A 6 minute read by Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale. This is our second post about the wall of silence that has long protected sexual abusers in Britain. Our first post was about how the Archbishop of Canterbury and dozens of other church officials covered up gruesome physical and sexual abuse. We argued there that the protection of sexual abusers in British institutions is not a glitch in the system. It is how the system works. This post tells the story of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, several police forces and dozens of managers protected Jimmy Savile over several decades.

SAVILE

Sir Jimmy Savile was often referred to as a ‘national treasure’, like David Attenborough and Ringo Starr. But after his death in 2011 we learned that he was also a prolific abuser of girls.

Savile was a working class man who became a DJ in the 1960s, first on a semi-legal ‘pirate radio station’ and then for BBC radio. For the next twenty years he was the presenter of the BBC’s Top of the Pops, the main weekly music program on television.

During this work he had sex with many girls, some forced and some consensual, both and above below the age of consent. This was known to many who worked with him over the years, and to BBC managers.

Savile later presented many other television programs. The most famous, Jim’ll Fix It, ran for twenty years from 1975 to 1994. The format, and the gimmick, was that children would write in to the BBC to ask Jimmy to make a lifelong dream come true, and one child would get to live his wish each week.

Savile’s relentless charity work over decades was also famous and much admired. Particularly important was his fundraising for the rebuilding of the Stoke Mandeville Hospital, the national specialist hospital for people with spinal injuries. As a specialist centre, Stoke Mandeville treated many of the most badly injured, and many children. Savile abused many of them.

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

How did Savile get away with it?  One answer is that he had powerful friends.  The most important was Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister from 1978 to 1990. Savile and Thatcher were personal friends, and he spent more than one Christmas with her and her husband Dennis at the official prime ministerial country residence of Chequers.

Thatcher tried several times to award Savile a knighthood for services to charity. On each occasion her civil servants told her she must not, given what they knew about him. In 1989 she finally overruled them, and Savile became Sir Jimmy.

Personal friendships with the Royal Family were also important, particularly those with Earl Mountbatten and Prince, now King, Charles. Savile offered advice on their marital troubles to both Charles and his then wife Diana. Charles particularly valued Savile’s friendship because he was able to give the prince a window into what ordinary working class people were like.

There were also extensive allegations of corrupt police protection. But we do not need a particular explanation of why Savile was protected until his death. It is enough to know that covering up sexual abuse of young people had been a standard practice for the British establishment for at least a century. Savile was not an exception.

We are not implying here that Thatcher or the Royal Family intervened personally to prevent investigations into Savile. Rather, the process worked by association. Savile’s victims, young and often vulnerable working class women, knew he was friends with the prime minister and the Prince of Wales. They largely assumed he was so powerful that they would be crushed if they went public.

Senior civil servants, police officers and senior managers could also imagine the consequences of Savile’s exposure for the prime minister and the royal family. They would have been tempted to cover up for the good of the system.

The cliché often used for such abusers is that they are hiding ‘in plain sight’.  Savile was not hiding, but he was in plain sight. Indeed, he often, almost compulsively joked about his naughtiness in front of the cameras.

Very large numbers of people heard the rumours, and a few thousand people also had evidence of his predation. Several police forces investigated complaints, and at least two police forces referred the case to the Director of Public Prosecutions, who did not prosecute.

HOW SILENCE WAS ENFORCED

To understand the magnitude of the cover-up, we need to look a bit more closely at the scale and brazen nature of what Savile did.

Very large numbers of police, nurses and other people were forced to be complicit in Savile’s abuse because of their fear of being sacked, and in a more general sense their fear of the vengeance of powerful men.

Grown women later reported being groped, fingered and raped while they were patients with spinal injuries at Stoke Mandeville Hospital between the ages of eleven and sixteen. One reported Savile raping her as she recovered from an operation, largely unable to move.[1]

Samantha Dearen had to collect the money from the congregation in the chapel on Sundays and would deliver it to Savile, who was waiting in a small room off the chapel, where he groped her every time. This continued for three or four years. Dearen said Savile liked to keep the door open so he could see the priest while he molested her.

The best biography of Savile is Dan Davies’ In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. Davies writes:

In the late Seventies, John Lindsay was working as a detective constable with Thames Valley Police. He claimed it was then that a young female nurse at Stoke Mandeville told him staff were concerned about Jimmy Savile’s conduct during hospital visits.

[The nurse] said to me at the they didn’t like Savile because he was touching little girls in hospital, not necessarily in a sexual way, but touching them and they were unhappy about the way he was going on,’ Lindsay said. ‘They told the little girls who were in hospital to stay in bed and give the impression they were asleep…

As a patient at Stoke Mandeville, Rebecca Owen recounts that she overheard nurses talking about how Jimmy Savile picked his targets: ‘It was an air of resignation that you had to put up with it,’ she said. ‘There was some sort of ironic chatter between the nurses about who would be the lucky one to go off to his room. And then, as one of the nurses was leaving or passing by my bed, she leant over and said the best thing you can is stay in bed until he’s gone and pretend to be asleep.

Savile had a room in Stoke Mandeville hospital in the 1980s.

But it wasn’t just Stoke Mandeville. At Broadmoor, the national specialist prison hospital for what were then called the ‘criminally insane’, Savile had not only his own room but his own set of keys. He also helped Edwina Currie, the Conservative health minister, break a threatened strike by nurses at Broadmoor.

Savile was also more than welcome at Leeds General Infirmary, where for several years he did one shift a week as a voluntary porter (orderly), and where he continued to pop in over many years, and where, again, he abused young patients.

The point of all these grisly stories is the sheer normality of the cover-up. Very large numbers of nurses, police officers and other rank and file staff did not have to be told to cover-up. They already knew, because everyone knew, what would happen if they tried to blow the whistle.

And those who did tried to blow the whistle reported the event to managers who knew to keep their mouths shut.

THE COMMISSION OF INQUIRY

After his death Savile’s predation was publicly revealed. There was outrage, partly because so many people found Savile a bit creepy, and many had known for a long time that sexual assaults on young people were regularly covered up. This eventually led to an official commission of inquiry into the sexual abuse of children. Our next post is about another brick in the wall of silence. It’s called Jimmy Savile, Boris Johnson and the Slow Burial of the Commission of Inquiry into the Sexual Abuse of Children.

Nancy Lindisfarne and Jonathan Neale’s most recent book is Why Men: A Human History of Violence and Inequality.

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[1] This next four stories come from Dan Davies, 2014, In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile.