Jimmy Savile, Who Knew What?

I started work at Hill Samuel Life Assurance Ltd in Leeds on Monday 14 January 1980, aged 16, as a Quotations Clerk. In the May or June of 1983, I got the Chief Clerk’s job which put me in charge of all the administration in the northern region, covering the Leeds, Manchester, and Nottingham offices. HSLA’s rule book stated that a Chief Clerk had to be aged at least 25, but the Regional Manager knew I could do it, and promoting me was cheaper than hiring in somebody from a recruitment agency. So, I got the job, aged 19. The incident that is the point of this story occurred at the time of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List that year, 1983, or the following year, 1984, I can’t be sure, I honestly can’t remember, but the precise date is not important.

We had one typist in the office – no desktop PCs back then. Every summer when our typist was on her two weeks’ leave, we got in a temp, so when I took charge, I hired one in as my predecessor, Tony, had done, from the agency we always used, Manpower. The woman they sent was what in those days was called a ‘career secretary.’? She was mid-forties, incredibly efficient, something of a dragon, and had previously worked for the BBC. I can’t recall her name. Tony had become an Area Manager whose job it was to schmooze brokers - Independent Financial Advisers - into giving us business, so he was still in the office daily.

Our temp was with us at the time of the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. The day the awards came out, Tony, exclaimed something like “All these nobs and TV people get knighthoods and peerages, but what about poor old Jimmy Savile? All he’s got is an OBE and he’s raised millions for charity!” At this our temp joined the discussion. “Savile will never get a Knighthood,” she said. “It’s well-known that he messes around with young girls. Everyone knows it. All the royals have been warned off to have nothing to do with him.” ?Those were her words as near as I can recall. The phrase “he messes around with young girls” is precise. She said that. Nobody used the word ‘paedophile’ back then, not in the company I kept anyway. The first time I recall hearing the word ‘paedophile’ was in a Sunday Mirror or Sunday People article about PIE, the ‘paedophile information exchange.’ We were stunned. Nobody argued with her, but we all discussed it between ourselves when she went out for lunch. None of us believed her. We all put it down to the bitchy backstabbing nature of the media world.

When the Savile story broke in 2012, I was a weekly contributor to BBC Radio Leeds. I did a weekly financial advice spot that lasted for seven years. The BBC gets a lot of stick these days, and often deserves it, but I do not believe anyone in BBC North at the time had any idea about what Savile was really like. Every day they faithfully reported the latest revelations, even though it was clearly getting them down. Their morale was on the floor. I bumped into BBC Radio Leeds presenter Liz Green one afternoon, on my way to the studio, and she was distraught. “We just have to keep reporting the latest findings, because it’s the news,” she said, “but what the public don’t understand is that it’s news to us too.” Another presenter, Johnny I’Anson, said “What people don’t understand is that he was a generation before us. We never knew him. He’s been in while I’ve been here, and to be honest everyone always thought he was a pain the arse and a nasty piece of work. He’d act like he owned the place so we’d be polite and get rid of him as soon as we could. He was a nuisance.” Johnny’s description rang true. I’d only ever seen Savile in person once, years before. It was in the mid-1980s in either Len’s Bar or Digby’s (the two bars were next to each other) on York Place in Leeds city centre. Savile was there with a bunch of cronies who had the look - middle-aged, dark suits, ties, and shiny shoes - of middle ranking police types. Dripping his usual bling, he was obnoxiously rude to the bar staff.

That’s all I know about Jimmy Savile, apart from what everyone else knows, but what did others know? Specifically, what did Prime Minister Thatcher, and the Royals, know, and the police? Because, if a middle-aged middle-class career secretary knew what she said was common knowledge, it’s hard to believe they were any less well informed. If the knowledge of Savile’s crimes percolated down to BBC secretaries, did it really not percolate an equal distance upwards?