In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (35 page)

‘At the bottom of the ward, sat in a high-backed chair with arms, was a young woman,’ recounted Thornton. ‘It being a neuro ward, I think she had brain damage; she was sat there, not on this planet, bless her. Then Jimmy Savile came in and kissed her. I thought at the time he was a relative but then he kissed her neck and started rubbing his hands down her arms, and he started to molest her. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it because I was laid flat on my back.
⁶

‘When a nurse eventually came in, I mentioned Jimmy Savile and pointed over to the girl and said, “If he comes anywhere near me I’ll scream the place down.”’ Thornton said the nurse merely shrugged her shoulders.
⁷

Another former patient at the hospital claims Savile touched her inappropriately in a lift after she had undergone spinal surgery in 1973. ‘I felt too frightened to report it because everyone thought he was a saint,’ she said.
⁸

In the same year, Beth, then a sixteen-year-old who lived at home with her parents in a village near York, was admitted to Leeds General Infirmary with a suspected nervous breakdown. She told me she was treated at the hospital for a period of three months. Towards the end of this period she recalled sitting on her bed in the middle of a ‘big, long ward’ when Jimmy Savile, who she had seen around from time to time, came over to chat.

‘Come with me,’ she remembers him saying, and he took her to a newsagent just outside the hospital whereupon he instructed the shopkeeper to give her whatever she wanted. ‘He swept his hand – magazines, sweets, everything,’ Beth said. Soon after she
returned to her bed, a pile of items appeared. ‘I thought I was the chosen one,’ she reflected. ‘I now realise he was grooming me.’

The very next day, Beth was again sitting on her bed when she says Jimmy Savile sent for her. ‘A porter in a white coat came to pick me up from the ward. He took me through these corridors until we were in a sort of underpass under the LGI.’ Off a corridor leading from the service area was a small office. ‘The porter said nothing,’ she maintained, ‘he just knocked and opened the door.’ Inside, Jimmy Savile was stood, leaning on a wall.

‘He pulled me to him and started kissing me,’ explained Beth, who remembers wearing a cheesecloth dress she had made for her stay in hospital. ‘He had one hand on my right thigh and the other on my left breast. His tongue was in my mouth.’ She insisted Savile said nothing, other than asking her one question: ‘Are you on the pill?’ When Beth said no, she told me he put his hand over hers and forced her to masturbate him. She said he was wearing tracksuit-style trousers, which were down around his ankles by this point. He did not wear underwear.

‘It all happened so fast,’ Beth explained. ‘When he’d finished, he said, “You’ve got to go now,” and knocked on the door.’ Outside the office was waiting a different man, who was dressed in a white T-shirt rather than a white porter’s jacket. This second man took her back to the ward. Beth says that when she tried to tell a nurse what had happened, she only got as far as mentioning Jimmy Savile’s name before the group of nurses laughed and walked away.

‘It was tried and tested,’ she said of the manner in which she was groomed, taken from the ward and assaulted. ‘No words were spoken, the knock on the office door, the different men to take me there and back to the ward.’ She claims not to have seen Savile again before being discharged. When she told her parents, she said her father refused to believe her. Her mother said she felt most people would feel the same as her father.

But it wasn’t only patients Savile preyed on, it seems. An account posted to an online Leeds forum
⁹
on the day his death was
announced suggests that he had keys to nurses’ accommodation at Leeds General Infirmary.

The author claimed his ex-wife was a student nurse at the hospital in the early 1970s. As a volunteer porter, Savile would enter ‘when the girls would be in various states of undress’ or regularly went ‘into the shower room at the end of the girls’ shifts to “clean”.’ According to the post, complaints were made to the board of the hospital but nothing was done.

‘The girls in my fiancées’ [sic] room were really getting scared of him, so one evening me and another of the girls’ boyfriends sneaked into their room after the girls came off duty. [Savile] used his master key to “accidentally” walk in – and me and the lad were in his face. He went white and ran out.’

The man recounted how Savile returned minutes later with security guards. He warned the girls that if anything was said, they would lose their jobs.

The same source claimed that six months later he and a friend got into a fight with Savile after he groped and then slapped the man’s girlfriend at the student nurse’s Christmas ball at Leeds Polytechnic. His account stated Savile had tried to press charges but there were too many witnesses. The incident was hushed up, as was Savile’s attempted rape of another student nurse.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which has managed Leeds General Infirmary and St James’s University Hospital since 1998, has consistently denied having ‘any record of complaints about Jimmy Savile’s behaviour made during the time he was a volunteer and charity supporter at Leeds General Infirmary or at any of our other hospitals’.
¹⁰
That said, it confirmed records dating back to the 1980s and beyond were difficult to search ‘due to the change in governance structures.’

Liz Dux, who represents 27 clients, both male and female, who were abused while in the care of the National Health Service, says Savile’s attacks on patients at hospitals in Leeds included forcing children to masturbate him and digital penetration. These offences took place from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s.

Beth told me that she saw Jimmy Savile at Leeds General Infirmary in the final years of his life. ‘He was walking quickly flanked by two police officers,’ she said. ‘He had the air of a very important man. I remember thinking how pretentious it looked.’

The attempts by Savile’s victims to report him are a recurring theme, Dux confirms. ‘We had a body of people saying, “Yes, I did tell someone and they didn’t believe me so what was I supposed to do?”’

45. AM I SAVED?

B
ritish society rose as one to salute the saint in its midst. In June 1978, Bob Brooksby chauffeured Jimmy Savile to the Dorchester Hotel where members of the royal family and stars of show business rose to give a standing ovation as he walked into the banqueting hall for a special Variety Club luncheon.

Angus Ogilvy, husband of Princess Alexandra and president of the National Association of Youth Clubs, which Jimmy Savile had raised funds for, was the first to get up to speak: ‘He has done more than perhaps anyone else to make the lives of unfortunate people happier than they might ever have been,’
¹
said Ogilvy.

Savile talked of how he had felt ‘great friendship from the off’ with Ogilvy and his wife, socialising with them at the NAYC headquarters on Devonshire Street in London and at any number of gala events. Princess Alexandra was a patron of a hostel for girls in care: ‘At this place I’m a cross between a term-time boyfriend and a fixer of special trips out,’ he added.
²

It sounds uncannily like the role he created for himself at Duncroft, where their paths certainly crossed at a garden party in May 1974. The Queen’s cousin was a patron of the mental health charity MIND, and on that occasion she greeted Jimmy Savile with a level of enthusiasm and familiarity that is said to have shocked the school’s main governor, Lady Montagu Norman.

Bill Cotton, by then controller of BBC1, was the next to pay tribute in the Dorchester’s banqueting hall: ‘Jim Callaghan might be Prime Minister and Jimmy Carter President of the United States, but when you say
Jim’ll Fix It
everybody knows who you
mean.’
³
Jimmy Savile nodded and waved, drinking in the acclaim. He was seated between Lord Louis Mountbatten and Sir Billy Butlin, two men representative of the social poles he now spanned.

The Christmas cards from members of the royal family and the ease with which Savile was able to get a 13-year-old girl inside Buckingham Palace during a royal reception – something he boasted about on Michael Parkinson’s chat show – underlined how, through Mountbatten’s patronage, he had become a firm favourite in royal circles.

‘Royalty are surrounded by people who don’t know how to deal with it,’ he explained of the fascination he seemed to hold for them. ‘I have a freshness of approach which they obviously find to their liking … I have a natural good fun way of going on and we have a laugh. They don’t get too many laughs. Some people have said I’m a court jester. I know I have freak value.’
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‘He was terribly pleased to know famous people, particularly the royal family,’ Roger Ordish recounted. ‘I remember we once did something with Angus Ogilvy, who was toe in the water with royalty. We were filming and he didn’t even introduce me. I thought that was a bit strange. It was almost as though he was jealous: “They’re going to know me, they’re not going to know you, sunshine.”’

With viewing figures of over 16 million and thousands of letters arriving each week,
Jim’ll Fix It
was causing its star to make some uncomfortable readjustments. ‘He said it’s the worst thing he ever did,’ recalled a friend. ‘He said it ruined him … He said, “Wherever I go in the world anyone under 20 calls me Jim’ll … Jimmy Savile is dead.” He never got to be Jimmy Savile again.’

Ordish confirmed the reality was someway removed from the popular perception of Jimmy Savile as the nation’s Santa Claus. ‘For someone who was so calculating about his own image, and so ambitious for himself, he occasionally said things that jarred and were, frankly, out of order,’ he said. ‘He sort of hoped no one was listening.’

When I asked
Jim’ll Fix It
’s producer to give me an example of the odd comments Jimmy Savile sometimes made, he recounted a conversation with Gill Stribling-Wright, one of the
researchers on the show. ‘Jim was talking about some very beautiful woman on the programme and Gill said to him, “Do you fancy her?” He said, “Oh no, much too old.” [The woman] was only 25, or something like that. He then said, “Walnut, walnut.”’

Ordish explained ‘walnut’ was Jimmy Savile’s reference to the woman’s clitoris. It’s no surprise to learn members of the production team described
Jim’ll Fix It
’s host as ‘weird’.

And yet despite making such remarks to young women working on the show, he was strangely puritanical when it came to what he allowed on
Jim’ll Fix It
. ‘We did an air-sea rescue thing that involved some girls,’ Ordish explained. ‘These girls pushed their teacher into the sea, obviously knowing that the air-sea rescue was coming, but I remember Jim asking me how I was going to do it. He didn’t want it to be disrespectful.’

Ordish believes the incredible viewing figures for the show – it even topped ITV’s
Coronation Street
in some weeks – forced Savile to look at himself and make some tough choices: ‘I suppose [he] was thinking, “I better go straight here.”’

Just not quite yet, it seemed. Jimmy Savile’s mutually beneficial relationship with P&O came to an end that summer when he was thrown off the company’s flagship, the luxury liner SS
Canberra
, after complaints from the parents of a 14-year-old girl. The girl in question was not the only teenager he attempted to lure into his cabin on that cruise, as Jane (not her real name), then 16, testified.

The star approached Jane and a friend and promised them autographs if they followed him back to his first-class quarters. They were taken inside whereupon he immediately began taking off his trousers. Jane said he begged her for a cuddle before pulling her onto his bed.

‘He was very forceful and wrapped himself right around me,’ she recounted. ‘It was quite frightening. At one point he slipped out of his pants and started rubbing himself up against me. I could feel that he was excited.’ Jane now believes that if her
friend, who took photographs of the incident, had not been present she would have been forced to have sex with Jimmy Savile.

A few days later, Jimmy Savile was summoned to the captain’s day room. Complaints had been made to a ship’s officer before the
Canberra
’s captain heard as the parents of a 14-year-old girl described how the 51-year-old celebrity had pursued their daughter around the ship.

Savile denied everything. ‘But the more I quizzed him,’ said the captain, who refuses to be named, ‘the more convinced I became that he was lying. He was a shifty sort of chap whose eyes darted all over the place. The parents, who were not travelling first class, were very decent, ordinary people who were scandalised by Savile’s unwanted attention to their daughter.

‘I told him he disgusted me and I wanted him off my ship when we reached Gibraltar. I detailed an officer to make sure he remained in his cabin until we reached the Rock. He was to take all his meals in his cabin and was not allowed to leave it under any circumstances short of shipwreck.’
⁵

Brian Hitchen, the former newspaper editor, confirmed that he heard the story about Jimmy Savile’s expulsion from the
Canberra
all those years ago. So why did he not report it? ‘Two reasons,’ he replied. ‘In those days newspapers did not write “nasty” stories about celebrities unless the famous had been handsomely paid for their often fairly tame revelations. The second reason is because Britain’s libel laws too often help make those like Savile untouchable.’
⁶

*

Having escaped public condemnation for his shocking behaviour at sea, the next stage in Jimmy Savile’s unlikely metamorphosis took place a year later with the publication of
God’ll Fix It
, a slim volume that outlined his views on faith. In his preface to the series of interviews contained within, Reverend Colin Semper had some interesting things to say about the man he produced on
Speakeasy
for four years.

He described him as a ‘mystery man’ and ‘difficult to know’, and asked, ‘Who is this blond-haired eccentric who can help a prostitute with a problem on the same day as he introduces
Songs of Praise
?’ Semper had no answers, as such, but was convinced Savile was genuine. Why? ‘Because however clever you are, if you are not genuine, you will be found out.’

Semper likened Savile to a wizard: ‘You never know what kind of answer you’re going to get. Usually the answers are off-beat, they can sound crazy but I have come to think that it could be a brave and glorious madness.’
⁷

The book itself is extraordinary, and as close as Jimmy Savile ever came to a mea culpa. As well as illuminating his twisted view of the world, it also revealed how he justified his actions.

In the chapter titled ‘How Do I See Jesus of Nazareth?’, he talked about how every human body was unique. ‘Nature makes one body of a woman, say, into that of a nymphomaniac, or that of a man into a very hot sex outfit. You can’t expect all of these to behave in the same way. God’s suggestions, the suggestions of Jesus, are therefore different for different people.’
⁸

In the very next chapter, he again bracketed himself alongside Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ himself for the way he was occasionally vilified for his very public good works. He said he was aware that the more he did, the more likely it was that he would find that someone would want to kill him.

In the chapter ‘What Happens When I Die?’ he discussed his work in the mortuaries of Stoke Mandeville and Leeds General Infirmary, and how ‘the imperfect chemical envelope’ of the body changes in death. He stated his belief that those who had ‘surrendered’ themselves to evil in life would be ‘surrendered to the forces of evil’ in the afterlife, and said death was something he was looking forward to ‘with quite considerable excitement’.
⁹

The most significant confessions, however, came towards the end of the book. In ‘Am I Saved?’ he admitted being an ‘abuser of things, and bodies, and people’ and recounted how he took troublemakers
in his dancehall downstairs to the boiler room whereupon they’d be tied up and gagged. After everyone else had gone home, his minders would beat them.

He also acknowledged that he took advantage of women: ‘That shows you that the forces of evil are causing me to do something which, on reflection, I would rather not have done,’ he argued. ‘I am frail like everyone else.’

It was but a minor concession before he outlined how he weighed his actions. ‘I often wonder if [God] works a debit side and a credit side, or whether a debit is a debit full stop. I think I’m in credit but I would hate to think that I could commit all sorts of sins just because I might have a credit balance.’
¹⁰

‘He saw the fund-raising as part of his credit side,’ agreed Semper. ‘The more he could get, the more bonus points he’d have in the Kingdom of God.’

Jimmy Savile expanded on the theme of credit and debit in the chapter ‘What Shall I Say at the Pearly Gates and at the Judgement Table?’ He explained how he would argue with St Peter if he pointed out all the sins he had committed, and argue that it was the machine of [his] body’ that had caused him to do such things.
¹¹

‘It could be that the person arriving at the judgement seat had been given a body prone to excesses because the glands dictated that he should be more than was really normal,’ he said. ‘The temptation could also be towards sexual excess in a girl – and I have known many – who has been born a nymphomaniac. She can’t resist a man who runs his finger down her arm … She might not really want to be possessed by that man, but her body – and this is a medical fact – finds great difficulty in resisting.’
¹²

It is a telling passage, and one that for once affords a view beyond the high walls of Jimmy Savile’s assiduously constructed façade. It also suggests that his access to the psychiatrists at Broadmoor had helped him to arrive at some kind of understanding of, and explanation for, that which he believed his own
glands ‘dictated’. Conveniently, he decided that such people should be forgiven because they were more ‘unlucky than bad’.

And yet, in a discussion on how he coped with sex, he once again demonstrated his unerring ability to reference the very core of his depravity, even in the process of delivering his lessons on life: ‘Sex at its worst is corruption,’ he said, ‘as when young people might be corrupted to provide sex.’
¹³
Sex, was fine, he maintained, as long as it didn’t ‘cause distress’.

‘That awful book,’ sighed Reverend Colin Semper when I asked him for his reflections on a specific line he’d written in the preface to
God’ll Fix It
: ‘[Jimmy] worked at being a character, almost as if to say, “They’ll never catch me out.”’ Semper agreed it has taken on a very different complexion in light of what we now know.

‘[Savile] liked to be outlandish and then he’d sort of cover it up,’ he said. ‘He was a kind of chameleon, really. He flitted from place to place and took on the foliage of the place. It was a strange, strange business really.’

Thirty-five years on, he acknowledged that Jimmy Savile was trying to balance out what he had done; that he was mitigating for it in some way before moving forward and, in his mind at least, trying to atone for his sins. I put it to Semper that what Jimmy wrote indicates he could have been in no doubt that what he was doing was wrong. ‘I think he did too,’ Semper said quietly. ‘I think he definitely knew.’

*

Despite rising public fears about children being at risk from predatory adults and a shift in emphasis in childcare away from solving and containing the problem of delinquency and towards the protection of the most vulnerable members of society, in April 1978, the National Council for Civil Liberties stated that two of its affiliated groups, the Paedophile Information Exchange and Paedophile Action for Liberation, should be allowed to campaign for an abolition of the age of consent.

Jim Callaghan’s Labour government was planning to reform the law at the time and the Protection of Children Bill proposed to
tighten the rules on child pornography by outlawing indecent images of children under the age of 16. The NCCL’s response was to advocate reducing the age of consent to 14, arguing ‘childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage’. It claimed children would suffer more from having to recount their experiences in court.