![]()
Section 1
WHAT WE NOW KNOW
ABOUT SAVILE
![]()
1
SAVILEāS SEXUAL OFFENDING
What Do We Know?
MARCUS EROOGA
A legend and a one off thereās no mystery to unravel/ This miner, DJ, friend to all/ Was simply Jimmy Savile
(Excerpt from Savileās headstone)
Introduction
When he was found dead at his home in Roundhay, Leeds, aged 84, on 29 October 2011, much-loved āgreat British eccentricā Jimmy Savile was a national celebrity, fundraiser and for many an icon of their childhoods, having been a ubiquitous presence on British television screens during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
In recognition of his contribution to public causes he was awarded an OBE in 1971, knighted by the Queen in 1990, and the same year was made a Knight Commander of St Gregory the Great by Pope John Paul II. This latter honour is made in recognition of āan individualās pre-eminent service to their faith, community or the work of the Holy See on a local, national and international levelā (Association of Papal Orders in Great Britain, 2013).
Jimmy Savile first came to public prominence as a DJ at a commercial radio station (unique in the UK at that time), Radio Luxembourg, from 1958 to 1967, although his public prominence really began with his BBC career, described below.
From the 1960s onwards, Savile began a parallel career of apparently philanthropic activity, fundraising and volunteering for āgood causesā. As a result, he came into contact with a wide range of hospitals and schools and, it is now known, used his contact with those settings, and his status in them, to abuse.
He wrote two books: his autobiography As It Happens, in 1974, reissued in paperback as Love Is an Uphill Thing in 1976, and a book about his religious faith, Godāll Fix It (Savile, 1979). He also features on the front cover and in the introduction of Benjamin Rabbit and the Stranger Danger (Keller, 1985), a book for young children about keeping safe from strangers, and on the cover of Other Peopleās Children: A Handbook for Child Minders (Jackson, 1976), published by the BBC.
When Jimmy Savile died, no one, even had they been aware of the extent of his lifetime of sexual offending, could have anticipated the extraordinary series of events that would follow. Some 75 inquiries into his activities have been undertaken, a range of other leading public figures have been prosecuted and imprisoned for non-recent sexual abuse as a result of police Operation Yewtree, and a wide-ranging inquiry that goes far beyond Savile, the Independent Inquiry into Institutional Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA, 2015), now chaired by Professor Alexis Jay, has been instituted.
The impact and significance of the revelations about him go far beyond Savile the man, and this is not a book about Jimmy Savile the person. His psychology, his motivation, his inner life are not the subject of this book. It is, to some extent, a book about Savile the sex offender, insofar as it is instructive to understand how his behaviour, his methods and his presentation of himself enabled him to become someone who, what then Metropolitan Police Commander Peter Spindler, author of Chapter 9, described in a phrase that lodged in the national consciousness, āgroomed the nationā (BBC, 2013).
More directly, this book is a consideration of what we can learn from the knowledge that we now have about the way in which a high-profile, trusted and widely respected individual, who lived much of his life in the public eye, could so effectively use his status to facilitate six decades of sexual abuse of girls, boys, men and women. That he did so and not only remained at liberty but, at the time of his death, was considered a ānational treasureā, to the extent that the streets of his home city of Leeds were lined by the public to view his funeral cortege on the way to Leeds Cathedral, makes it all the more extraordinary.
This chapter will outline what is now known about relevant key events during Savileās career and developments following his death, and explains the context to the inquiries subsequently conducted into his contact with various organisations, including consideration of why the majority of allegations were not made during Savileās life.
It is a partner to the next chapter, which considers themes from the findings of those inquiries as they relate to institutional abuse, and together form the basis of the remainder of the book, where individual authors draw on the inquiries and other research to identify key learning about the prevention of sexual violence.
This chapter first outlines Savileās contacts with, and alleged offending in, the range of settings where the majority of his abuse is now believed to have been committed: the BBC, Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville, the Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Duncroft School. Next, it outlines other allegations about Savileās abuse based on the findings of police Operation Yewtree and the handling of allegations made about Savile during his life. The chapter then addresses the issue of what survivors have said were the reasons for not disclosing at the time and what enabled them to do so after his death, and ends with subsequent developments and a conclusion.
Savileās alleged offending across the BBC and various health and education settings
From the various reports published, it is apparent that Savile is believed to have committed sexual offences in a range of settings linked to his TV and radio career and associated philanthropic, fund-raising and volunteering activities. What is now known about the extent of his offending will be considered in relation to the primary settings where he is alleged to have offended: the BBC, Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville, the Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Duncroft School. All the information below is derived from the inquiries commissioned following his death.
The BBC
In October 2012, following the widespread revelations about Savileās behaviour, the BBC invited Dame Janet Smith DBE ā a former High Court Judge who conducted the inquiry published in 2003 into the murders by GP Harold Shipman of his patients ā to investigate Savileās sexual misconduct and the BBCās awareness of it. After she was commissioned it was established that another presenter, Stuart Hall, had also committed multiple sexual offences against young people, some at the BBC. Due to a potential conflict of interest for Dame Janet, a freestanding investigation, led by retired High Court Judge Dame Linda Dobbs, addressed Stuart Hallās conduct at the BBC and the report was published as part of the Smith review. The final three-volume report was published in February 2016 (Smith, 2016), publication having been delayed at the request of the police to avoid the possibility of prejudicing ongoing police investigations relating to other suspects.
The report records that, following guest appearances in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Savileās career at the BBC began on 1 January 1964 when he presented the first edition of Top of the Pops and continued as a regular presenter of Top of the Pops until 1984.
Savile joined BBC Radio 1 in 1968, the year after the station went on air. In 1969, he began to present Speakeasy, a joint production between BBC Radio 1 and the BBCās Religious Broadcasting Department. This was a discussion programme for young people about the moral and ethical questions of the time and ran until about 1977. Jimāll Fix It, a āwish fulfilmentā programme for young people, was launched in 1975 with Savile as its presenter. This hugely successful Saturday evening family viewing ran until 1994, attracting up to 16.5 million viewers, and brought Savile enormous fame.
In 1977, the National Viewers and Listeners Association, run by social conservative campaigner Mary Whitehouse, presented Savile with an award for āwholesome family entertainmentā. More than any other programme, Jimāll Fix It led to Savile being viewed as the āfavourite uncle to the nationās childrenā (Nikkhah and Malnick, 2011). Savileās role as a regular BBC television presenter ended in 1994 with the demise of Jimāll Fix It. In the 1970s he had made a series of public information films on road safety, from which came the tagline āClunk Click Every Tripā, promoting the use of seatbelts. He was brought back to co-present the final Top of the Pops programme on 30 July 2006, an occasion that gave rise to one of the allegations of sexual assault later made to police.
He revelled in his celebrity status, writing in his autobiography of becoming the first DJ presenter of Top of the Pops in 1964: āAnd so ended the springtime of my pop career. Here then started the 100 degree summer with no clouds to cover the burning brilliance of total recognition by, eventually, nearly all this countryās 53 million peopleā (Savile, 1974, p.74).
In addition to his core work on BBC Television and Radio, Savile made countless guest appearances on a wide variety of popular family viewing programmes, including, famously, In the Psychiatristās Chair with Consultant Psychiatrist Anthony Clare in 1991 and a TV documentary in 2000 presented by Louis Theroux, in which Savile acknowledged the rumours about him being a paedophile, but denied them.
He also regularly featured on news or current affairs programmes, usually in connection with fundraising events such as marathon running or long-distance walks. He was seen with members of the Royal Family at the opening of the new wing of Stoke Mandeville Hospital for which he had raised money and was pictured outside Buckingham Palace after receiving his OBE. In effect, he was almost constantly in the public eye, standing out both by his ubiquity and distinctive presentation in an era before the āinstant celebrityā of recent times (Marshall, 2007).
ALLEGED OFFENDING RELATED TO THE BBC
From her inquiries Dame Janet Smith concludes that 72 people made credible allegations of inappropriate behaviour or offences by Savile. Included are some accounts of what she considers lawful consensual conduct where Savileās conduct was inappropriate because the women concerned were decades younger than him and almost certainly under the influence of his celebrity. They also include six incidents that did not entail any physical contact, but where Savile pestered them or used lewd or insulting words or gestures (Smith, 2016, para.5.337).
Of the 72 victims, 57 are female and 15 are male. Twenty-one of the female victims were aged under 16 years, and 36 victims were aged 16 years and over; 13 of the male victims were under 16 years and two were 16 years and over; eight victims were raped (six female and two male) and one female victim was the subject of an attempted rape; 47 victims were the subject of indecent/sexual assault excluding rape (34 female and 13 male); Top of the Pops and Jimāll Fix It were the programmes at which victims were most frequently assaulted (with 19 assaults in relation to Top of the Pops and 17 in relation to Jimāll Fix It). The majority of victims, 44, were assaulted in the 1970s, 10 in the 1960s and 17 in the 1980s (Smith, 2016, para.5.336).
OFFENCE LOCATIONS
All except three of the most serious incidents of rape and attempted rape took place on Savileās own, as opposed to BBC, premises. The exceptions were a 13-year-old girl who was raped in what Smith thinks was probably a disused storeroom at BBC Lime Grove studios in 1959; a 10-year-old boy who was anally raped in Savileās dressing room at BBC Television Centre, London, in 1973; and a 10/11-year-old boy who was orally raped in Savileās dressing room at BBC Television Centre in 1976. Some of the more serious sexual assaults also took place on Savileās own premises ā for example, a 14-year-old girl who was seriously sexually assaulted at Savileās London flat in 1975 (Smith, 2016, Appendix 6).
Smith states that Savile woul...
