In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies Read Free Book Online Page B

with underage girls’.
    Younghusband claimed that she didn’t know what was meant by ‘the darker side’ of Jimmy Savile, although she had heard rumours that he ‘mishandled charity money’ and knew there was speculation about his sex life. 15 George Entwistle would later claim that he did not read Younghusband’s email and did not believe it was sent as a warning about Savile. 16

5. THE WORLD WAS COMPLETELY BLACK
    J immy Savile’s school career was coming to an end in 1939 when, like all other schoolchildren in Leeds and other major cities across Britain, he was issued with a gas mask. It came in a small cardboard box with a length of string knotted to each end that allowed it to be worn over a shoulder or across the back.
    That summer, children were given forms for their parents to sign, giving consent for evacuation in the event that war was declared. In August, as hopes for peace dimmed in mainland Europe, the Department of Education outlined the requirements for each child in the event of evacuation: one full change of clothing including an extra pair of shoes, toothbrush and towel, three St Ivel triangular cheeses, six cream crackers and two ounces of barley sugar sweets.
    On 1 September, more than 18,000 children left Leeds Central Station on 51 trains. The 12-year-old Jimmy Savile was among them, heading to a temporary home with a family in Gainsborough. He would describe his time in the flat, open expanses of Lincolnshire as a widescreen experience after the leaden skies and grime of Leeds.
    This rural idyll was not destined to last long. When his parents cadged a lift off a neighbour to visit their youngest in his strange new surroundings, Agnes Savile discovered that he was living in the shadow of some prominent gasometers. She decided there and then to take him home, figuring if he was going to be killed by a German bomb it might as well be in Leeds. He was back at Consort Terrace before Hitler’s Panzers had rumbled into France.
    Despite what Savile later claimed about how badly Leeds suffered in the war, the city was getting off lightly in comparison to Grimsby and Hull to the east, Sheffield to the south and Manchester and Liverpool to the west. The low throb of enemy aircraft engines rarely presaged anything more serious than a few incendiary bombs that were advanced on by fire wardens wielding dustbin lids and broom handles like amateur lion tamers.
    Of course this was not how Jimmy Savile remembered it. ‘There were no lights from windows, no street lights,’ he recalled wistfully at our first meeting in Leeds. ‘You got a visit from the air raid warden if there was a chink of light from any of the curtains. The whole world was completely black.’
    In fact, the fledgling Jimmy Savile was faring better than most. ‘We were all in the racket business,’ he said of a period in which the city’s black market went into overdrive. He claimed to have learned much from the city’s growing Jewish population, many of whom were first-generation Jews who had fled the Third Reich. ‘They used to fascinate me,’ he said of watching the newcomers carving out their living on the markets. ‘All they knew about was being successful.’
    His other fascination was the local dancehall. His parents were regulars at the Mecca Locarno ballroom situated in the County Arcade, and Savile told me about being trailed along in his Sunday best and being made to sit on the balcony while Vince and Agnes glided across the dance floor under the coloured spotlights. He said he was always intrigued by how the dancehall became a temporary escape from the rigours of life outside and how people were transformed once the music played.
    The Mecca Locarno in County Arcade also afforded the young Jimmy Savile access to the more disreputable elements within society. As he memorably put it in his autobiography, he became ‘the confidant of murderers, whores, black marketeers, crooks of every trade – and often the innocent victims