Savile - The Beast: The Inside Story of the Greatest Scandal in TV History. John McShane
Savile worked with in his long career. Mike Read said: ‘Today should be a celebration. He’d have loved it – showman to the end. You don’t want it to happen but if it’s inevitable, the bigger the crowd the better. It’s extraordinary. I think it’s a celebration rather than anything else.’
Another DJ from Savile’s Radio Luxembourg days was Tony Prince. ‘He was my mentor. He was the mentor for DJs in Europe. He was unique throughout his life and he’s a testament to kindness and goodness and being a damned good DJ. He lived his life with his tongue in his cheek. If there’s a heaven, he’ll be laughing now if he’s got time. Because if there is a heaven, he’ll be introducing Elvis on the clouds,’ he said.
One wreath in a second hearse which just carried flowers spelt out the number 208 in yellow and white flowers – the frequency for Radio Luxembourg.
Hospital porter Walter Jackson, who had worked at Leeds General Infirmary for 19 years, paid tribute outside the hospital where Sir Jimmy volunteered as a porter and for which he had raised millions of pounds: ‘He used to walk about and talk to everybody. He’d talk to anybody, it didn’t matter who it was. If someone was crying, he would go over. You can’t buy that.’
On November 10 the focus of attention switched to Scarborough, the famous resort on the Yorkshire coast where Savile had an apartment and where he was to be buried – at a 45-degree angle calculated with a laser spirit-level so that he would be facing the sea.
Hundreds of well-wishers waved as his coffin was driven through the town and the crowd burst into applause as the hearse slowly passed them along the sea front. Poignant messages, including a sign reading ‘Goodbye Jimmy’, lined the route past a lifeboat station, harbour and Peasholm Park. The journey ended at Woodlands Cemetery just before 1pm and Savile was laid to rest on top of a hillside overlooking the water.
Father Martin Kelly, who conducted the service, said: ‘He was a man who had a place deep in people’s hearts. These past days have spoken of the great affection with which Jimmy Savile was held by so many. He was a man who knew what was important.’
Savile was buried with his Royal Marines green beret and medal, rosary beads and Help For Heroes wristband and about 100 members of the public gathered in the cemetery to watch the short burial. Nephew Roger Foster had slipped two cigars – a Romeo y Julieta and a Bolivar – into his casket, which was reportedly encased in concrete to prevent grave-robbers taking his ‘bling’ jewellery, when it had been opened for the final time.
His family and friends stood next to the grave, some wearing specially-made badges reading ‘Jim Fixed It For Me’, and his niece Amanda McKenna gave a reading by the grave before relatives threw flowers.
Dave Bishop, 67, from Nottingham, who attended the burial dressed as Elvis, said: ‘Jimmy Savile was a big Elvis fan so it seemed like the right thing to do to come and pay my respects. I bought a 99p bunch of flowers from the pound shop and threw them in. I think Jimmy would have liked it.’
No sooner had the oratory ceased and the tributes came to an end than it was announced that there was to be a special revived version of Jim’ll Fix It, hosted by EastEnders actor Shane Richie in the Savile role, broadcast that Christmas on the BBC.
In his will, millions of pounds went to charity and several hundred thousand pounds were raised by the auction of his belongings, including his Rolls-Royce – again with the cash going to good causes. This was a man who had risen from the humblest of backgrounds and through his hard work and determination to succeed had risen to the top. In addition he was the kindest, most generous of men, overflowing with the milk of human kindness. He would devote long stretches of his life to unselfishly helping others, doing no wrong, only good. He was practically a saint, albeit one clothed in an ill-fitting, garish track suit, and he was loved by all.
Or was he?
Throughout his adult life there had been rumours about Savile. Nothing that anyone could prove conclusively, but persistent, nagging stories about his fondness not just for ‘the ladies’ but for a particular kind of female: young ones. Pure evil gossip perhaps, or was there some basis in truth; a dark, sordid reality he had kept from the world for decades?
Who could have foretold, as the tributes poured in during the early weeks after Savile’s death, what lay in store? Not only was the life he tried to keep so secret behind the extrovert public façade about to be exposed, but questions were to be raised about institutions such as the BBC, the National Health Service, the Police, the Crown Prosecution Service and many others.
So I’ve always had Rolls-Royces and I’ve always had cigars because they go with Rolls-Royces. Every time I light a cigar it’s a celebration.’
Jimmy Savile on fame.
Jimmy Savile was born on October 31, 1926, in Leeds, a giant commercial and industrial powerhouse of a city, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
By a bizarre coincidence, on that same day several thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean in Detroit, Michigan, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini died.
Savile was the youngest of seven children from a family where money was scarce. Houdini was a rabbi’s son from Budapest. Neither man was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and both went on to achieve fame and fortune, their funerals being attended by vast crowds of admirers, most of whom had never known either man personally but nonetheless grieved their passing.
That wasn’t, however, all they had in common.
Both men fooled the public throughout their lives. Houdini’s escapology seemed to be pure magic, so much so that his name became a by-word for inexplicable trickery. Savile’s deception was far more sinister, a dark secret that he kept for decades, hidden behind a veil of nonconformity and madcap bonhomie.
His public persona was a pure lie on his part, a cover for perversity, violence and the degradation of the young. And it was all carried off with swagger and cruelty and was due in a large part to, as he might have put it himself, the fact that he had ‘more front than Woolworths’.
James Wilson Savile’s parents, clerical worker Vincent and wife Agnes (always referred to in later years by Savile as The Duchess) already had six children in their home in Consort Terrace, Woodhouse, not far from the centre of Leeds, when little Jimmy arrived.
As an infant, so the family legend that Savile was happy to elaborate on in years to come goes, he was at death’s door until his mother prayed for his wellbeing while in Leeds Catholic Cathedral and he miraculously recovered. Savile could not remember what his illness was. ‘In those days,’ he explained, ‘if you were poor you just died – it was no big deal.’
He was schooled at St. Anne’s in Leeds where, a few years later the actor Peter O’Toole also studied. The Lawrence of Arabia star was to complain in adulthood about being beaten by the nuns because he was left-handed, although Savile’s take on that was different. He called it a ‘factory of learning’ and although it may not have been effective on the really bad boys, it ‘had a salutary effect on the rest of us’ was his verdict. He was entitled to a jar of free malt, from which he had a spoonful a day to combat the possibility of getting rickets, free canvas and rubber-soled sandshoes, and free milk, as well as days out to Scarborough. Perhaps this was to form his fund-raising ethos – his parents organised whist and beetle drives for charity – when he was an adult.
In later years he was to say he was evacuated briefly to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire to avoid the bombs that Hitler was raining on cities such as Leeds and when he returned, even though he was not yet five feet tall, he began to frequent the local dance hall at the tender age of 11, occasionally playing drums with the band. It is perhaps an example of where Savile’s version of the truth already enters a realm of fantasy given