Savile - The Beast: The Inside Story of the Greatest Scandal in TV History. John McShane
the risk of being bombed some considerable time before 1939, the year war was actually declared.
His first date with a girl was when he was 12 and he later claimed that the young lady in question was some eight years older than him and worked at the ticket office at a dance hall. He said he only saw the top ten per cent of her body and on the eve of their first date at a cinema he cut his lip on some railings. ‘The darkness of the picture house hid my floppy lip and I discovered about girls that the 90 per cent that you can’t see is just as important as the 10 per cent you can. These days,’ he was to say in 1974, ‘the percentage is reversed, but the principle is the same.’
Savile’s autobiography, penned that year, gives several illuminating examples of his attitude towards women and girls. At very best they could be described as ‘of their time’; laddish, pop world remarks showing no attempt at any emotional contact. At worst, with the benefit of the hindsight that the world now has, they indicated the callous, uncaring disregard for women and girls that he was to show in the years to come.
For example, Savile was a keen cyclist and in one competitive race he and a friend were in the lead when they saw two attractive girls at the roadside. They immediately stopped and chatted them up, letting the rest of the field catch up and overtake them. All good, harmless ‘boys will be boys’ stuff perhaps…but then again perhaps it wasn’t?
In his autobiography, Savile wrote of his ‘introduction to the sex act.’ His description even then sounded seedy; now it gives a chilling foretaste of his future behaviour. Although he doesn’t state his exact age, it appears immediately after an anecdote about a sexual conversation he was having as a 14-year-old, so it is safe to assume it occurred at about the same time, Savile’s early teens. ‘I was quite simply picked up in the dance hall by a buxom and randy young lady for whom, that night, I was definitely the bottom of the barrel’, he said.
She asked him to see her home – the most direct of approaches – and they travelled in the third-class compartment of a corridor-less train for seven miles to Horsforth on the outskirts of Leeds.
Once on board she told him to put his feet up, which he did, but on the seat opposite and not lengthwise as she wished. Savile says: ‘I fastened hold of her with tenacity. Heartened by my firm grip she waited for “here it comes” and lay dormant. So did I.’
In gloating manner he continued: ‘Realising that not only had she paid the fare but she would also have to do all the work, she manhandled me into a sitting position and to my terror, mixed with embarrassment, slid her hand into my one and only pair of trousers and searched, in vain, for what she hungered.’
After they walked to her home they went behind her house where they leant against a wall screened by a large hedge. ‘Clutching me to her body like some flesh-eating plant she once again started her search for the Nile. Oft times since have I tried to remember the details of our time in the bushes.’
It was something he was not only proud of at the time, but was eager to share with his pals. ‘I trotted home the seven miles and carefully committed each detail of this amazing night to my memory.’ Savile didn’t just wallow in sleazy reminiscing, he felt it appropriate to boast of his subsequent behaviour when he added: ‘From that day to this there have been trains and, with apologies to the hit parade, boats and planes (I am a member of the 40,000ft Club) and bushes and fields, corridors, doorways, floors, chairs, slag heaps, desks and probably everything except the celebrated chandelier and ironing board.’
He continued: ‘As to the right and wrong of it, most of us have burned our bridges, not to mention our boats, long before we realise there could be a right or wrong to it. Ah that we were all but innocent animals. For fun, girls take a lot of berating.’
It is remarkable that Savile chose to make those views public in the mid-seventies when his fame was at his height and when he was a giant of mainstream entertainment, with a vast following of youngsters.
In wartime Leeds, according to Savile, he first thought of joining the Navy like elder brothers John and Vince, but his inability to swim ruled that out. Then he fancied being a Rear-Gunner in the RAF, only for his eyesight failing to meet the required standards.
He was 18 and although the war was nearing its end, he would have to do service in one form or another, and for Savile that resulted in him becoming a ‘Bevin Boy’ – the young British conscripts who worked in the coal mines of the United Kingdom, from December 1943 until 1948.
As the country could not import coal during World War II, the production of coal from mines in Britain had to be increased. The Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, decided that a percentage of young men called up to serve in the forces should work in the mines and one in ten of the young men called up were sent to work in the mines. These conscripts, almost 50,000 in total, were given the nickname ‘Bevin Boys’.
To make the process random, one of Bevin’s secretaries would each week pull a number from a hat containing all ten numbers 0–9, and all men liable for call-up that week whose National Service number ended in that digit were, with certain exemptions, directed to work in the mines. Not surprisingly, the men came from all walks of life and as well as Savile other Bevin Boys included comedian Eric Morecambe, the farce actor Brian Rix who later became the head of Mencap, and England football hero Nat Lofthouse.
Whatever else Savile may have invented about his life and the experiences that moulded him, it is incontrovertible that the time he spent underground had an impact on him that lasted throughout his life. As he put it: ‘The noise, the dark, the dust and the torn fingers created an impression of Hell that I will carry to the grave…Past memories of my after-school job in my beloved dance hall with its whores and hooligans were like a dream that never existed.’
He was a miner after the war ended and, in total, spent almost seven years in the mining industry, sometimes working with a pick and a short-handled shovel, lying on his side for up to eight hours in just 18 inches of space. Eventually he suffered a back injury and had to wear a steel ‘corset’ and use walking sticks to get around – his mining days were over. Perhaps that injury played a part in the empathy he had for the sick which he was only too keen to show to the public in years to come.
Savile may have been spending his working life underground, but his mind was in the stars; in a family where no one even owned a motor bike he cut out a photograph of a Rolls-Royce and pinned it inside his wardrobe door.
He would never have bought that ‘Roller’ if he had stayed in mining, it was the new world he was to enter that enabled him to achieve the fortune he longed for. Having spent his youth around the dance halls of Leeds it was a short step for him to enter the world of music and entertainment – and it was an opportunity he was not going to miss.
Together with a friend he booked a room above the Belle Vue Road branch of the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds friendly society for ten shillings (50p) and decided to charge one shilling (5p) to enter. The music came from a radio wired up to a wind-up gramophone and by 9pm they had taken eleven shillings on the door. They had made a profit.
One of the customers then booked him at a fee of 2d10s (£2.50) for her 21st birthday and that celebration took place above a café in Otley near Leeds. He wired his speaker to such an effect that it blasted out noise and once he had been paid he was able to reflect: ‘Looking at this vast sum of money I realised most definitely and positively that I had arrived at the threshold of a fortune.’
He decided he wanted a job at the Mecca in Leeds where he had worked part-time as a schoolboy and soon he was on 8d10s a week as assistant manager at the ballroom, rising quickly up the ladder with the nationwide organisation. It was the early 1950s and at last the weariness and austerity of the war years – rationing did not completely end until 1954, an astonishing nine years after the conflict ceased – was being left behind. Savile was determined to be the right man in the right place at the right time.
But it wasn’t all petticoats and dreamboats during the Fifties as Savile worked in various Mecca establishments up and down the country. There was an ugly side to these working-class palaces, and Savile was more than capable