In Plain Sight-The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies

Author:Dan Davies
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biographies & Memoirs, Entertainers, Bio, Arts & Literature, Actors & Entertainers, Actors & Actresses
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2014-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

39. PIED PIPER

Jimmy Savile climbed the ladder of a scaffold tower and on reaching the platform at the top, spread his arms wide and soaked up the acclaim. Below, 20,000 sun-baked teenagers from all across Ulster cheered their approval. A chain-link fence shimmered in the distance. It had been erected by the Royal Marines and marked a different sort of dividing line to the one these young people were used to, enclosing the makeshift arena laid out on the disused airfield at Nutts Corner.

Beyond the fence stood hundred of officers from the Royal Ulster Constabulary, backed by troops of the British army. The forces of law and order, or oppression and fear depending on which side of the sectarian divide you came from, maintained a watchful if twitchy presence. At this moment in time, however, the temporary fence represented a line between young and old. Youngsters from opposite sides of an increasingly bitter sectarian divide had come together to walk and to witness a pop festival, and now they were in the hands of a higher authority; a man describing himself as the ‘Pied Piper of Peace’.

As the cheers eventually subsided, Savile addressed his captive audience from his high vantage point beside the stage. ‘You have proved that the teenagers of Northern Ireland see more then violence in life,’1 he blared, as a sea of clapping hands rippled before him. ‘This is the greatest day of my life so far.’

Fifty-one bombs had exploded across Northern Ireland and the British mainland in the previous year alone, killing 29 people and injuring hundreds more. In February 1972, the IRA claimed responsibility for an explosive device that went off at Aldershot Barracks, killing six female ancillary workers and a Roman Catholic padre. It was thought to have been planted as retaliation for the Bloody Sunday massacre of 14 civilians, seven of them teenagers, carried out by British troops in the Bogside area of Derry just a month before. On 14 April, 24 separate Provisional IRA bombs went off at points across the province, and gunfire was exchanged between gunmen and the security forces. On one single Friday in July, ‘Bloody Friday’, 22 bombs exploded in a 74-minute period, killing nine and injuring 130.

In the summer of 1973, the Northern Ireland Association of Youth Clubs, the only interdenominational youth organisation for both sexes in Ulster, decided to contact Jimmy Savile. As vice-president of the National Association of Youth Clubs in Britain and a regular visitor to Ireland through his work with the Central Remedial Clinic, he was deemed the perfect choice to lead an eight-mile sponsored walk to raise money for a new youth centre in Belfast. Security forces advised Savile that he could be a target for IRA snipers but he was having none of it. The chain-link fence he said, would keep him safe, ‘not from bullets but from birds’.2

The walk began in the village of Mullusk, with Savile dressed in a bright yellow tracksuit and setting a brisk jogging pace from the front.

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