showbiz life, and I have never known her to reprimand me,’ he explained. ‘If I took some dolly-bird home she would give her the “hard eye” look-over before accepting her and making a real friend of her. But I think she was glad I did not marry. We were so close.
She never even hinted to me about getting married, and I had no inclinations. Ours was a complete association.’
¹⁰

After a post-mortem, the Duchess’s body was placed in a coffin in the front room of her daughter Christina’s house on Welford Road in Filey. Jimmy Savile sat in a chair next to the casket and hardly moved, later describing the period as ‘the best five days of my life’.
¹¹

‘We hadn’t put her away yet and there she was lying around, so to me they were good times,’ he told Anthony Clare twenty years later. ‘Once upon a time I had to share her with other people. We had marvellous times. But when she was dead she was all mine, for me.’
¹²
When Agnes Savile’s body was transferred to Leeds, and the house belonging to her daughter, Joan, Jimmy Savile rode in the front of the hearse.

A requiem mass was arranged for the following Monday at St Anne’s Cathedral in Leeds, followed by a funeral service at Killingbeck Cemetery. In his autobiography, Savile wrote, ‘as I fixed things for the final personal appearance of the Duchess it gave me the exact feeling that I was actually fixing to bury my own body. In some ways I was.’
¹³

On the day before the funeral, Savile wrote in his newspaper column about how his mother stuck ‘like a warm thought in the minds of 50 million people’. He claimed that a ‘big business house’ was planning to use her for a TV commercial because audience research had demonstrated she had 88 per cent ‘instant name recognition without a picture’.
¹⁴

When Vince Savile had died, Agnes gave their youngest son his wedding ring. Jimmy Savile was now desperate to add his mother’s ring to his little finger. His older sister Christina claimed the ring but after being awoken one night by a burning sensation on the finger she was wearing the ring, she conceded that their mother wanted him to have it.

Dozens of floral tributes were arranged on the steps of the cathedral to greet the cortège of six vehicles transporting members of the Savile family. Jimmy Savile again decided to travel in the
hearse with the coffin, dressed in a black fur coat and dark rimmed spectacles. Vince and Johnnie Savile, along with two of their brothers-in-law, carried the tiny casket to the high altar, where Jimmy Savile knelt down alone before it.

Four hundred people heard the requiem mass celebrated by Father William Kilgallon and Father Dennis O’Connell, who had befriended Agnes through the Margaret Sinclair Centre. Later, Jimmy Savile’s colleagues on the night ambulance shift at Leeds General Infirmary volunteered as a guard of honour at the cemetery. Savile later claimed that ‘official groups’ were also sent to the funeral by the ‘Irish government and Scotland Yard’,
¹⁵
which, if true, further reveals the degree to which his influence now spread.

Having dominated the funeral with his antics, Jimmy Savile also dictated the appearance of his mother’s final resting place. The marble tomb he had designed was huge and costly, with the words ‘The Duchess’ in big letters and her real name below. He was the only beneficiary of her will, being left £106.

The divisions within the Savile family were hinted at a week later, when Johnnie Savile was pictured in a newspaper picking rotting wallpaper from the damp-infested walls of his basement flat in Clapham, south London. The headline above the story read ‘Life with the Other Savile’. ‘I refuse to ask Jimmy for help,’ explained the 53-year-old rep of a printing firm and father of two, who revealed that he had joined a local squatters’ group.
¹⁶

‘[Johnnie Savile] could play my uncle Jimmy like nobody,’ Guy Marsden told me. ‘[He’d say,] “I’m your brother and you don’t give me owt and all I’m going to do is go on t’radio and tell everyone.” And my uncle Jimmy would cough up … he couldn’t beat him.’ Sure enough, the newspaper report mentioned that Jimmy Savile had agreed to give a donation to the squatters’ group when his brother was offered a house.