The blog post that won’t go away is still bouncing around in my head; the Sunday newspapers today have further infuriated me – and after long talks with Mr G, I have made the decision to publish. It is going to be a painful experience for me, one that will take several days to complete, so be patient with me. You’ll get an installment each day – the ‘Perils of Pauline’ Mark II.  It may be that the reason for publishing won’t be clear until I have finished the tale. That could be Friday! Who knows?

Pour yourself a double on the house, and sit quietly.

I did once write on this site of how I attempted suicide when I was 13,  a few months before the Suicide Act made that desperate act ‘legal’. Until that change in the law, you were either ‘mad or bad’. I ended the story with me being incarcerated in a fearful Victorian asylum in Epsom on the grounds that no one wanted to believe that I was ‘bad’. It was horrific, and I have thought many times over the years of writing of what happened to me as a child, but I truly loathe the ‘victim culture’ and could never bring myself to do it. I will, today, try to fill in  a few pertinent details.

 There was no ‘children’s ward’. Such a thing didn’t exist in those days. So I found myself in the company of some very strange individuals indeed; many, many, years older than I. The only concession to my age was that I was given a single ‘room’, not allocated to the women’s dormitory. ‘Room’ is in parenthesis, for it bore more resemblance to a police cell – a heavy metal door, with an inspection hatch, which in fairness, was never locked, but foreboding all the same. Although that door was never locked, the door to the corridor that it was on was locked at night. Someone, somewhere, was presumably aware that it wasn’t a brilliant idea to leave a 13 year old girl sleeping and accessible to several dozen adult males – even if it was only done in the interests of getting a good nights kip on night duty.

It was about the only concession to the idea that having some 50 men and women with varying mental states sharing one ward was potentially problematic.

Once a week was bath-night. There were four huge baths, deep cast iron affairs, with the controls for the hot water firmly on the outside. The routine was that two baths were allocated to the women, and two to the men, and periodically the water would be changed – not between every patient though!  There were procedures to go through before you reached the head of the queue. As the queue snaked the length of the ward, nurses would first collect – or more generally ‘help out of’ – all clothing; further up the queue, new clothing would be allocated, so that by the time you reached the head of the queue, you were stark naked, clutching a pile of clean clothing. All very efficient for the nursing staff.

It also meant that by the time I neared the head of the queue, I was starkers, and pressed in on all sides by some deeply confused equally naked men and women. The staff took no notice of the general ‘jostling’ that would go on around me – but one of the other patients did. His name was Joss and at 28, he was the nearest to my age. He took to standing next to me in the queue, and snarling at anyone who attempted to touch me.

Joss was 15 years older than me, and a schizophrenic. I didn’t have a clue what that meant, he just seemed to be the only person in that place capable of holding a conversation. He said it was all a misunderstanding that he was there – he should have been in prison for a ‘major bank robbery’, but had ‘pretended to be mad’ to escape prison. That sounded reasonable enough to me – I hadn’t done anything, that I could see, that warranted being locked up in this way, so could sympathise with someone else in the same position. We took to sitting next to each other in the dinning room and the ‘craft room’ that we were led off to each day.

Joss was kind and gentle, and looked after me. If you were waiting for the classic ‘I was an abused child’ tale, you will be disappointed. He never abused me in any way whatsoever. I should also make clear that never received any form of ‘treatment’ at Long Grove. With hindsight, I was undoubtedly deeply depressed, but I wasn’t diagnosed with any dreadful mental illness, I was just ’there’. The only place the general hospital where I had originally been taken to unconscious could think of discharging me to.

One day Joss disappeared under one of the tables in the craft room and beckoned to me. I crouched down under the table to hear what he had to say. Everybody else was milling around the door, waiting to go back to the ward for tea – it was the end of the day. ‘Get under here, and keep your head down, I’ve unlocked a window’. So I did! In time, the building was empty and we duly climbed through the window and ran like the wind across the extensive grounds, eventually making our way to Epsom railway station.

Still waiting for something terrible to happen? Sorry to disappoint again. He took me home to his sister in Brixton who gave me a job working on one of her market stalls. I lived with two female friends of his in a flat in Battersea. Joss went home to his Mother, and appeared occasionally, but not much. I was still very much a virgin – if you need to know – just working hard, paying my way and keeping my head down.

One day, two policemen came to the door. It was me they were looking for, having followed Joss to the address several times. They marched me off down Battersea Bridge Road towards the police station. As we were halfway there, we neared the post office. Three men came running out of the post office pursued by the post master…’you stay right where you are Susanne’ said my policemen and took off in hot pursuit. Needless to say, I was off round the corner like a bloody greyhound. Technically I had just made my position ten times worse, I had now absconded from police custody.

I hitch hiked for three weeks, up and down the country, day and night. I literally had nowhere to aim for, nowhere to go. Lorry drivers bought me bacon sandwiches, leered at me, but decided I was too young to chance their arm. Eventually I hitchhiked the length of Scotland, ending up three miles from John O’Groats late at night. The car driver was worried about putting me down on a lonely road (this was 1962!) late at night. ‘Come home with me’ he said. I declined. ‘You’ll be quite safe, my sister lives there too’. He made her come to the gate to reassure me, she did.

Her name was Jean and she ran the local store and post office. She too gave me a job, helping out in the shop. I lived in her croft with her. They were very poor – it was very primitive, two inch thick glass set straight into the cob walls, no frames! That lasted for about a month until once again a policeman came knocking. He took me into custody – a hilarious affair, since even then they had rules about young children and women, and there was no female police officer, just him and his wife and a cell door which had to remain open and he had to push my food over the threshold….

Two policewomen came up from London to accompany me on the long journey back to London by train. It took about 24 hours from memory. Eventually we ended up at I think it was Waterloo Station, no matter, we had a long wait for the next connection and quite improbably, they decided to take me to the old cartoon cinema that used to be on the platform. Half way through yet another Mickey Mouse effort, sitting between these two uniformed policewomen, one of them went to get some sweets. No sooner had she gone than the other one decided to go to the ladies. I watched her disappear down the dimly lit aisle, and with no sign of the other one hoving into view – need you ask?

I was off again like greased lightening. My 2nd escape from police custody. I made it to Joss’s house – the only place I knew, just as the police arrived there. I was taken to a place called Cumberlow Lodge in South Norwood, a now notorious detention centre. I was there for months, five at least. Every three weeks I would appear in court, and the magistrates would ask whether my parents were present. They never were, they refused to communicate whatsoever. Every three weeks the magistrates would make a new order ‘to give time to trace my parents’.

I had broken the law, both in my suicide attempt and twice escaping from police custody, but I was not the usual run of ‘runaways’. I was still steadfastly a virgin, as the indignity of gynaecological examinations proved, had never stolen anything, nor got involved in drugs or anything like that. I was extremely well spoken and well educated – several public boarding schools had seen to that.

But I was just 14 years old and nobody knew what to do with me.

Where was I? Oh, yes, Cumberlow Lodge, South Norwood. Politely described as a ‘children’s home’ – no doubt to honour the strictures of the will of the Victorian philanthropist, W E Stanley, who had left his much loved home to the government for use as a ‘children’s home’. It was a detention centre, adapted to the needs of the burgeoning new fangled Social Services who were trying out their theories that the State was better equipped to care for children than ordinary people. Even the good people of South Norwood complained bitterly when it became home to Mary Bell in later years. Those of us who were there sent up daily prayers that it would disappear from the face of the earth – our prayers were not answered until 2006 when a developer blew the site off the map of South Norwood one dark night before the listed buildings people could stop him covering it in ‘affordable homes’.

It was huge, my memory fails me but I would say probably 50 to 60 girls were there at any one time. Drawn from all over London and all walks of life - please don’t imagine that Mary Bell became famous because truly evil children were a new phenomena, they existed long before Mary’s time. I was utterly terrified of most of them, particularly Bernadette, who had greeted my arrival by whacking me over the head with a bounders bat for no other reason than that I sounded ‘posh’. A fledgling labour voter no doubt. Luckily she didn’t actually crack my skull, but I had an egg shaped lump on top of my head for months afterwards – probably accounts for a lot!

I don’t remember any of the staff, no terrible tales of deprivation to relate – but I remember well the frequent fights between the girls who were streetwise way beyond my years. Many of them had grown up in rough and tough parts of inner London and had experienced a life I couldn’t begin to understand. The violence scared me witless, and I took to sitting right at the back of the dinning room, back to the wall, with a girl called Agnes. Fat, frumpy, Agnes, she and I were the outcasts. And Sadie, an Indian girl – another crime in the eyes of the multitude. The three of us barely dared to exchange a word in case our conversation offended someone.

One night, over dinner, another fight started. They seemed to find it fun, they all joined in. Plates, food, then chairs, tables, flew through the air. Windows shattered, and the staff did what they always did, ran out the room locking the door behind them. I can’t blame them. I would have done the same if I could, but I was behind an upturned table with Sadie and Agnes. We cowered in silence listening to the screams as hair was pulled, skulls cracked, old grievances dealt with – eventually all was quiet. One of us, I forget who, peeped over the top of the table and gazed in awe. To say the room was a wreck was an understatement – there wasn’t an unbroken item in sight, nor another girl. The net curtains over huge Victorian glazed windows billowed in the breeze - they’d gone. The whole lot of them. Every last one of them. Probably close on 50 girls haring down Chalfont Road.

I don’t think we discussed the matter, we all seemed to have sussed independently that when they reopened that locked door, we would be the only ones left to bear the brunt of the collective staff ire. Trouble was, we had no more positive view of our chances if we ran after our youthful tormentors. Amazingly it was fat Agnes who came up with a solution; she was a local girl. Not Chalfont Road, but the opposite direction! Smart thinking Agnes – but you forgot something. That other essential accouterment of the Victorian  philanthropist – a tennis court. A tennis court surrounded by 12′ high wire fencing. I don’t suppose you have ever tried to traverse a tennis court without opening the doors. Agnes didn’t make it as far as the wire, ran out of puff long before and was lagging behind. Sadie got there first and her nimble size 3s soon found purchase in the diamond wire pattern. Ms Raccoon’s size 8s didn’t quite fit the bill. I could only just get a toe hold it took me an age stuck up high to figure out how to cross from one side to the other and let myself down – and I still had to get over the other side! Sadie had no patience with me and was gone, and after what seemed an hour or more but was probably ten minutes, I finally made it only to find a seemingly impenetrable hedge in front of me. Sheer adrenaline forced me through that hedge. I emerged into God knows what street, only to see Agnes sauntering down the road without a care in the world. She might have been fat and frumpy, but she wasn’t stupid. Realising that she had no chance of emulating our athletics, she had turned back and merely wandered down the main drive and turned left instead of right…

‘Running’ was becoming a habit for me, an obsessive one at that. Unlike the other runaways though, I had nowhere to run to; no forbidden boyfriend to make contact with, no circle of druggie friends to fall back in with; no pimp waiting to put me back to work. My peripatetic lifestyle before all this started; a new school virtually every year, years in hospital, parents moving round the globe -I simply hadn’t known anyone for longer than a few months anywhere. The various people my Father parked me with in the school holidays were merely figures at the ends of a long drive, I had no more idea of where they lived than I do of Cameron’s address.  Joss was out of the question, I knew that was the first place they would look for me. I became Agnes’s best, if unwelcome, friend. I stuck to her like a limpet. Whatever she had planned, so did I.

Agnes’s plans were interesting, I’ll give her that. They started with a trip on a fish lorry to the outer wastes of Suffolk, where we took up residence in a dingy hotel. Free bed and board in return for all the washing up. After a week or so, fish lorry returned for us and dumped us in Lowestoft. There we found ourselves usefully employed in straightening out lengths of copper wire. It was beginning to dawn on me that Agnes was related to all these people, and that possibly, probably, they weren’t the best people to throw my lot in with. When fish lorry came to collect us yet again and installed us in a dank caravan surrounded by other dank caravans, I decided that a moonlit walk was just what I needed – and I kept right on walking. Like I said, it was becoming a habit. I do wonder what became of Agnes, and searched all the faces in the Dale’s Farm drama for sign of her…

More hitchhiking, and Ms Raccoon can be found sitting on a park bench outside Hampstead tube station. Next to me, a small dark haired lady of continental appearance seemed fascinated by me. Evantia Turner, bless her long-dead cotton socks. ‘Did I live round here’ she enquired. ‘Oh yes’, saith I, not quite the rigorous observer of the truth that I became. ‘Chambermaid in a hotel over there’ upgrading my washer-upper status and moving the hotel several hundred miles with one airy wave of my hand. ‘Do you like it’ said Evantia. ‘Nope, quit this morning’. ‘You’ll be looking for somewhere to live then’? ‘Mmn’, (and a hot meal, and a bath, and if you could throw in a good nights sleep as well Missus!)

So it was that I became au-pair to Paul and Evantia Turner, two of the best people that ever walked this earth. Both university lecturers, they were used to young people and decidedly bohemian in their lifestyle. I later learned that it had taken Evantia one glance at my matted hair, the stench of fish clinging to me, and my half starved appearance to figure out that this was no chambermaid – that and the fact that there was no hotel ‘over there’…she knew a runaway when she saw one.

Between her and Paul, and several evenings over the dinner table in their wonderful hampstead house, they got the truth out of me. They declared that they were going to sort ‘this’ out for me. Paul rented a room for me in Olympia, and every day they would bring me food; every day they were in negotiations with the authorities. Hence the move to Olympia – they would reveal my whereabouts to the authorities just as soon as they had acquired ‘safe passage’ for me. I could live with them and continue my education. They were prepared to pay my school fees to return to my old boarding school and if necessary they would formally adopt me. I could weep now when I think of them, what an almighty magnanimous offer to a girl who was a total stranger to them.

Eventually the day came when all the plans were agreed, and as promised, Paul delivered me to Hampstead police station – I would have to go to court one last time to regularise things. I went to court, Paul and Evantia stood there smiling encouragingly at me – and lo and behold the magistrates had had a letter from my Father! Utterly outraged that anyone would suggest adopting his daughter…

The magistrates could see the sense of Paul and Evantia’s plan though, and although he couldn’t possibly release me into their care given my father’s opposition, there was something he could do. The State, the great and glorious State, the domain of all those newly qualified social scientists, had not long ago set up a special boarding school for girls such as I. I would be able to continue my education, Paul and Evantia could visit me, all the world was my oyster…

It was called Duncroft, I could go there straight away, that very afternoon…in the event, I didn’t get there until 3 days later. My fifteenth birthday. June 1st 1963.

Duncroft! I never thought I would hear that name again – and suddenly it is on everybody’s lips! It is nearly 50 years ago that the car I was in drew up outside that familiar facade and I prepared to enter yet another ‘boarding school’.

You need to be aware that I was well used to ‘new boarding schools’, approximately one every year of my life. Always ‘well heeled’ as they say, my Father wasn’t short of a few bob (I believe, though whether the reason for so many different schools was that he was not fond of parting with his money, I can’t say – I genuinely have never discovered the reason for the frequent changes of address, both for me, and for my parents). This one appeared not to be materially different from any of the others. The left hand side in the photograph I later discovered to be Elizabethan, rumoured to be King John’s hunting lodge connected by a tunnel to Runnymede, the right hand side fine weathered stone – a gracious country house. Most boarding schools of the time were in gracious country houses – the only enterprises that could afford the upkeep of those draughty halls.

We rang the bell in the grand porch, and shortly a sprightly Scottish lady appeared and bounced up to the door with a huge set of keys. A little unusual, even more unusually she locked the door behind us. Not normal behaviour in any of my previous boarding schools, but something I was becoming uncomfortably used to from my experiences over the previous 18 months. I was beginning to smell a rat in these new ‘arrangements’ for me. I can be a tad slow on the uptake at times.

The Scottish lady – Miss Keenan, or ‘Bridie’ as we referred to her behind her back – took me and my suitcase upstairs to show me my ‘dormitory’. Wedgewood it was called. Now that was a real surprise. No sign of the iron bedsteads I was used to – instead there were comfortable divan beds, and posters – posters covering the walls! Colourful bed linen – good grief!

The last but one school I had attended, a famous establishment on the Sussex coast, had iron bedsteads, and rigid rules about personal possessions – one framed photograph which could only be of family, one other ‘personal item’ – Teddy bears seemed to be favourite for this category – and a ‘mufti’ dress which had to be of brown velvet with white lace collar, any design you liked providing it followed rigid rules on length etc which you were allowed to wear for a few brief hours in the evening and after church on Sunday – at all other times it was gymslip and lisle stockings which were checked hourly to make sure the seams were straight!  The school after that insisted on a one mile – a mile! – run every morning with staff stationed at any cut off points, before you were allowed to go and get breakfast. Duncroft was looking like a novel experience. It was definitely that.

Miss Keenan introduced me to Miss Cole, Miss Cole introduced me to Miss O’ Niall, Miss O’ Niall introduced me to Miss Grey – and Miss Grey took me to meet Miss Jones. Do you notice anything about that sentence? I didn’t at the time, but I came to realise that there was only one member of staff, Mrs O’Sullivan, who laid at least nominative claim to have ever engaged in marital relations with a man. I don’t suppose it was easy for the Home Office to fill positions that required you to live on site in a single bedroom along with 22 or 24 hormonal girls from varied walks of life. Duncroft seemed to have cornered the market in ex-Nuns or those whose proclivities otherwise precluded them from contemplating the married life which was the norm for women in the 40 to 50 age group as these all appeared to be. I later learned that Miss O’ Niall shared a flat with Miss Jones; Miss Keenan and Miss Cole were regular visitors to each others rooms late at night, a few hands of whist no doubt; only Mrs O’Sullivan and Miss Grey seemed to keep to themselves.  Interesting – with the benefit of hindsight. Many times over the years I have thought of writing of it – ‘Sad Queens and Sour Widows’© was to be the title. Go figure.

Miss Jones was no exception, a stern lady, dark haired and of typically Welsh appearance, she was about 40 or so I thought. Ancient. What I came to know as her trade mark red slash of lipstick was neatly applied. She eyed me cautiously. She picked up a piece of paper from her desk and informed me that ‘by order of etc., etc., my release date had been set at 27th May 1966…and she added with a sly grin, there would be no absconding from her establishment…

I was genuinely shocked, and for several months afterwards refused to answer the plaintive letters from Paul and Evantia, convinced that they had connived with this fresh approach to getting me under lock and key. They hadn’t, and eventually I believed them and they remained steadfast friends and supporters up to their sad death many years later.

I burst into tears, not an emotional state that Miss Jones had a lot of time for – that wasn’t her style. She offered me a cigarette – Crikey! I’d been given cigarettes before and happily accepted – never by the Head Mistress of any previous school though!

‘Now look, my girl’ she said, and in that ‘my girl’ was distilled every essence of Miss Jones, she really did believe that we were her chosen ones. We came from all walks of life, every possible background, every dire circumstance, the one and only thing we had in common was that at some point in our checkered history we had been IQ tested and found to have an IQ in excess of 140.

140 – not the number of Twitter characters permitted to communicate by these days, but the artificial divide between those whose past history of being in ‘need of care and protection’ – whether by virtue of prostitution, drug abuse, anorexia, or being the victim of abuse in its many forms, emotional and physical – left them at the mercy of such tender establishments as Cumberlow Lodge, or, opened the magic door to Miss Jones’ new emporium. The place where she intended to prove to the Home Office that given the chance to continue their education, given a decent environment, these girls had the wherewithal to turn their lives round. She was a messiah on the subject.

She would nowadays be referred to as a Feminist. A term I have oft derided. In Margaret Jones’ case it meant, not empty rhetoric, but a genuine belief that we could be empowered to control our lives, not remain victims of our circumstances. Her constant mantra was to look forward, not back. To be positive not passive. If I had to place my loathing of the ‘victim culture’ anywhere, it would be firmly pinned to Margaret Jones’ lapel. She fought for us, she moved mountains when necessary. When a fellow pupil from my last boarding school turned up at Duncroft (the only known connection between any two girls other than the ubiquitous IQ test!) a few weeks before the GCSE exam in English, she enlisted the help of Rab Butler to ensure that she was allowed to sit the exam as a late entrant, and spent many evenings reading through Henry V with her willing her to pass the exam with a bare five weeks preparation – she did, and Margaret Jones beamed with pride. My friend decided to abandon her previously determined attempts to starve herself to death and started eating with gusto…sadly in later years she succumbed to anorexia again, but she has a fine daughter who lives on in testament to Miss Jones’ desire to see us help ourselves to a new future.

In truth, you needed the will to help yourself – the ‘education’ budget she had been allocated ran to one registered blind gentleman who arrived each afternoon to try to instill some sense into what must have seemed like St Trinian’s outcasts to him. His eyesight meant that he was extremely careful where he put anything down in order to find it again, especially the blackboard duster. One particular girl took a delight in creeping up to his desk, lifting her clothing and draping herself silently across the desk in such a way that her breast was exactly where he thought he’d put the duster – he would recoil in horror to our great delight, each and every time. It was a regular jape. It would also be fair to say that some of the girls were very experienced little minxes.

We had many visitors, I well remember the coach loads – ‘Thomas Cooks Tours’ – of trainee psychiatrists who arrived at the invitation of Dr Mason, the resident psychiatrist, to peer at the inhabitants of this new experiment in dealing with a cornucopia of teenage misery. The educationalists, the trainee social workers, the Home Office apparatchiks, all came and peered at us myopically – Miss Jones’s ‘cream of Britain’s delinquents’ – she was proud of us, and determined that the way teenage misdemeanor, criminal and otherwise, was dealt with would change.

Time passed slowly. We spent the mornings cleaning the establishment - oh those bloody red tiled corridors! They were endless. We were furnished with overalls and ‘Bumpers’. Great lumps of iron hinged on the end of long poles, with the iron covered in soft polishing cloths. They covered an area some six inches by nine inches, and it does take all morning to polish a 30 yard long corridor with one…but if you worked assiduously you might progress to helping cook in the kitchen, or Mrs O’Sullivan in the laundry (very generous with her cigarettes was Mrs O’Sullivan…) or the heights of good behaviour could see you cleaning the staff dinning room, a beautiful oak paneled room or Miss Jones and Miss O’ Niall’s apartment. The staff dinning room wasn’t a bad billet, they all smoked like troopers, especially Bridie Keenan – unfiltered Piccadilly No 6, such excellent dog ends I remember them still…but the top job was definitely Miss Jones’ apartment, and I got to be such a goody two shoes that it was my domain for a long time. There was always an unsmoked filter tipped Craven ‘A’ in the ashtray left for you to clear away – tidily, mind.

Little rewards for good behaviour. They worked too; 10 cigarettes a week for reasonable behaviour, 20 for goody two shoes (should I be suing the Home Office for my 20 a day habit?) a record player in the common room with a motley collection of ancient LPs, the occasional chance to hear the radio in the laundry, a few ‘educational trips’ in the mini bus round Staines - closely guarded by the superbly athletic in-case-you-got-any-ideas Miss Keenan, and generally Miss O’ Niall – and they went on working for a long time, right through to the end of 1965. I was but 7 months away from my 16th birthday when I would be allowed to progress to Norman Lodge, the hostel built in the grounds of Duncroft. A place where the close reins that Miss Jones kept on us would be relaxed, we would be helped to find a job, allowed out on our own occasionally, given the chance to spread our wings. It was a tantalising prospect.

She called me into her office one evening – the delicious prospect of a fag beckoned..! Ah double-entendre alert.

She wanted to talk to me about my future – and my past, for a change. She told me things that she had gleaned from the official records of my Father’s war time past. Probably shouldn’t have done, but it was helpful to understand what had gone on. She told me to forget about them – sound advice that I have followed ever since. Then we got to my future – what did I think I wanted to do with myself? Perhaps the Civil Service, I opined? (forgive me, I knew not what I was saying). That would not be possible, she explained, nor a job as a telephonist with the GPO (not high on my list of things to do before I died, but still) – nor were the armed forces an option, nor the police or other emergency services…why? Well, a ‘care and protection order’ counted as a criminal record so far as those organisations were concerned. It was monstrously unfair, but there was nothing she could do about it.

Now, I’ not saying that I really wanted to do all – or any – of those things, but the fact that I was actually prevented from doing so really hit home with me. All the old anger at being repeatedly locked up for one moment of despair and one bottle of aspirin just welled up inside me. OK, and escaping from police custody several times, I did understand the law even then – but I had never done a damn thing that warranted what had happened to me since. I’d behaved myself, cleaned that damned corridor hundreds of times, been patient, and now it seemed my entire life was to be permanently blighted. I went off to bed in a foul mood.

Somewhere in the course of that night, I remembered how thin I was, how long legged I was, how the window was adapted to open just so far, how there was a bay window just so far below…Yes, I’m afraid that Ms Raccoon was off on her travels yet again, armed with nothing more than a purloined business card from the man who had made new curtains for her flat, and the clothes she stood up in. I was to be back within a couple of months, but that will have to wait for another day.

Good Lord! 2000 words from someone, one of some two dozen girls alive who were in Duncroft in 1965, and she still hasn’t mentioned Jimmy Savile! Has the woman no mercy? You’ll just have to wait for tomorrow…

*Erratum:

I was very tired and didn’t proof read properly; dining is spelt dining, not dinning; I’m has got an m after the apostrophe; I was 16 and coming up to my 17th birthday not my 16th birthday; and the curtains for ‘her flat’ refer to Miss Jones’ flat – I could have worded that better. I am putting them in an erratum because I am very aware that the text from yesterday was downloaded several hundred times, and read many thousands times, and I don’t want to be accused of having changed the text after publication. (and my heartfelt thanks to the few brave souls who ventured into the comments to encourage me, those silent readers can be very daunting sometimes, and this is definitely one of those times!)

First some corrections from yesterday – I was very tired and didn’t proof read properly; dining is spelt dining, not dinning; I’m has got an m after the apostrophe; I was 16 and coming up to my 17th birthday not my 16th birthday; and the curtains for ‘her flat’ refer to Miss Jones’ flat – I could have worded that better. I am putting them here and in an erratum because I am very aware that the text from yesterday was downloaded several hundred times, and read many thousands times, and I don’t want to be accused of having changed the text after publication. (and my heartfelt thanks to the few brave souls who ventured into the comments to encourage me, those silent readers can be very daunting sometimes, and this is definitely one of those times!)

Jimmy Savile. The bit you’ve all been waiting for – I do hope you won’t be disappointed.

You can imagine how gobsmacked I was when this story first emerged. How closely I read everything that was said – and noted what was not said. Not the ‘Jimmy Savile is a paedophile’ story, the Internet is full of such tales. No, it was the Daily Mail story which caught my eye; how ‘two brave women’ had come forward and identified themselves as being the victims of this paedophile. One word lept out of the print, long before I had got to the relevant sentence. Duncroft. Not just Duncroft, but Wedgewood dormitory. 1965. I consumed every detail. My jaw was frozen to the ground for several hours.

‘There were girls in there who were quite terrified of him‘ – I read elsewhere that ‘girls were hiding behind the bedroom doors’ to escape his attentions. I was mesmerised. And puzzled. For I had never hidden behind a bedroom door to escape his attentions nor anyone else’s attention. I had simply never met the man. Period.

How could that be? How could I have been so unobservant as to not notice such a comment worthy event as a major celebrity galloping around the building unescorted? There had to be some mistake in the reporting. Or maybe in my maths? I rechecked all my fingers, yep I was definitely there in 1965. Except for one month at the end of the year – but I was back four months later. Perhaps this had occurred whilst I was absent? Possibly, but I was quite confident that the older girls would have still been sitting round the fire in the common room ‘casting the runes’ and regaling the new arrivals with tales of the night Miss O’ Niall had hit the sherry bottle so hard she had tripped on the steps, or when Miss Grey’s poodle went missing and someone had locked it in the clothes cupboard – we had nothing else to talk about and observed the staff as closely as they observed us. We were obsessed with them and monitored their every move – mainly to make sure we didn’t miss a thrown away dog-end, but you get the picture…it was said that this celebrity had stayed overnight in Miss Jones’ flat…

Now I was truly puzzled; I am aware that victims of child abuse will hold their secrets for many, many years out of shame, embarrassment, a feeling that no one will believe them, but it was not the abuse which so consumed me by this time, but that small detail which had apparently passed me by. A man in Miss Jones flat – for the subject of Miss Jones’ sexuality and her relationship with Miss O’ Niall was our major ‘Mastermind’ specialist subject. Just for the record, I doubt that there was one. However, whoever was cleaning her flat, and it was I for a long time, was permanently in the inquisition seat – how many glasses on the coffee table, level of sherry in the bottle, no detail was too small for forensic examination.

Trust me on this one – if a Morrocan goat-herder had spent the night in that flat, or the goat wearing trousers for that matter, it would have been number one on the nightly agenda for years afterwards. There was also the other irritating detail – where was Miss O’ Niall, had ‘Nelly the elephant packed her bags and said good-bye to the circus’ as we used to sing late at night when she was out of earshot? There were only the two beds in that flat, not so much a flat as two bedrooms and a small sitting room in between. I couldn’t help myself, I started digging. I started digging because this story was the building block on which the media circus was having a libel-free gorge on Savile’s corpse. I couldn’t care less about Savile, I am not attempting to defend his reputation; his sexual preferences are a matter for the police – but I am perennially interested in the ‘truth’ as reported by the media.

I googled the given name, and right there, second item on the first page something stood out. It seems Bebe wasn’t sure of her dates. I tried to follow the link to read more – but the item had been removed from Facebook, ‘not available’. Ah, well, links do get broken, intriguing though, because if it wasn’t 1965, then it would explain why I knew nothing about it. Must have happened in late 1966 after I had left permanently. Then it hit me, if it was late 1966, then Bebe wasn’t a ‘vulnerable child’ attacked by a pervert – she’d become an adult admittedly ‘subjected to sexual harassment’ by her account – but not the ‘evidence’ of paedophilia (yes, I do know it is technically Ephebophilia, but you can’t expect the media to be that precise in selecting a keyword for ‘hits’) that it was alleged Newsnight had suppressed.

There was Bebe again, still unsure of her dates, replying to yet another name, Karin Ward, that meant nothing to me at all. 1974, long after my time. Long after Bebe’s time. Er, long after Miss Jones’ time too, in fact long after Duncroft was a ‘Home Office Approved School’ – it belonged to Barnardo’s by then and things had obviously changed. However, Bebe still had ‘happy memories’ of Duncroft. I will agree that it is unsurprising that victims of child abuse should put forward a happy face and conceal the truth.

Still intriguing though that someone so unsure of their dates should be quite definite that Savile attacked her aged 15 in 1965. She’s allowed to be unsure though, memories fade, but I would expect investigative reporters to be quite keen on corroboration.

As if by magic, Karin Ward appeared from the shadows that day, another brave victim come forward. Before anybody has anything to say, let me add that I have every sympathy with Karin Ward. She has not only been brutally used by many scumbag men in her life, she was in the process of disclosing all this as part of her therapy when she fell ill with cancer. Nobody knows better than I how debilitating chemotherapy is, and shame on the TV reporters who pressurised her into turning accounts she had written anonymously of sexual abuse on fantasy story web sites (stories she has now removed – but here is a link via wayback machine, and two earlier literary efforts of hers still on sale in the US) into a high octane celebrity exposure. They want shooting in my book for that alone. When I discovered that one of them was Miss Jones’ nephew, I blew a fuse. Yes, Meirion, I’m pointing the finger at you! If anybody was in a position to make strenuous forensic inquiries, it was you. Your aunt, Margaret Jones, is still alive and well, aged 90, living in North Wales. You should, or certainly could, have revealed the presence of her archive, something I will go into later. It might have made a nonsense of your story – a story that by your own admission was one ‘any journalist would want to run’ – was that too risky?

‘Outraged Meirion’ – outraged because his editors wanted ‘proof’ not just allegations.  So far he had a group of girls, all in contact with each other, making a series of allegations. So Meirion made strenuous efforts to find such proof, and he came up with another Duncroft resident ‘Fiona’. Fiona claimed to have a letter from Surrey police saying that an investigation into Savile had been dropped in 2007 because the star was frail and unwell. She promised to scan it and send it to him, indeed she claims that she did so, but for whatever reason he never received it. Meanwhile he had e-mailed his editor, told him of the Surrey police investigation and sat back satisfied that his story now ‘had legs’ as they say in the trade.

A pity he didn’t go as far as Ian Gallagher of the Mail on Sunday, who actually tracked ‘Fiona’ down and got a hard copy of that letter.

[The letter] says that Fiona was interviewed by police in 2006 despite the inquiry not beginning until May the following year.

The letter is also headed by a Surrey Police crest not in use at the time it was supposedly written. Significantly, there are no reference numbers included within the text.

A spokesman for Surrey Police said: ‘This letter is not genuine and was not sent by us at any time. The suggestion that we advised anyone this case would not be pursued due to the health of the individual concerned is wholly inaccurate.

Why would such a forged letter be in circulation? If not forged by Fiona, and I have no reason to believe it was, then by whom? Who were the circle of ‘others from Duncroft’ who had told Fiona that they had also received the same letter? Who had a vested interest in giving this story legs, who was photoshopping off line, out of sight, determined to give these allegations the credence that would enable Newsnight to go ahead with their expose?

By now the story was exploding by the hour, questions were being asked in parliament, lawyers were lining up on behalf of their clients, the BBC was being whacked over the head by every journalist sore at their coverage of the Murdoch debacle, and a Met police investigation was announced into the ‘more than 200 victims’ who had come forward; Sky news had given up describing them as allegations and they now became ‘revelations’ and ‘evidence’, talking heads on the shoulders of dozens of has-been show-biz figures were paraded on TV hour by hour – ‘I remember having lunch with Jimmy and a girl who ‘could have been 14 or 15′ and I ‘think they may have had sex’, oh it was disgusting, dreadful, I should have reported it but it was the culture of the time’; Esther Rantzen was sobbing into her microphone – and it all started with a Newsnight programme that no one had actually seen based on the slightly iffy evidence that I was staring at huge holes in.

A long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, I had reason to research Duncroft. I stumbled upon a ‘Friends Re-United’ forum that had been set up by some women of my age. I actually met some of them, one in France, one in America, and one in Wales. We had all repaired our lives, agreed that Duncroft wasn’t what we might have wished for our lives, but Miss Jones had given us a better start than we would have had without her. Now I returned to that Forum – all those women I had been in contact with had vanished, withdrawn their names from the list of ex-pupils, as had I, in fairness. But there was more, dozens of comments had been removed, loads of photographs taken down, entire threads disappeared. Something had occurred in this community. In their place were comments such as this:

I want there to be an investigation in to Maggie Jones who ran Duncroft school and who was great friends with this Jimmy Saville and allowed him to spend his sordid time with the girls there. This woman was an imposter and should also be exposed in this enquiry.

Here we go! The government sponsored paedophile ring snatching vulnerable young girls and feeding them to old perverts! Who is Rochelle Shepherd? Well damn me if she doesn’t turn out to be another of Meirion Jones five interviewees.

Then I found this on yet another ‘Duncroft’ forum:

Date Posted: 07:01:03 10/06/12 Sat
Author: Sandra Gunn
Subject: Re: duncroft approved school staines
In reply to: GD ‘s message, “Re: duncroft approved school staines“ on 10:48:27 06/05/07 Tue

Yes I was there at the same time. We have all been bullied by you online GD aka Gxxx Dxxxxxx.* You live in Ireland and your name changed lol. We also ALL know the identity of ‘A’. So grow up, go away and leave us all to our own memorys, not your autistic moanings. You did not know of what we had to put up with and yet you think you know! Grow up! For anyone who cares (not that many) Gxxx Dxxxxx* has even been banned from a lot of sites. We all meet in private and she is upset as she is not included….we don’t want a wingeing big mouth who thinks she knows it all.

Complaints of on-line bullying? A group meeting in private off-line, not wanting to include anyone who ‘did not know of what we had to put up with’ – what the Hell had been going on in the years since I last looked at the site? Despite the many comments detailing ‘happy memories’ of the place, there were obviously still some very unhappy ladies who blamed Duncroft for their unhappy lives.

Then I discovered that a group, or at least two ex-Duncroft girls had approached the Daily Mirror with the same ‘Jimmy Savile’ abused me whilst I was there’ story back in 1994. 18 years ago. The Mirror had been unable to substantiate the story, but were prepared to run it if the girls would sign an affidavit that would protect them from a libel suit, which seems perfectly reasonable under the circumstances, if a tad ‘ring the bell and run away’ on the part of the Mirror. Now, usual caveat applies, abuse victims, keeping their secrets, etc, etc, – but it seems slightly odd that you aren’t prepared to talk to parents, child line, the police, counselors, or anyone other than journalists on a national newspaper. They are perhaps the people I would be least prepared to talk to if I wanted to preserve my anonymity. So this story had been doing the rounds for a long time then?

That probably accounts for why Claire Ellicott of the Daily Mail was trawling that forum:

Date Posted: 03:01:20 10/01/12 Mon
Author: Claire Ellicott
Subject: Re: duncroft approved school staines
In reply to: bebe roberts nee scott ‘s message, “duncroft approved school staines“ on 12:40:55 08/08/06 Tue

Hi Bebe,
I’m a journalist from the Daily Mail and was wondering whether any of you had met Jimmy Savile while you were at Duncroft?
If so, please do get in touch or send me an email on claire.ellicott@dailymail.co.uk or 020 3615 1067.
Thanks,
Claire

I was beginning to wonder whether this was a ‘chicken and egg’ affair. Had the rumours about Savile started because people in the business were genuinely concerned, or had they started because the story was being put around? Which came first?

Now, for the final time – I am not defending Jimmy Savile. In fact it was fear of being called yet again a ‘paedophile defender’, a suggestion I find repulsive, that had kept me quiet so far. I am concerned merely with the qualities of the ‘hare’ that has been sent roaring round the track in front of the panting hounds. It had better be a fine, healthy, and genuine hare – for there are now so many hounds that it will be hard to see the truth. I am concerned with Miss Jones’ reputation. She is too ill to be interviewed right now – but her voice lives on, as I will show. There never was a woman less likely to persuade girls to become vulnerable victims – she would have choked on her cornflakes at the mere suggestion. Her entire life was dedicated to persuading us to stand on our own two feet – and I defy anybody who knew her to say otherwise. If she had any ‘obsession with sex’ it was with making sure that we didn’t ruin our lives by having it, backed up with the ever humiliating VD and ‘virginity’ gynaecological examinations for anybody who failed to return from wherever. I can see the gathering storm though, and she can’t speak up for herself, I am prepared to do it for her.

How to do so? I had not wanted to write these posts; my first port of call was to a very old friend of mine who is now an editor on a serious Sunday newspaper. I could talk to him as a friend, not just a reporter. I told him that I feared, not that anyone was outright lying, nor that Savile wasn’t a filthy old pervert, but that the Newsnight story was not as solid as those who were complaining that it had been unfairly ‘pulled’ were claiming. I showed him the evidence that these girls had become a ‘group’ rather than a series of unconnected individuals with the same story, that I feared that there had been a certain amount of bullying going on towards anyone who didn’t corroborate their story – either by them or by whoever was behind the forged police letter. I also, crucially told him that there were official records available that had not been accessed since Duncroft had closed, that would confirm dates and who was present.

Now, I am not an idiot, I am well aware that official records can be fudged. In fact I know they can. The girl who claimed she was pulled from Savile’s caravan in the grounds screaming that she had been assaulted – an essential part of the story. She was not believed ‘and chucked in detention for three days’. One thing I was sure of, is that the records would show she was in detention – Home Office inspectors turned up too regularly, unannounced, for anybody to risk taking her out of circulation without putting it in the day book – the records might well say it was for cutting her toe nails without permission or some other lie – but if that period coincided with anything that could be substantiated with Savile’s whereabouts, then that might give a tad more credence to the tale – on the other hand if the only record of her being in detention was when he was on a well publicised tour of Japan…tough.

‘Whew’, he said, ‘I didn’t realise there were official records – but if they proved the girls were mistaken, God, that would be ‘commercial suicide’ in this climate’. Interesting.

I turned to another old friend, someone who worked for the BBC. Look, I said, I don’t know how to do this – I’m sitting on this, this, and this, and I can’t access Miss Jones’s archive from France, can you do it? ‘Ouch’ he said. ‘Can’t tell you what I’m working on, but getting involved in this would be ‘career suicide’ for me’. It’s that suicide word again! ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do, explain to me exactly where that archive is, and I’ll speak to a producer on Panorama, they’re making a full investigation into why the BBC pulled that programme, they’ll be very interested in this’. A little later he e-mailed me with a woman’s name, he’d given her all the details of the archives hiding place – woud I speak to her in confidence? Yes, I said, quite happy to do that.

She never did call me. I checked again, no one had accessed that archive. They seem very shy of it. It’s the hot potato nobody wants to touch.

Abuse victims should be heard. They should be listened to intently. By the same token, those accused of such heinous crimes should be so accused by tested evidence, not newspaper circuses. This shouldn’t be a subject to push up newspaper circulation, nor for a Punch and Judy show between branches of the political media – the damage done by sexual abuse is too profound for that. What is happening, with a – shall we call it polite disbelief – in some quarters, that not all the ’400 victims who have come forward’ are entirely motivated by a desire for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, does a disservice to every genuine case.

I’m not afraid of the truth, I have nothing to fear from it. If other girls were cowering behind bedroom doors in 1965 and I failed to notice, nor even hear mention of the man’s name, let alone meet him – well then, after eating my Raccoon tail, I shall take myself off for counseling; I would obviously have a profound case of ‘false memory syndrome’.

The Newsnight story was the foundation stone of this saga – come on then investigative reporters that are so vital to our democracy, or the Met police, or anyone else interested in the truth – let’s be having you! Let’s see how strong that foundation is.

Off to Liverpool with you. The lady you want is Dr Maureen Watry. You’ll find her at the Sydney Jones library at Liverpool University. You want the box marked NRA 22753 – it’s filed under Barnardo’s. In it you will find all the minutes of meetings, financial records, correspondance from old girls, day books noting everybody’s presence or non-presence and even the girls’ files (although access to those is restricted to genuine researchers) running from 1948-1982: It contains Miss Jones’ entire archive (here’s looking at you Meirion!) it will make fascinating reading. Next to it you will even find another box marked D.965 – all her photograph albums. Happy hunting! You might find an even better story, who knows. Of course you could find that you’ve all been chasing after a stuffed rabbit – how embarrassing would that be?

The truth is out there.

*Edited to add: I have been asked to blank out the name of the girl who was subject to on-line harassment. I have done so, much against my better judgment, I don’t like altering a post after publication but I have no wish to cause further distress. Allegedly, the forum on voy.com has ‘been abandoned’ and it is no longer possible for the original thread to be taken down by the person who set up the forum. Although curiously, and allegedly, a post from ‘Rochelle’ was removed in recent months. Hmmn, would that be the same Rochelle Shepherd interviewed by Meirion? I don’t know.

Perhaps we should be renaming the BBC; instead of the friendly ’Aunty Beeb’ conjuring up a safe pair of trustworthy womanly hands, would ‘Uncle Beeb’ with all the connotations of the furtive, fiddling Uncle, whose lap you avoid sitting on, be more suitable? It would appear that the BBC is solely responsible for every recently discovered act of Paedophilia in existence. Procurer-General. Funded by the taxpayer to lure into sin by criminal acts every last innocent child of the nation, via a techicoloured Pied Piper.

Do I think that illegal acts may have taken place on their premises? Almost certainly! It would be decidedly odd if, the BBC having taken to throwing their stuffy image out of the window in order to regain the audience they were losing to the Pirate broadcasters, didn’t discover that in addition to welcoming this brave new uninhibited world of disc jockeys and long haired rock stars, they had also inherited the new sexual mores of the time – sex, with whomever, whenever. Broadcasters were stuffing cocaine up their noses, puffing on cannabis at every opportunity, why would they start demanding birth certificates from the willing girls who mobbed them? No, I am not excusing them, just wondering why anybody would imagine they should have been so careful not to cross one legal line when we knew they were crossing so many others?

They will now, of course, the BBC I mean. There is no defence against a tort of negligence if you have been warned of the risk – so I confidently expect the BBC lawyers to insist that cctv cameras are installed in every dressing room, toilet doors removed, birth certificates supplied at the door before entry, CRB checks carried out on anybody who needs to be in the building when children are present, random drug tests on all and sundry, quite possibly breathalysers on every floor – had you ever noticed how all paedophiles waft either ‘foul’ or ‘stale’ breath over their victims?  - and for sure sacrificial heads will roll as proof that they are terribly, desperately, heart rendingly, sorry they didn’t do all this before.

Does that solve the problem? Not a bit of it, for I respectfully suggest that there is a perversion far more sinister and damaging at large inside Beeb headquarters. One that Jimmy Savile is usefully drawing all the attention away from. Let us step back from the world of ‘there must be veracity in all these claims, so many have come forward now’ and ‘is the BBC a fit and proper organisation to hold a broadcasting licence’ – and go back to basics. That Newsnight programme, the ‘pulling’ of which has set this hare running.

We find a BBC producer hunched over his computer – in a dingy basement at the BBC or in his home, we know not. His name is Meirion Jones. He hadn’t had a decent story for some months, but now Jimmy Savile had died, and he had an idea…he tapped some words into Google; what were they? Well, we know it wasn’t Jimmy Savile, and we know it wasn’t Karin Ward – we know that because Karin Ward was writing under the pseudonym of ‘decrepitoldbag’ and had never mentioned Jimmy Savile’s name in her on-line literary efforts. No, you see Meirion had met Jimmy Savile, in the company of someone he knew well, and my guess is that he either tapped in the name of the place where he had met him or the name of the person who introduced him.

Bingo! He came upon Karin Ward’s fantasy autobiography. And Lo! and behold, she referred to ‘JS” in the context of sexual abuse and Duncroft, the genre she had been writing in for some time. Could he be that lucky, could she be referring to Jimmy Savile? He fired off an e-mail to her. What did it say? Perhaps ‘it will be our little secret, you can talk to me in confidence’ or ‘we will take this at your pace, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do’…I don’t know but I have fired off a FOI request to find out this morning. We shall see.

That e-mail ended up on the computer of a girl who could not be more vulnerable, the very definition of vulnerable. Frightened – she had cancer. Alone – she had little contact with most of her family. Confused – she was in the midst of psychotherapy, trying to exorcise the demons of childhood abuse from her mind. Indeed, the jumble of her life story and that of other ‘victims’ she had met along the way were all running together in her head and emerging as that story on a fantasy web site that Meirion Jones had chanced upon. What little self confidence she had oozing away by the hour as her hair fell out in clumps. The ravages of a lifetime of abuse floating before her eyes as she contemplated the end of her days – Today? Tomorrow? Who knows when you are having chemotherapy, you dwell in the company of people who look reasonably hale and hearty at 12 o’clock, stone dead at 6pm – tell me about it, I’ve just been there and I know how it messes with your head.

Had she been trying to repair severed relations with her scattered family? I don’t know, but it would be unsurprising in the state of mind she must have been in. Had she been successful? I don’t know, but how soothing must the interest in her by this important person, a BBC producer no less, have been to her shattered ego. What sympathy and solace did he offer her when she phoned him back? How important it was that her voice be heard? ‘Closure’, that ghastly American term, offered on a plate; a chance to strike back at her tormentors, it must have seemed like a jug of water to a man crawling from the desert – step this way little girl, everything you have dreamt of….

Was it? What was Meirion offering her? The chance to see justice and her alleged abuser behind bars? Hardly, Savile was stone cold dead – and those Google terms had never occurred to Meirion whilst he was alive, or if they did, he had not acted upon them. The opportunity to prevent other victims being hurt? Hardly – Savile was stone cold dead. Perhaps Meiron had been overtaken by a fit of conscience at reading of her terrible life and wished to help her in some other way? A good Samaritan to this terrifyingly frail and vulnerable girl? No, what Meiron was offering her was the chance to bare her shattered soul, expose her balding head to the world at large and star in a few minutes of prime time television – the main attraction in his next ‘great story that any journalist would want’. She wasn’t a ‘great story’ Merion, late night entertainment to a salacious audience – she was a walking train wreck who should, deserved to be, protected from predators like you.

Predators? That popular term in the paedophilia thesaurus? Yeah, predator – for you see I can only slip the very slimmest of fag papers between you and Jimmy Savile when it comes to preying on the vulnerable. The fag paper that says what he allegedly did was against the law – but morally, ethically, I can discern nothing between you. You were both in powerful positions, you both should have known better, you both took advantage of her circumstances. You didn’t tell her that it was your aunt who had kept her locked up all those years, in fact you didn’t tell anyone until another Duncroft resident produced a photograph of you and your Mother and your Aunt standing outside Duncroft – then you made the admission that would have had everyone screaming ‘conflict of interest’. At least I can just about say that Savile might have been driven by testosterone forces beyond his control, not much of an excuse, he should have controlled them – but what can I say about you? That you were driven by the desire for your next big story, your career? Or was it even bitterness at the rift between you and your Aunt?

I haven’t been that angry since that despicable character Robert Green was dragging that poor Down’s Syndrome girl round the country to be the star exhibit, gloated over as every detail of her genitalia was discussed by those who have a prurient interest in poring over such things. I can’t even get a fag paper between you and Robert Green, other than your own wise counsel which prevented you going after this story whilst Savile was alive. You too wanted to parade the victim - look at this folks, pay attention, never mind flicking through the Radio Times, and here’s a picture of the dirty old sod wot ‘ad her,  gave ‘im a wank in the back of his Roller she did, disgusting innit! A ‘great story that any journalist would want’ – is that so? Not exactly the usual Newsnight fare is it?

I know journalists that wouldn’t have touched that story with a barge pole, would have realised that exposure could do nothing for Karin. Old school types, mind you. The sort that might have found that story and flicked past it on their more callous days, muttering ’poor girl’ to themselves. Or might have got in touch to check that she was receiving help, or offer support, or friendship or any manner of things other than exposure for the sake of their careers. Even ones that might have thought the Savile story was important, and would have concealed her face, disguised her voice, still let her voice be heard, if they really thought there was no other way to bring out the story. Ah, but that wouldn’t have been such ‘great TV’ would it?

So, to be sure, I want to see heads roll at the BBC. Not trustees, or the Director-General, token sacrificial lambs. I’ll start with the despicably dishonest Meirion Jones. On a pike. Outside BBC headquarters. Then I’ll have the scalp of each and every person involved in that half baked Newsnight programme, aye, cameraman, sound man, the lot. Each and every one of them could have stood up and said ‘ this will do nothing for this girl, she is vulnerable, protect her, don’t exploit her’. They didn’t. Too frightened for their careers. Isn’t that what they said about those who knew of Savile’s activities? Does it make any difference that she appeared to be willing, enjoying it even? Isn’t that what they said about Savile’s victims?

When I’ve finished stringing them up – I want the man responsible for overseeing them all. The man who hires them, trains them, who should realise that ethics and morals have long taken a back seat in favour of titillation and juicy ‘scoops’ – that’s not what we pay our licence fee for.

Victims voices should be heard. In private, by trained people who know how to help those tormented by past demons. Anybody who comes into contact with them should move heaven and earth to help them get that help. They are NOT, absolutely not, fodder for a flagging career, or filler between the stairlift ads and the entreaties to sue the council when you fall down a pothole.

If the BBC can’t sort that one out, they are wasting their time ensuring that they don’t get sued again when a rock star demands a blow job in his dressing room from the nearest handy underage groupie.

Would somebody care to explain why both the BBC and ITV are still trawling for new prime time ‘exhibits’ on the web page of an organisation dedicated to those who have been abused? And why such an organisation is letting them?

Perhaps Leveson will report soon and tell us when we can expect to have a ‘news’ organisation for our money….

The opening sequence of the Panorama film featuring the alleged sexual abuse of children at Duncroft lingered on a huge and imposing set of Victorian iron gates.  Half open, they conjured up an image of a peek inside a forbidden and forbidding world. A world where children were routinely abused in a manner which our intrepid reporters were about to reveal…it was shades of Haute de la Garenne and a dozen Hammer horror films. It was an emotive image.

It has stuck in my mind for no other reason than that, once again, I had no memory of those gates. For once I have no criticism of the film crew, it was a good shot and set the scene for what was to follow. I have no criticism here of the Panorama research team – their idea of attention to detail is not the same as mine, I accept that. Still, I couldn’t get those gates out of my mind. Was it possible that this was another entrance, one I had never seen. We mustn’t forget that Duncroft was then was a locked facility – we weren’t wandering round the grounds, far from it. I went to the trouble of tracking down the builder who converted Duncroft into luxury flats in the 1990s, flats which today sell for in the region of half a million pounds – to residents who must be utterly thrilled with their new found notoriety. He was kind enough to check his records this monring, and sadly, it was 20 years ago, and they no longer are able to confirm where those gates came from.

It is an utterly irrelevant detail to the vast story of Savile’s undoubted predilection for underage girls. But my focus has never been on ‘immature and ageing pop star prefers to have sex with immature and unquestioning girls’ – that is a story as old as the hills and one that will no doubt continue. It is illegal, it is utterly wrong, but the present media fest won’t stop it. No, my focus was always on the question of whether the original story which focussed heavily on Duncroft was wrongly prevented from appearing – or not. Heads have already rolled over the question of why it wasn’t transmitted, millions (our millions!) will now be spent on public inquiries trying to answer that question, and inevitably, many people who appear to be disconnected to the story – those apartment residents for a start – will be made to pay a price for the decision which made Merion Jones throw his toys out of his pram and allege that there was a concerted cover-up of Jimmy Savile’s reputation and that ‘his story’ was rock solid.

The truth of that orignal story matters more than ever, so forgive me as I pick at every stich in it.

I have already demolished Bebe Roberts account of how ‘girls were hiding terrified behind doors’ as Savile rampaged round the building seeking fresh victims….. unfortunately Bebe was 23 by the time Savile visited Duncroft, and had left the school by some 9 years, so her account of being molested by him aged 14 was, er, total nonsense. Does that matter? Surely there are always going to be some who come forward in the wake of such a witch-hunt as this who are going to make false allegations. Yes, it does matter, if for no other reason than that Bebe, poor fool, must now go through the rest of her life having been publicly labelled a liar, having proudly produced her photographs to make sure that all her neighbours recognised her…she is a victim of all this too, though your immediate sympathy may not lie with her. She will go in the same box along with John Gibbon of Redcar who also proudly produced photographs of himself standing in front of Savile’s car and gave a vivid account of how he ‘was lured’ into the back of Savile’s car, and assaulted. He ‘grabbed the door handle and lept out’…I have lost count of how many car dealers have now come forward to complain that the photograph clearly illustrates a 1977 Rolls Royce Corniche which has a padded parcel seat in the back and two front seats which must be folded down to get into and out of the back – and no rear doors to grab a handle of…he’s another one who will be trotted out in defence, to prove that you can never trust allegations of pedophilia. And this helps genuine victims how? The media have a lot to answer for when it comes to helping genuine victims.

What of Karin Ward? I have taken a lot of schtick over the past few days for daring to question any part of her story. Or indeed, that of Bebe’s initially. It seems that if you were a resident of Duncroft who claims to have been abused you must be believed, protected, defended. If you were a resident of Duncroft who was not claiming to be abused – then you can only be ‘muddying the waters’, or ‘have an agenda to prevent the truth being known’ - because such is the power of the media, that ‘everyone knows the truth’. If only. There is only one story in town.

I had some evidence of this before I started, I detailed my initial attempts to talk to some in the media. ‘Commercial suicide’ and Career suicide’ were phrases said to me by two top flight investigative journalists when I attempted to point out where the evidence could be found that would disprove some of what was being put around. They didn’t care to open that box…

Since then, I have been approached by The Times:

I’ve just been reading your posts, Past Lives and Present Misgivings. Very moving and interesting, and naturally enough I’m very intrigued by what will be in the next chapter. . .

It makes me wonder whether I could have a chat with you about the possibility of you writing of your Duncroft experience for the opinion pages of The Times. What do you think?

Mr G is framing that one for me as we speak…needless to say, when they saw from the next chapter that I wasn’t abused by Jimmy Savile – they lost interest. Ditto, Radio 4 who wanted to fly a journalist over to France hot foot before I revealed what happened when Jimmy Savile visited the school, a scoop for them, er, lost interest when they discovered I was not claiming to have been abused! I am not alone getting in this reaction, far from it, for I have finally this morning tracked down, shall we say, an elderly member of staff from those Duncroft years. We chatted for hours on the phone. I am not going to reveal who she is, for very good reason. She is waiting patiently to make a statement to the Police. And that is going to put the cat firmly amongst the pigeons.

She has no interest in speaking to the media, not because she is old, or infirm, or uncooperative - but because the media have already had ample opportunity to speak to her.  The Daily Mail, the Sunday Telegraph, the Independent were among those whose names she remembered from the days when, after some ‘helpful person’ had fed her address to the press, she found herself besieged by so many journalists and camera crews that she was unable to leave her home, nor were her neighbours; finally this elderly woman was forced to vacate her home and stay with friends. Nothing wrong with that you say, it is right that those in a position to throw light on this matter should be rigorously questioned by the media. I would agree - had any of the media been interested in what she had to say. Had even one of them quoted her. But you see, she didn’t make the girl’s story stand up either, in fact what she had to say was in direct – and provable – opposition to some of the claims – and they didn’t want to know! There was only one story in town.

I didn’t think I could still be shocked by the British media. I can. Here was someone who had direct and in many cases, documentary evidence, that the media were chasing a stuffed rabbit rather than a hare, and they just looked the other way. Her testimony will be damning. And damaging.

Damaging because more people will be proven to be liars. Just because they were blinded by the lure of five minutes of fame. They will have to live with that, and it saddens me; already damaged lives will be further damaged. Some will say – ‘serves them right’ – but I don’t hold with that view. I would rather say, it serves all of us right. We have the media we pay for every time we buy a newspaper or pay our television licence. We encouraged them to make a living out of feeding us pap – and they obliged.

The media, quite rightly, consider Jimmy Savile to be their own creation, as was Garry Glitter; now they delight in taking him down. Despite my knowledge of specific allegations being false, I think on balance, that I accept he was a man of many sexual preferences – mostly illegal. There are too many allegations now to think that they can all be without foundation.

Karin Ward undoubtedly met him, as a 14 year old at her children’s home in Norfolk, and possibly again when he visited Duncroft in ’74. She was certainly in a party of heavily supervised children (these were mainly children who had been locked up to prevent them from running away!) from Duncroft which visited  the set of Clunk-Click, not the dressing rooms, not Top of the Pops at all. She was 16 on March 25th 1974. The media persist in saying she was 14 when on Clunk-Click. The first episode which she attended was the one featuring Olivia Newton-John – can anybody tell me the date of that? She was quite possibly one of a small number of children who were allowed in groups of three to take ‘a short trip round the block’ with a member of staff in the vehicle in Savile’s Rolls Royce as a special treat.

It remains entirely possible that she met up with Savile again after leaving Duncroft.

There have been many people working in the background of this story. Somebody forged the letter that Fiona produced saying the investigation into Savile was being dropped due to his age. Somebody, I am alarmed to tell you, set up a Facebook entity in the name of a former member of staff encouraging former residents to tell them their story. How many children – now adult – felt safe communicating with what they thought was a trusted member of staff? It took a high level call to a Director of Facebook before that entity was taken down – it has never been established who set it up. Certainly not that member of staff. The entire Facebook group which had been urging girls to come forward with tales of abuse was taken down just before the broadcast of the story. I am not alone in having received threats for having ‘dissed’ the tale of ‘institutional child abuse over a number of years’. Someone in the background has had a keen and determined interest in building this story.

Why were the Home Office records of girls who had been sent there by the justice system, handed to Barnardos, a private charity? Why were later records, of girls who were sent there under the auspices of the mental health regime, handed to Barnardos, a private charity? Why are they still listed as safely in the possession of the National Archive? Who has seen them?

Savile did spend one night on the premises. He was opening a fete in the area the next day. It can’t have been pleasant for him. He was billeted in a spare room in the newly built staff quarters, not the cosy headmistress’s flat – the other side of the secure unit which had been built by MIND by that time to house girls whose behaviour was considered exceptionally challenging. The corridors leading to and fro that area were permanently locked – not to protect the girls, but to protect the staff sleeping there, and that included Savile who would surely not have got a minutes sleep that night, when you think about it, if all those girls had been able to access him during the night – I must admit, so great were the allegations that he might have had access to the girls that I had never considered his fate had the girls had access to him!

Miss Jones did indeed stay on to 1974ish. The answer should have been obvious to me – I had always believed that she left when it ceased to be an approved school and became a secure unit for girls with far more profound mental health issues. Of course, the nature of the school might have changed overnight with one fell swoop of the bureaucratic pen, but her dedication to her experiment didn’t. There were still girls there in the old part, finishing out their allotted time in her charge as determined by the courts, and so she remained – until the last of her charges had gone their way into the world. Typical.

MIND built her a house in the grounds, Duncroft was no longer the comparatively cosy environment it had been, where she could sleep in a room next to her girls. Her sister did visit her there; she brought her young son, 7/ 8 years old with her.

Little Meirion, getting his first peep – from a distance – of the place that he was to turn into the ‘story that any journalist would want’.

Of such slim pickings is a media storm created.

* I have now amassed a body of documentary evidence. I am not handing it to the media either. It is going straight to the Police, and I remain ready to make a statement as do several other people.

Evening all; pull up a chair and pin your ears back.

I have, this evening, had a long talk with Miss Margaret Jones, headmistress of Duncroft for many years. It was almost 50 years since we had spoken directly to each other, and it was riveting. She was as corruscatingly honest and direct as I remember. Anybody who is under the impression that because she is 91, she might be slightly short on the marbles is in for a shock. Her power of recall is exceptional – and will prove to be devastating. As sharp as a box of scalpels - I can’t say that I am surprised; if anybody was going to stay on the ball, she was always a good candidate.

Until this evening, only a couple of old girls had her phone number. I was not one of them. She sent word to me this evening that she would like me to phone her because things had happened today – and because she has also been following my blog for the past week. I am still not in a position to prove that I have told the truth, and the whole truth, but I now have the private satisfaction of knowing that she has told me that she asked me to phone her because she knew I was speaking the truth and applauded me for having done so. I have taken a lot of schtick over the past week for speaking out – a lot of it from people who have never met me, but imagine that they know all about me. This statement will do nothing to change their mind, and frankly I couldn’t care less; their opinion of me is meaningless, Internet chatter. What my husband thinks of me – and Miss Jones – is what counts to me. I wouldn’t have had the life that I have, and by extension, wouldn’t have the husband that I have, were it not for her.

I am saying this now, for, as my regular readers are well aware, I also have cancer. I have just undergone a six month revolutionary treatment, and in the next couple of weeks have to decide whether I am going to have more treatment in the future. That is a major decision that my husband and I must make together in peace and quiet. Sadly, as a result of events today, he has been forced to divulge a secret that he had been hugging to himself for some days. Last week was our 20th wedding anniversary, and on Friday he had booked a rather wonderful hotel in Paris for us, planning to whisk me away to some peace and quiet, to talk of the future and get away from all this. He only told me because he thought that with the seriousness of what is happening and the amount of press enquiries that I am fielding, I might prefer to stay here. Not a bit of it – my husband and my health are more important than a squalid little press story. We will be leaving here early on Friday morning, and I will be turning moderation on at that time which means no ones comments will be released until I return. I am making a point of saying this now, so that those who know me and trust me will understand – those who only wish to denigrate my attempts to get at the truth will no doubt have a field day saying that I have ‘run off’.

So what has happened today? As I said, only two girls had her phone number, and only her family - including Meirion – and the Panorama team knew her address, despite many claims to the contrary. Somebody, one of those people, gave that information to the Daily Mail, and thus Claire Ellicott of the Daily Mail, she of the totally erroneous report detailing Bebe Roberts’ claim to have been assaulted on Duncroft premises 9 years before Jimmy Savile ever set foot in the school, turned up on Miss Jones’ doorstep. Armed with a concealed tape recorder.

The only other person from the press who has ever approached her was Emily Plowden from Panorama, who approached her two days before transmission of the ITV programme – and almost a year after her nephew Meirion first tried to put together his Newsnight programme. Until Emily turned up, Miss Jones had no inkling whatsoever of claims of illegal behaviour. She and her nephew had not been in communication for many years.

She has not been contacted by any police officers in respect of allegations made of assaults that may have happened to girls in her charge. Ever.

That is not to say that she has had no inkling of what has been going on though – with her ex-girls, not with Savile, I hasten to add.  Merely that she had no idea that a television programme was being made about it – or at least about the version of events it attempted to portray. She is totally aware of who is who behind all the false identifies; who has obtained confidential information from girl’s pasts that should never have been in any ‘civilian’ hands, what pressure has been put on people to speak in a particular way – or that information would be revealed. She knows precisely who has a relationship with each television company and with which newspapers – I have laughed and cried with her for over an hour.

I wish I could share it with you, it is an extraordinary tale – but I have given my word that I won’t. For good reason. She is still a canny old bird, a tad deaf, but the marbles swirling with the efficiency of Colossus 11.  She is waiting to see who hangs themselves with which piece of rope. Then she will strike.

It won’t be to the media. She has talked at length to her legal advisors – not to protect herself, but in view of her age… She has no faith whatsoever in the honour or ethics of any of the media. ‘They don’t check their sources’ is what she said. My sentiments exactly. She is happy to co-operate with the police. (As is the other ex-staff member I have spoken to at length this week).

She has given no interview to the media. She was presented by Claire Ellicott with a list of nine christian names, no surnames, of girls who claim to have reported assaults by Savile on themselves to her at Duncroft. She told her that she had no comment to make. She did answer a couple of questions. Then she spotted the concealed tape recorder. Now she waits to see what the Mail version of this encounter proves to be.

God help anyone who doesn’t stick strictly to the truth.

She is, she told me, 91 years old, she doesn’t know how much longer she will live. She has no family left that she is close to, or whose reputation she cares to protect.  I can understand that frame of mind, unfortunately I share it myself at the moment. It gives you a strength that would not be understood by those who seek their five minutes of fame and fortune. Photographs sold, confidences broken, for a few bucks.

Blimey, I could write a book after that phone call – damn shame I’ve given my word to keep quiet. I’ve just had the interview the media would die for.

Comments will be on until the early hours of Friday. Don’t know when I shall be back – Mr G won’t tell me. I knew something was up – its the first time in 20 years he hasn’t asked me at least three times by a Wednesday – what I was cooking for Sunday lunch!

*Edited to add: Two items of interest that are not breaking any confidences. Both concern cigarettes.

One, I said earlier that we were given cigarettes each week. I had not appreciated, or had forgotten, that the school leaving age was 15 in 1964. Hence when I arrived, I was past school leaving age and no longer entitled to a full time education. (I did say that education was limited and afternoons only). We were free to go out to work legally - except that we couldn’t, we were locked up. Hence the requirement that we spent our mornings cleaning the buildings, working in the kitchens and the laundry. For this we were allocated a minimal pocket money which was never actually handed to us. It could have been saved up, but if we wanted cigarettes or sweets, the staff would buy them for us. In other words, we were buying our own cigarettes rather than being bribed for good behaviour in the way I may have implied.  Obviously the more ‘work’ we did, as opposed to misbehaving, the more money we had for more cigarettes. The Home Office generosity certainly didn’t extend to supplying cigarettes for us. Bang goes my claim for my 20 a day habit! Ah well….

Two – Miss Jones was considerably amused at my powers of recollection as to the various brands of cigarettes smoked by the staff, vis a vis our obsession with collecting dog ends….seems my memory is damn near as good as hers. Bridie Keenan did smoke Piccadilly No 6 unfiltered, and Miss Jones did smoke Craven ‘A’. Neither brand is still available I believe, but I can describe the packets perfectly – and even though I have such a clear memory of the packet design, I have ever smoked either brand. So much for the ‘plain packs’ campaign. 50 years later.

in·sti·gate  (nst-gt)

One of the difficulties with this story is that whilst we have six unhappy ladies who have spent years trying to get someone to publish their tale, although are somewhat reluctant to speak privately about it to counsellors or family, a curious anomaly, we hear little if nothing from the hundreds of girls who passed through Duncroft and went on to have happy fulfilling lives. Can I just lay down some facts perchance there are some journalists interested in such boring old fashioned artifacts?

The Oxford English Dictionary tells me that the term ‘teen-ager’ was coined by a sociologist in 1921. It didn’t appear in print as ‘teenager’ until 1941, and was not in common usage in the general media until early 1960. To all intents and purposes, that generation, my generation, that reached their teens in the early 60s, were the first British teenagers. That may not mean anything to the wet behind the ears young journos of today, but it does have a profound significance.

Until ‘teenagers’ were acknowledged, you only had ‘children’ and ‘adults’ – those over 21. The key to the door and all that. Children, particularly girls, were subdivided into ‘good girls’ and bad girls’. That is to acknowledge that we were not the first generation to have had sex before marriage, or to have given birth to children before we were 16, or partaken of drugs, or the myriad other ways in which one could become a ‘fallen woman’ – but we WERE the first generation to be given a chance to step back from that ultimate fate of being a ‘fallen woman’, unmanageable, unemployable, fit only for a life of prostitution. It was a time before Social Services, before flats and maintenance for single Mothers, when maternity benefit was acquired on your husband’s National Insurance – no husband, no money; when rooms were advertised for No Irish, No Blacks, and most unthinkable of all – ‘No unmarrieds’. The pill might have been on sale in 1967 – but for married women, you dorks!

Duncroft was that fledgling opportunity, a unique experiment. A halfway house, a stepping stone between the Father who said ‘never darken my doorstep again’ and an adult world that had you ‘pegged’ before you even entered it. Hundreds, not half a dozen, girls took that opportunity. Went on to train as secretaries; married farmers and Doctors, and plumbers, reared three and four children, have homes full of pictures of the grandchildren, sons and daughters in law, positions as school governors, friends and reputations – and they don’t want to find themselves plastered all over the Sun as former residents of Duncroft.

I could weep for the e-mails I have received over the past couple of weeks, and am humbled by the faith shown in my integrity that so many girls have given me their real name. Not because they wish to contact ITN or BBC4, or get a quick quid from ‘Bella’ magazine – but because they are terrified that someone will name them as a former resident of Duncroft. They want me to watch out for any attempt to name them on this blog. They want to stand up for Duncroft, to counter the disgraceful slurs being put about – but not at the cost of their new lives – and who can blame them? I have removed all those e-mails from my computer, and I give them my word that no one will ever prise those names from my lips. No, not even the police. Go on, jail me if you dare!

Those hundreds of girls, including myself, took the opportunity that a more enlightened age granted them, and made the most of it. A mere half dozen failed to climb back up the slippery slope, and have emerged into middle age as embittered women.  Those half dozen, with their tawdry tales of ‘Jimmy grabbed my bottom’ have run full tilt into an age of moral panic, unethical journalism, charity empire building, a dying main stream media, and a couple of unsupervised journalists, to take centre stage in a drama that is threatening our entire information source.

Truly a case of the power of the 1% as the Guardianistas would say.

I speak for the 99%.

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy – this entire shebang grows more bizzarre by the hour, if not by the minute.

Overnight, a woman called Andrea Davison has emerged to claim that she was also at Duncroft, and there she first learned of ‘the existence of an Elite Paedophile ring reaching into the Government’. This is a story which has been gaining much traction on the Internet overnight.

I will take it one step at a time, otherwise I might fry your brains…

I have established via Derbyshire police (explanation will come later!) that this woman really is called Andrea Davison, that is her true name (amongst many fake others) and that she really is 62 years old.

That would place her at Duncroft around 1964/1965/1966. Assuming she really was at Duncroft. I have spoken to a senior member of staff, and two girls who were there at that time, and no one can recall a girl of that name. That is not to say that she is lying, she may have been utterly unmemorable; if so, she got off to a slow start in the ‘being utterly memorable‘ stakes.

If, and it remains an ‘if’, she was at Duncroft in ’64, ’65, or ’66, then she was there some 8 or 9 years before Jimmy Savile ever set foot in the place. Pace Bebe Roberts. Ipso, she cannot be talking about an alleged paedophile ring involving Jimmy Savile.

Andrea Davison is an interesting person though. The reason I had to confirm her identity with Derbyshire Police is that they have reluctantly become considerably expert in all matters Andrea Davison and her various related identities. This started when the Derbyshire Economic Crime unit became aware of a major fraud which resulted in several innocent members of the public losing their life savings. Prosecutions were brought against the fraudsters, and in the course of their enquiries, they became aware that false identity documents, including passports, were being used by the fraudsters which emanated from an address in Wales.

North Wales police obtained an arrest warrant and raided the property in Felinheli – the home of Andrea Davison – where they discovered what amounted to a ‘document factory’. They arrested Andrea Davison and charged her with 27 separate fraud and theft offences.

During the course of their interviews with her, she claimed to be an agent for MI5 or MI6, and claimed to have been producing ‘virtual identities’ in an effort to protect her life which she said was in danger as a result of ‘her work for the secret services’. The police made enquiries with both MI5 and MI6, but were unable to confirm that she had ever worked for either of them…they did discover that she had been an informant for Customs and Excise, and the Ministry of Defence. Something which would hardly have endeared her to the serious criminal gang who were using false passports provided by her. This may have some bearing on what followed.

Before the matter could come to Crown Court, Andrea left her home and claimed political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.

You may take a second breather here to compose yourself.

She was, of course, ahead of Julian Assange in this move. Indeed, she would tell you that the real reason William Hague ‘was threatening to storm the Ecuadorian Embassy’ was to get at her rather than Assange….she believes herself to be a far more important and dangerous person to the British government on account of her ‘knowledge’ – gained at Duncroft, aged 14 or 15, no less – of an elite paedophile gang operating at the heart of government.

In her absence, she was convicted of 26 offences of fraud and theft by a jury of 12 of her peers – note, not a ‘member of the corrupt judiciary’ – her peers, of having been instrumental in fleecing many innocent people of their life savings. She was found not guilty of the 27th charge by order of one of those ‘corrupt members of the judiciary’ that we are told about….

Somehow she managed to leave the protection of the Ecuadorian Embassy and arrive in Argentina, where she is today.

From Argentina, she has now declared that ‘Police and  Yorkshire Crown Prosecution Service and the Judiciary of North Wales wanted to get her into prison where they could silence her. Her colleagues are convinced the Establishment were deliberately driving her to suicide or would have suicided (sic) her in prison.

If that were so, many innocent members of the public would have had to be fleeced in a police sting operation in order to be seen to arrest the fraudsters (now slumming it in prison) who were using the passports which Andrea claims she was only printing to save her life on account of her being such a terribly dangerous person to the British establishment…this ‘conspiracy’ has more tentacles than a brace of siamese-twin octopi.

She also claims that ‘ the Court stole [all her] life savings, her inheritance and heirlooms from her Parents and everything she owned’ – not the train fare to Argentina apparently…

Usually known as a ‘proceeds of crime order’. Quite common after a major fraud trial.

From Argentina, Andrea tells us that ‘she worked closely with Tony Blair’ to expose evidence of  ’the Conservative Governments involvement in illegal arms deals and their cover-up of organised child abuse’. She certainly wrote to Blair more than once, and produces as evidence a copy of his letter to Ken Clarke where he states that ‘it is not the first approach I have received and I am sure it is not the last’ – whether he was just referring to an approach by Andrea or by other people is not made clear.

Five years after that letter was written, Tony Blair came to power and Labour was in power for the following 13 years – yet nothing further seems to have happened with regard to Andrea ‘working closely with Tony Blair’….

Andrea now complains that ‘the evidence she held about the North Wales Children’s Homes and Duncroft and the Paedophile ring was seized by the Derby and North Wales Police in January 2010 and has never been returned’ – that would be along with the evidence they seized about her fake ID factory then?

Andrea (now describing herself as an ‘investigator of sexual abuse’, rather than an MI5 agent) believes that Kenneth Clarke ‘got his revenge’ on her for having the temerity to write to Tony Blair regarding her views on a paedophile ring by refusing to allow her to have a fair trial in the Mold Crown Court proceedings – these would be the July 2012 proceedings that she chose not to attend, preferring to share a broom cupboard with our old friend Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy….they must have had some interesting discussions on the definition of sexual abuse, to say nothing of ‘which of them was the most important’.

One item I fell upon in the course of researching this article, concerns the Palestine Telegraph. A blogosphere ‘newspaper’ well known to those of us who come in contact with the tin foil hat conspiracy theorists. How can I say this, it is not a source that I would trust as far as I could see it to report the truth, or check on its sources. Indeed, it was sued for libel, for having made up wild stories that the ‘claimant was a fraudster’. It was at this point that I fell off my chair laughing.

The claimant was none other than Andrea Davison v Sameh Habeeb & 5 Ors [2011] EWHC 3031     Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

I reported all this to Miss Jones this morning. At 91, and having had her reputation maligned by a media which doesn’t choose to check up on the likely veracity of its informants, she is entitled to some cheer in life….as she said – you couldn’t make it up. But someone did, at some point in this story.

Remind me someone, didn’t I come into this story as a result of someone claiming to have been abused by Savile at Duncroft in 1965 and a forged letter? Forgeries, forgeries, I’m connecting dots somewhere…..

Blimey, never let it be said that Miss Jones girls were a boring lot……!

Ms Raccoon is now going to climb out of this rabbit hole and go out for lunch with her reassuringly sane husband – back later.

Following last night’s episode of ‘Exposure’, the prosecution’s case for the demonisation of Jimmy Savile was completed in the sense that the audience have been invited to give their verdict. No doubt if we fail to give the required verdict, the ‘Ireland v EU’ solution will be applied and we will be given a further installment to wet our appetite for the correct answer.  There has been no case for the defence, so all we can do is look at the evidence laid out for us by the televisual prosecutors and see what it amounts to.

The programme opened with the powerful statement ‘We now know that Jimmy Savile was a predatory paedophile for more than 40 years’.

Not so fast Mr Williams-Thomas! We know that there have been possibly hundreds of allegations that he was – but for those of us looking for facts as opposed to innuendo, we are sitting down waiting for you to make the case to us that he was…

We continued with a brief re-run of Williams-Thomas’ previous ‘witnesses’ – the Duncroft girls. First off, Charlotte, the girl who claimed that she was sexually assaulted by Savile in a caravan and subsequently disbelieved by staff when she became hysterical at this trauma, and ‘thrown into the isolation unit as punishment’. Whether or not Charlotte was sexually assaulted in the caravan by Savile, only Charlotte and Savile know the truth. We can but examine the available evidence as to which of them is likely to be telling the truth. So I look at the claim that Charlotte was ‘thrown into the ICU unit’ as a result of her claim that she complained of sexual abuse. I am aware of Charlotte’s full identity, and of the record of the one and only time she was ever put in the isolation unit, and the reason for her being there. That record will be made available to the police or formal inquiry. Charlotte of course, is fully able to apply for her own records from Barnardos and prove to the world that she was in the ICU unit for whatever reason at any time near to or even in the vicinity of Savile’s known presence at Duncroft. Thus I am confidently claiming that ‘Charlotte’ is lying on the specific question of whether she informed staff of this alleged abuse and whether she was punished for any event (I am charitably allowing for further allegations that the records might be claimed to have been falsified in respect of the reason for punishment) that could conceivably be linked to any visit to Duncroft by Savile. I do not lightly lay myself open to allegations of defamation, I do so confient that I can defend my words.

Then we heard again the clip of ‘Fiona’, the ‘Fiona’ who produced a forged letter allegedly from Surrey police saying that the 2007 Surrey police investigation was prematurely concluded because Savile ‘was old and frail’. A piece of evidence that I charitably assume she failed to show Williams-Thomas, for even had he never discussed the Savile case with his old colleagues on the Surrey force where he was based for 12 years – he would surely have picked up on the fact that the letter heading was false, as Surrey police did once they were shown a photocopy of it.

Despite the many clues available on the Internet that I would have expected any investigator to pick up on regarding ’Fiona’s’ manipulative nature and propensity for outright lies, Williams-Thomas was prepared to run with a clip of Fiona claiming that she had performed a sexual act on Savile whilst under the age of 16. That is, legally and morally, child abuse. Whatever your views on ‘willing girls’ aged 14, I do not ignore the fact that in law, if the allegation was accepted by a jury, Savile would certainly have been convicted of child abuse on this count alone. However, given that Savile is not able to defend himself, I would expect, in the name of balanced reporting, that Williams-Thomas would have inserted into the piece at this stage something he alluded to at a later date – that all 20 girls who were at Duncroft during this specific period were interviewed by police during the 2007 investigation – and not one of them gave any evidence which gave credence to Fiona’s claim. Not one of the ‘other girls’ who was outside the car according to Fiona whilst she was performing this act, not one of the other girls sharing her dormitory?

We can say, truthfully, that child abuse victims are afraid to ‘come forward’, but these girls would not have been coming forward – Surrey police had gone to the trouble of tracing all 20 of them, 40 years after the event, no mean feat in itself, and invited them to assist with their inquiries. Keir Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions has made a statement on this specific allegation:

“Whilst it is sometimes possible to prosecute cases where the victim does not support a prosecution, there are obvious problems in proceeding with a case where the victim does not support a police investigation, where there is no forensic evidence and only very limited, or even in some instances no, witness evidence, particularly in relation to allegations which date back a number of years. [...]

The first allegation against Savile was from a woman who reported to Surrey Police in 2007 that she had witnessed a historic indecent assault on a girl aged under 16 at Duncroft in the late 1970s.

Surrey Police said: “Officers carried out enquiries to locate the victim who did not wish to support a criminal prosecution.”

The CPS said the file then submitted by the force in 2009 included evidence of “three further potential offences” by Savile, who was interviewed under caution by officers.

These were an alleged indecent assault on a girl under 16 at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, in or around 1973; the alleged incitement of a girl under 16 to engage in a sexual act at Duncroft in the late 1970s; and an alleged indecent assault on an adult in Sussex in 1970.

“However, the evidence showed that none of the alleged victims would support a prosecution,” the CPS added.

“In these circumstances the CPS concluded that it was not possible to bring a prosecution in this matter.

“Prosecutors have to satisfy themselves that there is sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction in order to be able to take a case to court, and it was concluded that no further action could be taken in this case.”

So we can whittle down William-Thomas’s ‘five Duncroft victims’, who had been let down by Surrey police when they made their claims….Five victims who incidentally, only the sharp eyed would have noticed in the original programme, included ‘Rochelle’, a girl who was never at Duncroft as a resident, but is the daughter of a former resident; an inconvenient fact that was not explained in the programme, to:

One girl who alleged she had witnessed a sexual assault on a victim at Duncroft who declined to support the allegation to the police.

One allegation of ‘an incitement to engage in a sexual act with a child’.

Two other allegations of assault that were nothing to do with Duncroft.

Quite what the police were supposed to do with these historic allegations given that none of the victims were prepared to support the allegations, there was of course no forensic evidence to support them, and ‘very limited’ witness support I do not know. That they were prepared to trace and interview the 20 other girls present at the time, 40 years later, and interview Savile under caution is to their credit. Mr Williams-Thomas appears very taken with the idea that on the basis of what must have been many hours of what proved to be fruitless police work they should then have gone on to interview the elderly and retired staff at the time, so much so that he has repeatedly telephoned the 91 year old headmistress of the school, recording her endlessly polite statements that she did not wish to appear on his programme nor make any comment, and gleefully including this recording in his programme. To what end? Has the idea of trial by television taken such hold that he expected her to produce the confidential records of the named girls and display them for public entertainment? He has another ‘think’ coming. The records are in safe hands and will be produced for the benefit of the real police, not the media police.

We then moved onto perhaps William-Thomas’s most impressive witness. ‘Denise’, not an old Duncroft girl, but, in the 1960s, the 10 year old daughter of ‘family friend’ Uncle Jimmy, who credibly described a scenario all too many people will have recognised; the pervy ‘Uncle’ with the roving hands who she says sexually assaulted her. Had Denise been aware of the law at 10 years old, she would have recognised that this was an offence for which Savile could, if proven, been convicted, and the poor woman is now beating herself up for not having spoken up at the time and potentially have stopped him in his tracks. Any fault or blame here, lies not with the authorities, not even with the BBC – but fairly and squarely with parents. The law has always protected 10 year old girls from sexual abuse, both major and minor – no change in the law will take the place of parents educating their children in the matter of appropriate physical boundaries; nor will any number of weeping Ester Rantzen’s and their telephone lines take the place of  parents imbuing their children with the love and trust that would allow them to discuss such matters with the family members who would surely have delivered a hefty punch on the nose or elsewhere to any ‘family friend’ who behaved in such a manner. I’m not normally one to suggest side stepping the law, but on these specific types of allegations, I would wholeheartedly support direct family action rather than hauling a 10 year old child through the unpleasant process of adversarial law in order to ‘punish’ the perpetrator.

Next up was William-Thomas’s potentially most valuable witness. Janet Cope, who had ‘been by Savile’s side for 30 years as his personal assistant and secretary’. Surely now we would hear some real evidence? Sadly not – even though Ms Cope belatedly informed the world that she had been most discourteously sacked by Savile for reasons undisclosed, even she was not minded to admit to any knowledge whatsoever, or even suspicion, that Savile was this ‘known predatory paedophile’. She would, she said, have challenged him had she ever had reason to suspect this of him. She stated that he was ‘controlling and manipulative’ - just the sort of attributes I would expect of someone who had pushed himself from obscurity to world wide fame.  Quite how Ms Cope was supposed to be making the case for the prosecution of Savile as paedophile defeats me, but she was able to add colour to the programme by showing photographs of Savile with various other celebrities, and thus linking his name to everyone from the Queen, to the Pope to Princess Diana. Scarcely surprising for a serious fund raiser and celebrity in his own right. This presumably and charitably, was supposed to make the case of people being ‘too scared’ of Savile to challenge him with allegations of sexual abuse – but where were the allegations? The result of these hundreds of phone calls from scared victims too frightened to come forward before? Nobody has ever doubted that Savile was incredibly important to Stoke Mandeville hospital, he raised millions of pounds for them, but they themselves or rather Buckinghamshire Health Trust, have denied that any rumours or allegations ever came to their attention, so what is William-Thomas saying here?  That one girl of indeterminate age claims that Savile ‘stuck his tongue down her throat’ at a concert in 1973? Possibly he did, and if so it would have been at a minimum (given the indeterminate age) sexual harassment - but where was the claim that Buckinghamshire Health Trust are in anyway responsible for the fact that she failed to tell anyone?

Finally we were onto Broadmoor, where incredibly, after 20 years as an unpaid prison visitor, and a major figure in the entertainment world, Savile was appointed ‘Honorary assistant entertainment officer’. Frankly I’d have been more gobsmacked if he hadn’t been, with that track record. I doubt that the corridors of Broadmoor are thronged with worthy citizens who wish to give their time putting on entertainment for some of the most dangerous people in the British Isles. Why only ‘assistant‘ – who was it that was better qualified? We weren’t told. But giving up his time as a volunteer, we were told by no less figure than Edwina Currie, was evidence that he had both access, and opportunity for abuse. Indeed, and that applies to each and every person who does volunteer for unpaid work in such places – is it evidence that they are all paedophiles?

We were shown ’Kate’, a resident of Broadmoor, who claimed that Savile, an honorary member of staff, came into the bathroom whilst she was naked in the bath and ‘joked with other male members of staff”. I don’t think anyone would dispute that the multiple bathing arrangements common in mental hospitals at that time, which involved male and female patients being naked together and attended by male and female members of staff was wholly inappropriate. It is something I have attested to myself. I don’t find the fact that an ‘honorary member of staff’ was given this access any more or less despicable than the fact that it was common for male members of staff to have such access to naked females residents. I condemn it, but I cannot include it as proof that Williams-Thomas has proven his case regarding paedophilia.

Kate’s later testimony that Savile ‘put his arm round her and touched her breast’ and later tried to put his hand between her legs, may well be true. How can we know? It is an allegation. She says as a result of this allegation ‘she was put in solitary confinement for several months‘. Even in the allegedly lawless atmosphere of a 1970s mental hospital, and incidentally Duncroft, there are very strict rules regarding solitary confinement. It has to be a matter of record, for it is one of the first things that prison visitors and Home Officer inspectors check on. We can argue that the log book records could be falsified to give a spurious reason for such solitary confinement, but I cannot accept that the dozens of staff who would have been on duty during those months, day and night, would all have been prepared to risk their jobs and pensions and accept someone being in solitary confinement and that not being noted in the record books. Ipso, Broadmoor, like Duncroft, will have an official record of this confinement. Something else to be produced to the police, methinks? The real police.

Much was made of the fact that Savile had a set of keys to Broadmoor. We are invited to deduce that he had free run of the entire hospital, but were told that he specifically didn’t have a set of keys to the bedrooms, only to the communal areas where there were staff on duty. I am not in the slightest surprised. My own experience of visiting such establishments, of which I have seen more than my fair share as a Visitor, is that the staff are extremely concerned to make sure that you do not manage to wander to any area that is not monitored by the staff for your own safety. I’ve certainly never been offered a set of keys to wander between staffed communal areas, but then I’ve never been appointed an honorary assistant entertainment officer either – merely an occasional visitor. There would undoubtedly be a dearth of individuals volunteering to become a prison visitor if Savile or anyone else had been allowed unsupervised access to some exceedingly dangerous people who would cheerfully – and have done – chop you into small pieces! Not even the regular staff do that, never mind honorary staff or visitors.  He came and went through the staff entrance. So what?

There was considerable time devoted to the allegations that Savile was invited to ‘head’ the task force put in place when the hospital was in crisis. Ms Cope, his personal assistant told us that Savile ‘believed himself to be ‘top dog’. The Broadmoor authorities have denied this. Edwina Currie says his role ‘was never defined’. What are we left with? That Savile believed himself to be in charge? He may well have done so, that doesn’t make it fact that ‘he was in charge of the task force’ as has been claimed. To me, that leaves me with the impression that here was a man with 20 years experience who was invited to join the task force committee – and why not. He had a point of view. Part of that point of view Ms Currie tells us, was that he believed that staff had been fiddling overtime, that some had allocated accommodation to family members etc. This was portrayed as evidence that he ‘could’ have blackmailed staff into ignoring his abuse of vulnerable victims. Yes, OK, he could have done – even Ms Currie didn’t go so far as to claim that she knew whether he had ever done so. It ‘could’ also be evidence that here was an outsider who was prepared to tell the authorities the truth about some of the goings on in a hospital in crisis. It depends whether you watched this programme having already made your mind up that Savile was a predatory paedophiliac or whether you had an open mind waiting to hear the evidence…

Last night Roy Rowden, a former senior NHS executive supervising Britain’s three high security prisons proclaimed himself ‘shocked’ at the access Savile was given to inmates. Remembering that Savile was a prison visitor long before he became an ‘honorary assistant entertainment officer’, perhaps Rowden would care to enlarge on his views as to how exactly prison visitors are supposed to act as a watchdog to ensure that proper standards of care and decency are maintained if they don’t have access in supervised areas to inmates?

Every prison and immigration removal centre has an Independent Monitoring Board (IMB), formerly known as a Board of Visitors. Members of the IMB, who are volunteers, are appointed by the Home Secretary and act as ‘watchdogs’ for both the Minister of Prisons and the general public, to ensure that proper standards of care and decency are maintained.

Now onto the matter of Alan Franey, who was invited to join first the task force, then applied for – and got in open competition – the job of General Manager of Broadmoor and later Chief Executive. Alan Franey was previously head of Leeds Infirmary, whence he knew Jimmy Savile, a long time voluntary porter there. It was portrayed as somehow sinister that Savile should suggest a man who had successfully headed up a major hospital trust to join the task force trying to sort out the problems in a hospital - on the grounds that this hospital was high security and covered mental health. Now if you are trying to prove that Savile was a man with sinister intentions, you can make something of him suggesting that the Department of Health assess his old friend Alan Franey to take up this position – however, if you have an open mind, you might querulously wonder what William-Thomas’s point here was? Does he believe that Savile shouldn’t have made any suggestions even though on the task force as an undoubtedly interested party? Should only have made suggestions that involved people he had no connection with and thus couldn’t possibly recommend? The civil servants in the Department of Health certainly did assess Alan Franey and considered him quite up to the job of managing a hospital. So what are we suggesting here? That the civil servants were so blinded by Savile’s celebrity that they gave Franey the job for no reason? Should they have ignored the fact that he had already proved himself competent to manage a major hospital? Should they have disbarred him on the grounds that he was friends with someone on the task force? I’m left looking at a mass of innuendo and totally unsure of what I should be deducing from it.

Finally, we had the ‘grilling’ of Sir Roger Jones. Roger Jones was discussing in his office possible contributors to a forthcoming ‘Children in Need’ programme. Savile’s name was mentioned, and ‘several of his staff showed by their body language that they were uncomfortable with this suggestion’. Why were they uncomfortable? Roger didn’t know, since none of them actually voiced any complaints, allegations or offered any explanation for their ‘uncomfortable body language’. That didn’t save Roger from trial by innuendo – shouldn’t he have immediately run round the BBC building warning all and sundry that Savile was a predatory paedophiliac? Hmmn, so the next time someone suggests the geriatric Cliff Richards for the ‘Christmas Special’ and the staff all roll their eyes and look at the floor, the producer should immediately go round the BBC denouncing him as a predatory paedophile? Welcome to the biggest defamation claim the BBC has ever had to defend, if so!

I watched last night with an open mind, quite prepared to believe that Savile was a dangerous paedophile that various authorities should have suspected and thus protected children against. Williams-Thomas has had publicity that others could only dream of, ‘hundreds’ of victims coming forward in the wake of his previous programme, hours of television time to develops his theory, and last night was the final result. Along with the rest of the general public, I am invited to draw my own conclusions. The case for the prosecution rests.

Er, that was it? Really? Where’s the Beef? 

©Anna Raccoon-still-with-her-head-defiantly-above-the-parapet.

Updated to add:

‘Those who watched this programme will recall MWT citing an apparently independent witness, a member of a girls choir who claimed that Savile walked up to her at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and ‘stuck his tongue down her throat without warning’. 

Overnight I have been contacted by someone who is aware of the Girls Choir to which she belonged, and also aware that the girl’s sister was at Duncroft…as were the group of original ‘complainants’. 

Would anybody care to calculate the odds for me on Savile managing to walk into a crowded venue and ‘hitting on’ what could be the one and only person there with a connection to Duncroft and the original group of Duncroft girls? 

Pan·o·ram·a (pn-rm, -räm) n.

1. An unbroken view of an entire surrounding area.

Along with several other interested parties, I have spent the afternoon digesting the Pollard report on whether the Newsnight ‘Savile’ programme was pulled from the transmission schedule because of ‘pressure from above’ or not.

Watching Twitter on the subject, the phrase that has been lept on with glee has been that Peter Rippon’s decision not to permit transmission was ‘seriously flawed’. What seems to be missing from any of these tweets is the follow up that this was ‘done in good faith’ and NOT  ‘for inappropriate reasons’.

As a result of that decision ’in good faith’, the senior management at the BBC seem to have gone into ‘headless chicken mode’, often making decisions on flawed information, and generally more concerned with watching their own back than with sharing information and being transparent.

I am not concerned with the bulk of the report dealing with the failings of the BBC to deal with the outcome of that decision. I shall leave that to others.

Now that it has been decided that Peter Rippon didn’t make his decision as a result of management pressure to protect the reputation of a BBC star, I am concerned with why that decision was made.

Peter Rippon could only act on the information he was given by his investigative team. His own view was:

‘The extent to which we had to rely on the testimony from [[R1]] was stark. She was the only victim in vision we had and would be the face of our allegations and I remained concerned about how well her testimony would stand up to the scrutiny it would get. I was also concerned with the way we had collected the additional evidence from other victims and witnesses, The women were to remain anonymous. The interviews had all been done on the telephone. Some of them were done by a junior researcher who was with us on work experience who I had never worked with. I was also concerned that the evidence could potentially be undermined because some of the women had already discussed the claims amongst themselves via a social networking site. In my personal experience, the strongest testimony from victims of alleged child sexual abuse has to be collected individually, face to face, on neutral territory, with trained interviewers used to not asking leading questions. This was a long way from what we had done.
For these reasons I emailed Meirion on 30th November saying I wanted to pursue the CPS angle on the story to its end before finally deciding on publishing…’.

Rippon was right to be concerned at relying on the testimony from the one woman they had on film, for Meirion Jones own view of the women was:

In another e-mail to Mr Williams-Thomas, on 22 November, Mr Jones offered some candid observations about the ex Duncroft residents. He said that while ‘most’ were intelligent, ‘most’ were also ‘emotionally damaged’ with a ‘criminal background’ as well as being ‘suspicious… extremely manipulative [and] difficult to deal with’.

In his evidence to Pollard Mr Jones rather played down this description of the residents, although it was obviously his private view of his ‘witnesses” expressed as he thought at the time.  However, another of the women had vouchsafed the information that there had been a 2007 investigation into these allegations which had been dropped ‘because Savile was old and infirm’.  She claimed to be in possession of a letter proving this. That information obviously significantly strengthened the extent to which Rippon felt that he could rely on the ‘compelling testimony’ from the one witness they had on film and the telephone conversations via a junior employee on work experience - he was indeed happy at that point for the investigation to continue.

We will never know who the author of that forged letter was. Fiona was the last person known to have handled it, before handing it to a reporter from the Daily Mail, who quickly established that it was a crude forgery – however, crucially she never did give it to the Newsnight team. That forged letter has subsequently become the crux of the breakdown of trust between Peter Rippon and the investigative team headed by Meirion Jones.

On 25 November Mr Williams-Thomas told Mr Jones that Surrey Police had confirmed to him, off the record, that they had indeed investigated Savile. That was a big step forward. First, it was confirmation that the police had taken the allegations seriously enough to mount an investigation. Second, it demonstrated that those residents who said they had been spoken to by the police had indeed done so. It reinforced their credibility. 
Mr Jones immediately passed the news on to Mr Rippon: ‘Off the record Surrey Police have now confirmed that they did investigate Jimmy Savile about sexual abuse of minors and that they interviewed the girls from Duncroft as part of that inquiry. The Head of the Paedophile unit is now going to dig out the files and hopefully tell us more on Monday.’

Rippon was nervous about putting the BBCs reputation on the line on the strength of the uncorroborated evidence he had seen/heard so far, and when it appeared that there was no corroboration of the story that had been pitched to him – i.e. that the women had been let down by an unsatisfactory police investigation abandoned for the farcical reason that Savile was ‘too old and inform’ he withdrew his support for the transmission.

Rippon asked Meirion in an e-mail dated 5:26pm on 7 December:

‘What is the latest….did the CPS get back?…There is a limit to how much time it is sensible to continue chasing this.’

Meirion Jones replied:

… still waiting for CPS…As you know I already think story is strong enough – and danger of not running it is substantial damage to BBC reputation – but no point having that discussion until I have final word from CPS.

Sadly, as those of us who have followed this story closely have known all along, that information was incorrect. The letter purporting to come from Surrey Police conveying this information was a forgery, and in fact the Surrey Police investigation had been dropped due to lack of evidence.

‘Following an investigation by [Surrey] Police, the CPS reviewing lawyer advised the police that no further action should be taken due to lack of evidence’. The statement added: ‘As this is the case, it would not be correct to say that his age and frailty was the reason for no further action being taken’.

Pollard says:

I think it is clear that, at this stage, Mr Rippon would have broadcast the story if there was clear confirmation that the CPS had dropped the case against Savile because of his age. That could either have come through the appearance of the ‘old and infirm’ letter or by the CPS confirming that fact themselves. If that had happened I do not think Mr Rippon would have been able to resist the pressure to broadcast. Indeed, the story would have passed the threshold that he himself had set so he would have had no reason to oppose it, although he clearly had considerable other doubts too.

That Meirion was placing great store on the ‘old and infirm angle’ himself is shown by his draft for the transmission.

On 27 November Mr Jones drafted a version of the ‘cue’, the lead-in that would be read by the presenter just before the filmed story was played out on the programme. This was:

‘When Sir Jimmy Savile died in October, Prince Charles led the tributes to a national treasure. But there was a darker side to the star of Jim’ll Fix it. Newsnight has learnt that he was investigated by police for sexual assaults on minors but the crown prosecution service decided in 2009? that he was too old and infirm to face trial. Now some of the girls who say they were assaulted by him in the 1970s when they were 13, 14 and 15 have talked to Newsnight. They say Savile was an evil man who should rot in hell and that his charity work gave him cover to get young girls. They even claim that some of the abuse took place after BBC recordings and involved other celebrity paedophiles who appeared on Savile’s shows such as Gary Glitter.
Liz Mackean investigates …

Early in Mr Jones’ draft was a quote from an interview with Mr Williams-Thomas (although the interview had not yet been recorded it was clear what line it was anticipated he was going to take) in which he was expected to say ‘but in 2009 the CPS decided that Savile was too old and infirm to face a trial and dropped the case – I have to say I don’t think that is acceptable – and why was it all hushed up?’ Mr Jones accepted that this story, with the CPS angle prominent near the start and talking of ‘hushing up’ the abuse, was the story he was hoping to put out.

I have always maintained that what has happened to the BBC in the past few months were as a direct result of Meirion ‘throwing his toys out of his pram’ when he wasn’t allowed to run with a story that would have directly impacted on his elderly aunt with whom he no longer enjoyed good relations. Not that Meirion had had the good manners to either inform his Aunt that he was investigating a story in which she would have been an obvious interviewee, or even told his bosses at the BBC that he had a personal and emotional involvement in this story.

Two days later, on 23 November, Ms Boaden spoke with Mr Mitchell. She was not aware at the time that Mr Jones’s aunt was the Head of Duncroft, nor that he had been considering the story for some time while Savile was alive. She said that she would have been ‘quite concerned’ about such a personal involvement or emotional connection.

From this point on, relations between Meirion Jones and his executive editor appear to have totally collapsed.

There was a further factor involved too. It is clear to me that the relationship between Mr Rippon and his investigation team had all but broken down. I accept that there were not screaming matches and open rows but, as it became obvious that the story was not going to run, an element of personal antagonism crept in. It comes across clearly in the personal e-mails sent by Mr Jones and Ms MacKean to their friends and in the exasperated way Mr Rippon describes, in particular, Mr Jones’s methods of working. He thought Mr Jones was over-selling the story, literally ‘like a salesman’ he told us, and was prematurely passing details of the investigation to other parts of the news department to try to build up an assumption that the story was going to go ahead.

Stories started to appear in the press reflecting Meiron’s view that ‘his’ programme had been abandoned because of managerial pressure to protect Savile’s reputation, rather than his Editor’s feeling that the story needed more corroboration.

The complete distrust of Mr Jones which I referred to above extended to the News PR team. Ms Deller and Mr Feeny were, by this stage, evidently concerned about the continuing leaking of material to the media, of which they assumed Mr Jones to be the source. The pair had taken the view that this should lead to disciplinary action against Mr Jones and even his dismissal. In an email exchange later that night, after Ms Deller learned of Mr Jones’s family connection to Duncroft, Ms Deller said to Mr Rippon, Mr Mitchell and Mr Feeny: ‘No excuse. No more discussions with him’, suggesting ’a discreet conversation with HR to establish options.’

Mr Mitchell and Ms Boaden were both at pains to point out that the fact that Mr Jones was considered to be inclined to leak did not mean that he was persona non grata within BBC News. Throughout this period he was still being trusted to, as Ms Boaden put it ‘do some journalism’.However, Ms Boaden did suggest that one reason why nobody sat down with Mr Jones to get his version of the underlying facts was that by this point he was ‘regarded as untrustworthy’. Another reason, Ms Boaden suggested, was that Mr Jones would not be the right person to go to:

‘… you have to decide what you think the facts are that you want to explore… So the allegation is a cover-up of a Newsnight investigation. So you wouldn’t necessarily go to Meirion Jones to get the facts on that, since it is suspected that Meirion is the person who has decided it is a cover up’.”

What more can be said? One man’s overweening ego and hysteria at not being able to use the Newsnight programme as a vehicle to vent his private grievances? Somebody’s desire to over egg the pudding by forging a letter? Between them they have engineered the downfall of the BBC’s Director General, The Deputy Director of BBC News Stephen Mitchell, lost the trust of the British public – such as it was – in the investigative integrity of the BBC, cost the BBC licence payers some £2 million just to get the facts straight, and most damaging of all, have put back the quiet patient work of the real police in investigating historic cases of child abuse by years.

That is the real tragedy - all this grandstanding, and out there, tonight, some poor kid is getting unwanted ‘attention’ from a ‘friend’ of his Mother’s. Do you imagine any of these people actually care about that kid?

I am indebted to my commentator, DtP, for suggesting the title – superb! Wish I had thought of it myself.

First the Yewtree report. This long awaited £450,000 worth of expensive police time has succeeded in uniting two warring parties – the conspiracy theorists who are convinced that a combination of lizards/Rothschilds/the Royal Family/and sundry far-from-politically-correct comedians and DJs/are responsible for subverting the morals of the entire nation – and those who have direct experience of the various care homes and other institutions implicated in the ‘Savile was Britain’s greatest dead paedophile’ saga.  Getting these opposing parties standing on the sidelines yelling ‘load of rubbish’ in unison will be a hard act to follow for future inquiries. My congratulations to DS David Gray and Peter Watt of the NSPCC, I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

Part of the problem is that although they have spent a great deal of money – two detectives travelled from Surrey to another part of the British Isles, staying in the most expensive hotel in the area for two days of interviews with a witness who gave them documentary evidence that Savile’s association with Duncroft in particular only commenced in 1974 they then publish a report detailing alleged offences there in 1971!

This may well be because the report has been based exclusively on accounts by those making allegations in order to ‘Give victims a voice’. Inconveniently contradictory documentary facts having no place in reassuring ‘victims’ that they have been ‘believed and listened to’.

My interest in this matter has always related to the ‘Duncroft’ issues, partly through personal knowledge, and partly because it was the believed ’suppression’ of these facts, vis-a-vis the initial non-transmitted Newsnight segment, that created the uproar that was to rock the BBC to its foundations and result in many experienced journalists and producers no longer in employment. I fully accept that there is a school of thought that says none of that matters because of the ‘good’ that has come out the ensuing publicity and the number of others abused that have felt able to come forward. That has always seemed to me to be an argument along the lines of ‘But Mussolini made the trains run on time’. There were other ways of getting the message across. I don’t believe that the resulting publicity justifies the damage that has been done.

For that reason alone, I draw a sharp dividing line between those allegations made before transmission of Panorama, and those made in the wake of publicity afterwards. Yewtree has taken them all together, and thus can cheerfully announce that

2.4 The volume of the allegations that have been made, most of them dating back many years, has made this an unusual and complex inquiry. On the whole victims are not known to each other and taken together their accounts paint a compelling picture of widespread sexual abuse by a predatory sex offender.

Nope, on the whole they are not, but those of us who were eagerly awaiting the results of your £450,000 inquiry are interested in whether the original complainants were known to each other, and in contact with each other….we say they were, and are not impressed that you have glossed over this important detail.

Yewtree, written in conjunction with the NSPCC is primarily concerned to ‘give victims a voice’. Therefore they have followed the California model of believing everything said about what might have happened to a child. (This only applies to sexual abuse, otherwise Venables and Thompson would have been sent home with a pat on the head, ‘believed’ when they said that Jamie Bulgers disappearance had nothing to do with them’). I am quite happy to accept that young children are unlikely to lie about sexual occurrences otherwise how else would they know how to describe what has happened to them? – so no surprise at the following part of paragraph 2.4.

We are therefore referring to them as ‘victims’ rather than ‘complainants’ and are not presenting the evidence they have provided as unproven allegations.

What is a surprise is that have said they are ‘victims’ as a fact, and therefore reports as factual evidence:

2.11 There are reports of offences from when Savile worked at the BBC between 1965 and 2006, at the final recording of Top of the Pops.

At Leeds General Infirmary, where he was a porter, offending was reported between 1965 and 1995.

At Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where he was also a porter, reported offending took place between 1965 and 1988.

They then single out Duncroft School as being the site of ‘allegations of offences’. Ho hum.

At Duncroft School there are allegations of offences between 1970 and 1978 when he was a regular visitor.

Interesting, particularly since Operation Outreach spent so much money establishing who introduced him to Duncroft, when, and the six visits he made…

The conspiracy theorists are mortified to read that:

2.15 There is no clear evidence of Savile operating within a paedophile ring although whether he was part of an informal network is part of the continuing investigation and it’s not therefore appropriate to comment further on this.

But DS Gray ploughs on with his sop to the nation’s intelligence…

9.2 The victims tell us that at Duncroft School Savile was given unsupervised access and preyed upon girls by offering ‘favours’ such as trips in his car and cigarettes in return for sexual activity.

Remember you said you were ‘investigating Savile’ – not just writing down what the ‘victims’ told you Petal?

Still the CPS report, also known as the Levitt report, released today, was far more interesting. Here for the first time we have an authoritative account of what the Duncroft victims amounted to. These were the girls, the only ‘victims’, over which the BBC was traumatised and brought to its knees. These are the girls who have resulted in no less than 14 separate inquiries running at present. Remember, everyone else came after this…

I will set aside Karin Ward for the moment, simply because she had never gone to the police, nor had made any complaint to the staff at Duncroft; her allegations arose purely because one of a series of fictional books she had written about her life as an abused child was picked up by investigating journalists. The story was ‘given legs’ as they say in the trade, by the revelation that Savile had been investigated by the police, and the investigation was stopped because Savile was ‘old and infirm’. If that was true, it meant by implication that Karin Ward was probably telling the truth…even though those who knew Duncroft and Karin’s hard won reputation for telling amazing porkies could see the glaring errors in her book. (I still love the idea of Bridie Keenan, the ex Judo teacher, administering injections with no previous training and no cries of foul play from the other residents!!!)

So, a wonderfully shortened version of the Duncroft victims, for those who don’t want to read the full report:

Surprisingly, the first person to contact Police, was nothing to do with Duncroft. That was the ’2007′ investigation which has been quoted many times as being the Duncroft investigation. It wasn’t.

It concerned a lady who, 40 years beforehand, had been in her 20s when she heard Savile on TV saying he needed a holiday. She, being a member of his fan club, offered her family home as a suitable place for him to take a holiday. She received a polite letter in response saying thank-you but no thank-you.

2 years later, Savile’s chauffeur appeared at her door without warning, and told her husband that Savile was in the local town and had sent him to see if she wanted to go and meet him. Her husband encouraged her to go.  She went. The ‘next thing she remembers’ was that Savile had his arm around her, and they ‘ended up in his caravan’. Whilst there, he asked her whether she was on the pill, and put her hand on his groin. When she said that ‘she didn’t do that sort of thing’, Savile sat up, checked that she had her bus fare home, and invited her to take a memento. She chose a crucifix. That’s it. That’s the dastardly attack.

However, 40 years later, after living abroad for many years, she returned to the UK, saw Savile on TV, and sat down to write a letter to the Sun newspaper…as you do. A reporter hot footed it down to see her. She told the reporter that she wouldn’t go to the police. Four months later the Reporter tried again. This time the reporter told her that she’d ‘keep her name out of the papers’ but that Savile was now connected to events at Haute de la Garenne in Jersey, and that unless she agreed to make a complaint, nothing could be done about the alleged abuse of children there. On that basis she made a complaint to the Sussex Police.

The Police visited and told her that they would need to contact her (now) ex-husband, and her workmates from 40 years beforehand to check the story out. She was unwilling for various reasons to co-operate with this course of action.

The Levitt report concludes that had she made an official complaint, it would at least have gone towards showing a ‘pattern of behaviour’ – though given that she was in her 20s, had invited Savile to her home, gone willingly to his bedroom, and the man had cheerfully desisted after what was admittedly a coarse approach to suggesting sex, it scarcely shows a pattern of paedophile behaviour.

Fast forward another 2 years, and we have the first of the Duncroft allegations. 2009 and a Duncroft resident approaches Surrey Police not to report that she had been abused, but to tell them that she had witnessed an abuse occurring at Duncroft. This was 2 years after The Sun had first made strenuous efforts to connect Savile with a care home. She claims to have phoned Child-line – (Esther? Didn’t you say ‘if only’?) and been told to go to the Police. So she did.

She gave them the name of Witness C, who she alleges was sitting next to Savile in the TV lounge, when he took her hand and placed it on his crotch, he then ‘squeezed her hand’ which would have had the effect of ‘squeezing his testicles and penis’. She said that she believed witness ‘C’ to be 14 at this time. She says that Savile ‘groomed the girls’ by sending them a giant box of chocolates on their 16th birthday. (A bit tardy for someone who had ambitions to be a paedophile groomer I would have thought, 14th birthday would have made more sense, but what do I know). He did this all of three times. The chocolates on the 16th birthday, I mean.

All well and good, but when the police caught up with witness ‘C’, she didn’t want to know. She declined to make a statement. She agreed that the incident had occurred, but said it only happened the once, she was 15, not 14 at the time, and she had never seen Savile since – although she was the recipient of one of the three now infamous boxes of chocolates two days later – presumably on her 16th birthday?

Not a lot the Police could do with that, although Savile undoubtedly committed an offence. Either indecent assault or gross indecency with a child. There is no question of consent being given – and the arrival of the box of chocolates a few days later which we have already heard from another witness happened three times on 16th birthdays confirms this. It is not absolutely necessary that the victim give evidence themselves, the case could have continued without her, but was becoming weaker by the minute. However, had all these allegations been correlated, and this is the point that the Levitt report makes consistently, it could have amounted to ‘a pattern of behaviour’. The 20 year old claiming that Savile placed her hand on his crotch, and now a 15 year old being the alleged victim of identical behaviour – but being unwilling to formally confirm it.

The Police persevered though, and traced the other residents of Duncroft at the time (1978). Thus they came to speak to Witness ‘D’ who told them that nothing had ever happened to her, but she had heard rumours and that these rumours were being discussed on Friendsreunited. A few days later she rang the Police again and told them that actually her sister had been at Stoke Mandeville Hospital for a concert and Savile had approached her, kissed her and stuck his tongue in her mouth. Extraordinary co-incidence. Out of all those people at the concert, the sister of a Duncroft girl! Still, it might not reinforce the paedophile stalking the corridors at Duncroft, but it is an offence.

Oh dear, she didn’t want to make a complaint either. No witness statement from her, no botched police investigation, in fact she didn’t even want to meet Ms Levitt.

I’m trying hard here, but I’m up to page 36, and so far I’ve got one witness who is unwilling to formally confirm that Savile once placed her hand on his crotch and squeezed it, a few days before her 16th birthday. Onwards and Upwards.

We move onto witness ‘G’. Witness ‘G’ was certainly 16, in that she was resident in Norman Lodge, where girls were only entitled to live when they had reached the age at which they could go out to work. At one time (when I was at Duncroft, that was 14 – but things had changed by 1978, and now you had to be 16, by law) So there is witness ‘G’, 16 years old, and apparently training to be a nurse. Savile allegedly said to her, ‘Give us a blow job, and I’ll get you a job at Stoke Mandeville’ or words to that effect. She declined.

Er, and that was that…he didn’t pursue the matter.

Interestingly, witness ‘G’ was one of the girls on the television programme, and Ms Levitt says:

I did not know at the time I met her that Ms G had participated in a television programme about Jimmy Savile. During that programme she made a number of allegations which go considerably further than those she made to DC S in 2008. When I met her she made reference to having given him a “hand job” but said that she had refused to give him a “blow job”.

So much for the much vaunted ‘Duncroft’ allegations and the ‘five women’ who had gone to the police and come away empty handed as a result of corruption/blinded by fame and celebrity/ protected by higher powers etc, etc.

The evidence that the police had amounts to one 20 year old who rejected a crass approach and was nothing to do with Duncroft, one who was a witness, one near 16 year old who says he put her hand on his crotch but didn’t want to do anything about it, one who says he kissed her sister and made her cry, one who says he made an inappropriate suggestion but didn’t pursue it – and one who has made a career out of writing of child abuse, egged on by the psychologist who chose to involve herself in the Hollie Grieg ‘paedophile ring’ hoax.

In fairness, Levitt QC makes a point of saying that if all these allegations had been taken together then they might have been held to show a ‘course of behaviour’, and if all the witnesses had been told of the other allegations then those who declined to give evidence might have changed their minds, and Savile might have got two years, being the then going rate for indecent assault on a child. (Witness ‘C’).

As it was, he was interviewed under caution, and denied the offences. Both Surrey Police and Sussex Police did go to strenuous efforts to trace all the other residents looking to find more evidence and more importantly, DID notify a range of other charities, and institutions that they had investigated Savile. (See the appendix for full list).

At no point in any of the copious statements to Police did anyone so much as suggest that staff at Duncroft might have been aware of the two occasions we are left with – the ‘hand on crotch’ incident, or the ‘inappropriate suggestion’ incident.

Sky news just on – report by NSPCC reveals ‘full extent of Savile’s offending’ and Police missed ‘at least three opportunities’ to charge him. Sylvia Edwards just being interviewed – the girl who alleged that film of the final episode of Top of the Pops shows him groping her bottom – an event which she says has ruined her entire life….

And apparently ‘he struck at Duncroft School at least 11 times’….and Savile was ‘unchallenged by Police’. Interviewed under caution over an incident where the alleged victim declined to give a statement is NOT unchallenged.

Cobblers! I am ashamed to be British tonight.

“If we do not change the way we use this material in court we risk inviting a torrent of new claims. Our enemies will begin to realise that our justice system is an open goal and come rushing with spurious claims knowing the Government will have to pay out. Even more serious, genuine claimants have no hope of getting their claims properly examined.”

So spake Robert Buckland, the MP for Swindon, a part-time judge and a member of the Commons Justice Select Committee.

It is good to know that someone is aware of the dangers to the British purse if we mess with the historic rules of Justice. The Tax payers Alliance is up in arms too:

“It is extremely worrying if that problem is getting worse, and more claims are coming in. It makes it clearer than ever that action is needed so that taxpayers’ money is not paid out unnecessarily.”

They are of course, speaking of the danger inherent in a system which seeks to pay out compensation to ‘alleged’ victims in an out of court settlement rather than go to the expense, and face the difficulties of testing evidence in court – but only where those alleged victims are nasty alleged terrorists that nobody has any sympathy for.

A pity that our politicians and the Tax payers Alliance are not equally incensed by the prospect of genuine victims of sexual abuse getting their claims properly heard amongst the torrent of ‘Savile’ related claims that  are currently fueling the Paedo scare. There is every chance that BBC Licence fee payers will end up footing a multi-million pound bill as ‘closure’ for the emotive outpouring of hundreds of middle aged fantasists, among which there may even be some genuine cases of child abuse. Cases which will be treated with the same scorn by a public incensed to find that they are watching ‘The Great Escape’ for the fifth time that week, owing to the severe budget cuts imposed by a BBC seen as an ‘open goal’….

It is a hypocrisy not far removed from that which allows us to munch on that nice fat cow with the big eyes, but recoil in horror at that thought of minced up Dobbin with the equally big eyes.

We have overdosed on emoting this week, with the sad news that Frances Andrade’s latest suicide bid was successful. I say ‘latest bid’, for buried in the media reports was the information that Frances had made six attempts on her own life in the previous months. The fact that the seventh and successful attempt coincided with her having given evidence in the trial of Michael and Hilary Brewer a week beforehand on charges of historic sexual abuse led to claims that it was the interrogation by the Defence Barrister, Kate Blackwell QC, that was responsible for her death. Who would the media have blamed had any of the earlier attempts been successful? The teacher who had gone unbidden to the Police after she had learned that Frances had engaged in sexual activity with one or more of the Brewer’s at an age when she could not have given informed consent?

Frances was obviously deeply unhappy at the prospect of the forthcoming trial, as well she might be. 20, 30, and 40 years later, a lot of us (and a lot of rock groupies) may well be reflecting on sexual experiences that could be described as ‘sexual abuse’ on the grounds that we were not of an age to give informed consent.  Although I did in fact wait until I was 16 to so do, I should be appalled if in conversation with a friend I had confided under aged sexual experiences – only to find that my ‘friend’ had marched off to the police and laid a formal complaint, leaving me forced to relieve those experiences in the full glare of publicity and the unforgiving nature of an adversarial court process.

Needless to say, Frances’ death was scarcely a day old before those who would dismantle our ancient system of Justice were out and about on the airwaves.

Sir, Is the present adversarial court system competent to handle sexual abuse offences? The recent tragic death of an abuse victim after a gruelling cross-questioning in court suggests not. The legal mind appears not to grasp the psychological complexities involved. The judge in this case emphasising that the defence barrister had acted entirely professionally suggests that there is little understanding of the pressing need for change. The adversarial court system is a strong disincentive for abuse victims to speak out. A society cannot be healthy when the law obstructs justice and truth.

Marjorie Orr
Director, Accuracy About Abuse
London NW3

We already have a system whereby alleged sexual abuse victims are given additional weight to their evidence by the so called ‘trawling method’ of bringing forward other complainants who may or may not be genuine, but the sheer weight of numbers is believed to overcome the historic need for corroborated evidence. The victim’s identity is shrouded in secrecy. They are allowed to give evidence via video link, or hidden behind a curtain. To say that we should dismantle the system by which the defence can rigorously examine the evidence for which his client is threatened with jail is a step too far.  We are being groomed to accept it by the media though.

The problem lies partly in the fact that the media has groomed us to believe that the only help society can give victims of sexual abuse is either a highly publicised trial of the accused or a cheque in lieu of. It is a paltry sticking plaster for a deep wound, and one which says more about our need to feel that we are doing something than any genuine concern for the victims. How much better to put the money currently being consumed by highly paid lawyers, and funds for compensation payments, into dedicated mental health services? Both for the perpetrators and the Victims?

We are putting millions of pounds into giving Sky News footage of angry protestors kicking the sides of prison vans, yet precious few pennies into funding the sort of dedicated therapy that might do more good than forcing reluctant witnesses like Frances Andrade into feeding our apparently unremitting appetite for armchair emoting and righteousness.

It was the Barrister Helena Kennedy, QC, who was reported to have said even if the perpetrator is convicted victims do not always find relief: “Criminal processes do not provide the answer to individual pain.”

By all means rage at those individuals who prey sexually on children,  they are undoubtedly criminally wrong; but do not be fooled into believing that you are really doing anything for their victims – though you might arguably be preventing another victim for the following x number of years.  What the victims really need is care and compassion and dedicated psychotherapy in an intensely private setting, and that is something that as a society we seem to have no appetite to demand.

Last time I checked, there was but one such psychotherapist in the whole of Wales and her waiting list ran for years rather than months. In the meantime, her putative clients had to be ’counseled’ by a cheque through the post from the taxpayers of Britain via the Criminal Compensation Board.

Funding such a scheme properly rather than paying civil compensation would neatly remove the suspicion than some claimants are only interested in the cheque.

Hollywood has long been a cost free publicity machine. Cost free in the sense that it sold its output and therefore required little or no financial input from those who wished to influence the minds of the general public.

Where government is concerned, there have been some costs attributable - the military personnel and awesome fighting machinery is always available to film makers; with the proviso that they show America as the benign victor over grateful populations. Why make a movie showing the ugly side of the American war machine, when you can have thousands of fit extras, air craft carriers galore, hawks, and hundreds of tanks rolling over your chosen hillside for free, merely by coming up with a script that pleases the Generals?

Between two and three million Soviet prisoners were executed by the Nazi’s, hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, the mentally ill and the disabled – yet for many of the younger generation, the horrors of the Nazi regime can be summed up by ‘they killed six million Jews, didn’t they?’ such is the power of the many Hollywood epics that have centered on the horrors suffered by the Jewish people.

Other organisations have sought to avail themselves of the hearts and mind campaign that can be won with the aid of Hollywood. I can remember watching the film ‘The Magdalene Sisters’ without ever querying whether it was a truthful portrayal of life in a Catholic run institution in the early part of the last century. Don’t we all know that every Catholic priest is a paedophile, that Nuns are routinely cruel and uncaring? Why should we be surprised that this is reflected in a Hollywood film?

Possibly because we haven’t gone to the trouble of reading the MacAleese report on the actual Magdalene Laundries. That might be because we picked up on its publication via the BBC,  which gave us a selection of quotes from the report that did nothing to disabuse us from our comfortable belief that we ‘knew’ – since it was a Catholic run institution – that it would be full of harrowing stories of abuse and sadism,  and we didn’t really need to wallow in all that, did we?

Quote: From the BBC website, from ‘Maureen Sullivan’ – described as ‘survivor’.

In the report I find that some people are still in denial and yet there are other parts that clearly state and people can see we were telling the truth all along.

I ask for an apology from the religious orders and I ask the Prime Minister of my country to give us an apology, they took my education and they took my identity.

The BBC don’t give a link to the full report, I have no idea why – but it is HERE for those who don’t want their prejudices ready-to-heat, but are prepared to create them from scratch.

Googling the MacAleese report comes up with another post entitled ‘How to read the MacAleese report’. Written by a solicitor, it purports to tell you what you should and shouldn’t understand from the report.  Fortunately I had already read the report before I read Simon McGarr’s resume of the 1000 page report. He tells me that Martin MacAleese’s introduction ‘runs for eleven pages of disingenuous waffle’ and ‘the Executive Summary is a shameful farrago of guesses, elisions and wilful ignorance’. What could have driven Simon McGarr to such fury against the inquiry into 50, 60 and 70 year old allegations of cruelty, abuse and perversion? Could it be the the final report didn’t quite match up to the Hollywood and media driven expectations?

Where was the evidence of paedophiliac Nuns? Nowhere to be seen. MacAleese could not find one single report of sexual abuse by a Nun. But the beatings and the shaven heads – we’d seen them on our television! Oops! MacAleese had neglected to screen those he interviewed and actually allowed an authentic dissenting voice of a Magdalene girl to appear in his report.

 ”It has shocked me to read in papers that we were beat and our heads shaved and that we were badly treated by the nuns… I was not touched by any nun and I never saw anyone touched. As long as I was there, I was not touched myself by any nun and I never saw anyone touched and there was never a finger put on them. … Now everything was not rosy in there because we were kept against our will … we worked very hard there … But in saying that we were treated good and well looked after”.

Send that woman to the back of the compensation queue, tar and feather her! None of the women told the Committee that their heads had been shaved, with one exception. The exception occurred where one woman had her head shaved because she had lice:

“When I said it was all itchy they shaved it … If you got lice your head was shaved”. In response to a question on whether hair was ever shaved as a punishment, she replied “Just for the lice”.

Not everyone was off message: Another woman who had been in two Magdalen Laundries reported that, in one of these Laundries, “there was a padded cell, I was put in there 3 times”. Ah the fabled padded cell, star of so many misery memoires. However such comments were a rarity in Chapter 19, which is overwhelmingly women saying ‘it was hard, it was tough, we didn’t enjoy it, but never saw anyone physically abused’.

Undoubtedly life was tough in the Magdalene Laundries, but it can only be truly compared to life in any other commercial laundry in the 1920s, whereas it currently finds itself compared to modern day expectations of employment.

“The floors of the laundry were constantly floating with water – often soapy dirty water streaming out. There was constant inhaling of steam from the large colander (large ironing board). Young women stood either side of the colander for up to two or three hours in the morning and again in the afternoon. Large buckets of boiling water were scattered around the floor used for starching and steaming. The light was poor and their only view from the windows was more iron bars. There was often a foul smell in the air from the extensive, industrial laundry of soiled sheets from hospitals, hotels, convents, farms and more”.

One of the main complaints is that the girls were paid no wages and never knew when they might be allowed to leave. The no wages bit is described as ‘modern day slavery’ (as is work experience in Poundland!) but reading the report I see that:

Chapter 10 of this Report sets out the circumstances in which some former young women were placed in a Magdalen Laundry during the period of their supervision after discharge from Industrial School. It appears to the Committee that, for many of the women it met, these were the circumstances in which they came to enter a Magdalen Laundry.

The women were either not told or didn’t remember that they were still on licence from those Industrial schools – I can relate to that, I doubt many of the Duncroft girls appreciated that they were still subject to recall to Duncroft until they were 21. I certainly didn’t. Since there is no such thing as a ‘fallen women’ these days, only proudly independent single mothers and young women expressing their individuality, it is difficult to compare the situation for someone leaving such an establishment with its inherent ‘stain on their character’ with modern life.  Where else would these women have been employed in rural Ireland in those times? Rage against the times by all means, rage against the prejudice, the injustice, be grateful it doesn’t exist today - but blame the Nuns who had set up a business that was prepared to employ these girls?

Chapter 20 examines the financial viability of the Magdalen Laundries, on the basis of the financial accounts or other financial records prepared contemporaneously by the relevant Religious Congregations.

The results of the financial analysis carried out tends to support a view that the Magdalen Laundries were operated on a subsistence or close to break-even basis rather than on a commercial or highly profitable basis.

You mean the dastardly Catholic church wasn’t making a thumping profit out of these unfortunate women? Is there to be no end to our disillusionment?

The report spoke to 118 women who had experienced the Magdalene Laundries, a small enough sample, but still the largest exercise in collating the authentic memories of those who had actual first hand experience – and it paints a very different picture from the accepted media view. Why could that be? I was sent an interesting link during the week.

Campaigners believe the role such movies (the Magdalen Sisters)played in highlighting the issue justified any artistic embellishment, and this view is shared by Louise Lowe, director of the award-winning play Laundry (another portrayal of the alleged horror), who says The Magdalene Sisters “served an important function at the time”.

This is dangerously close to the view taken by those in the child abuse industry – what does it matter if the original reports from Duncroft were exaggerated, embellished, and in some cases, outright lies? They served a greater purpose, allowing some 400 other individuals to come forward with tales of abuse at Savile’s hands…all grist to the mill.

The constant repetition of advertisements from the NSPCC showing highly vulnerable and obviously prepubescent and unhappy small girls in winsomely oversized nightgowns is drumming the message into our heads – ‘when we say child abuse, this is the picture we want you to hold in your head’ – and a disgusting abhorrent picture it is too, who could begin to defend sexual activity with such an innocent? Yet the reality is that action against child abusers currently comprises a series of arrests of geriatric entertainers who are alleged to have received oral sex from a groupie 30 years ago who now says she was 15 at the time, and her new ‘friend’ says that’s child abuse…

So successful has been the media campaign, that both the expensive reports recently published – Yewtree and the MacAleese report were greeted with howls of rage by the public. ‘Whitewash’, ‘Coverup’ – euphemisms for ‘Where’s our Paedophile Ring. We were promised a paedophile ring!’ Promised by whom? Those who were actually present, or the media?

Who is it that is so insistent that we should loose all faith in religious institutions of any variety and men in general (unless they are safely married to other men!)?

I was nearly tempted out of my sick bed by a chance reading of a Guardian piece which claimed to have uncovered 43,00 – that’s forty three thousand in case you glossed over the figures – cases of child abuse in a 21 month period. Noooo! An extra 43,000 victims? Another 43,000 queuing at the compo agency? Surely not, can there be anyone left in Britain who has not been a victim of something or other? I subsided back into the pillows on further reading whereby it turned out that these ‘victims’ – half of whom were ‘black or ethnic’ – teenage boys incarcerated in youth offender establishments,  you know, the hulking great 6′ 2″  Jamaican lads from South London sink estates who’ve been convicted of gouging out someones eyes with a crowbar, who have been ordered to strip to ensure that they are not carrying a machete into prison with them. Apparently these brave lads sorry, children, have been describing the practice as ‘undignified’, leading ‘to feelings of anger, humiliation and anxiety’. Not as much anxiety as the staff ordered to care for these ‘children’ would have felt if they had not ensured that they didn’t have a 12″ carving knife strapped to their left leg no doubt, but right on cue, out came a leading children’s rights campaigner to describe the ‘practice of children being forced to expose their naked bodies to adults in authority as institutionalised child abuse’. Knowing that they would be strip searched had led to a mere 275 of them being daft enough to still be concealing a weapon or other illegal item – and that apparently is sufficient to describe the practice as ‘unnecessary’. Give me strength.

I lay there thinking of my recent trip to England, and the village where I lived for ten years or more. It had a railway station, a rare omission on Mr Beeching’s part; no ticket office any longer – and how we used to amuse ourselves telling the Americans who had flooded the area that in order to catch a train you had to wave the train down as it passed through the station. You didn’t of course, it stopped there anyway, but the sight of those shed sized marines desperately jumping up and down and waving their arms like Benny Hill on speed was one of the great joys of our village life. The village didn’t have much to support itself on, surrounded by sand dunes and impermeable flint-stone - but it had survived and prospered. The sand dunes were full of rabbit warrens; the rabbits duly caught, skinned and sent down to the tanneries of East London by train to line the gloves of the gentry. The flint was discovered to be just the thing to ignite a spark in gun powder, and generations of the men folk had sat and laboriously chipped away at the flint to supply the flint lock pistols in both sides of the American civil war. When the lump of flint grew too small to safely chip, they took it home with them, and when they had a large enough pile, they set to and built themselves a house with it - beautiful houses that glistened like rose cut diamonds as the sun danced on the cut facets of the ‘knapped’ flint. The river was never teeming with fish, but just a mile up river was Elvedon, where the elvers, the baby eels, first started their journey. By the time they reached our village they were plump and tender, a much desired delicacy in the East End of London. They too were trapped and skinned and sent on their way by train.

Every time I see ‘Operation Elvedon’ in print, I think of old Kenny Adams, the last of the eel trappers, who would punt past my house each sunset to lay out his traps.  The punt his Father had made was gnarled and twisted, as was Kenny, both nearing the end of their life, but still useful. Still independent. Still functioning. Kenny didn’t need a grant from the countryside commission to keep his craft alive – he did it because it was what he had always done, he knew no other way. Now we have a generation to whom ‘Elvedon’ means only a scrap between the left and the right wing media, scores of journalists being dragged out their bed at daybreak by demoralised policemen.

Michael Gove is determined that children aged 8 – 11 will have 99 hours of history lessons to absorb the full range of key developments in the reigns of Alfred, Athelstan, Cnut, and Edward the Confessor. Blimey! I can hear the sniggers from here when they get to Cnut. They’ll be rushing down to the local t-shirt printers (one in every town nowadays) to have their ‘FCUK’ t-shirts adapted to read  ’FCUK Cnut’. More dispiritingly, it may be the tattoo parlour that they visit….

When I first went to live there, long before the M.11 was built, it was a village in time warp. The beautiful Georgian houses inhabited by an army of single, elderly spinsters. The Misses Summers - not sisters, but elderly ’companions’, one the daughter of the local vicar who had set her up with a sweet shop in the High Street, since she was minded to never marry, and her companion, the decidedly masculine and muscular village barber, possessor of a moustache that would have been the envy of many a man. They lived their life, to ripe old age, in harmony within the village without any Equality legislation, or necessity for ‘hate speech’ laws – and a generation of children learnt that there were different lifestyles available to those who chose not to emulate a heterosexual lifestyle. One side of the sweet shop contained the marble barber’s sink where the ‘tweedy’ Ms Summers, as I came to know her,  would attend to the men folk’s hair, the other half was lined with glass jars of home made boiled sweets, the ‘sweet and timid’ Ms Summers domain. I still have some of those jars, and yesterday Mr G hung the small pine cupboard in our new kitchen where Ms Summer displayed her other sideline, the lethal fireworks she sold once a year. The barber’s sink came to rest in a house we restored in Herefordshire – I still mourn its loss.

There was Ms Murrel, and Ms Fox, neighbours in grand houses, quietly tending the village church, relaxing after a life time teaching the village children how to read. Olive, who had once given birth to quads, light years before disposable nappy manufacturers gave you a life time supply of their goods in response to such an event – light years before disposable nappies had been invented. She had soaked and scrubbed, washed and dried a mountain of the terry towelling originals in her time, with na’er a ‘social services approved’ assistant carer in sight. Uncomplainingly. Only one of the quads now lived, a man of limited intelligence, cared for dedicatedly by Olive. The huge and elegant mansion with its sweeping gardens down to the river had been sold ‘by social services’ to care for her son after her death, and now, I discovered last week, was owned by a London businessman who rented out its vast rooms to some dozen Polish families gainfully employed digging up carrots in the surrounding fields, washing them and packing them like sardines for the Londoners who would be appalled to find that carrots grew in dirt. Their cars and surplus possessions littered the gardens, the cast iron conservatory was gone, the sweeping garlands of roses trained over iron hoops, collapsed and neglected.

And Muriel, whom I lived next door to for so many years. Sister to Olive. They had come to live in my house as young children. Their father had been a footman at Buckingham Palace, returning on the train when leave permitted. When he died, Muriel had stayed at home to care for their Mother, when she too died, a small part of the house had been kept back as a home for Muriel, I had bought the rest of the house. I can remember locking myself out of my house one night when I had the flu and had popped outside to get something from my car. It was a freezing cold night, and I was just in my dressing gown. I knocked with some trepidation on Muriel’s door, unwilling to disturb her so late at night – ‘come in my dear’ she said, ‘I’ll pop the fire on for you’…she had been sitting listening to the radio, knitting herself new socks, no fire, on that freezing night. She wasn’t short of money, just of that proudly hardy generation that put on an extra cardigan when the nights grew cold – and did something useful.

Now Muriel had gone, discovered lying in her home, dead for four days they say, by the postman. Her only friend in the village had been on holiday – there was no one else to miss her. Her house was full of Polish electricians, busily rewiring the cold store for carrots…

I thought how all these women had been my role models in my formative years. My Aunty Ailsa, drafted into the war office in Liverpool, progressing to being in charge of the contracts division at the Ministry of Defence, unmarried until she retired, daily doing battle with the salesmen from Decca and Marconi over multi-million pound sales, triumphantly independent to the end of her days. Aye, and Ms Jones, Ms O’ Neil, and all the spinsters at Duncroft, who taught us that it was possible to stand on your own two feet, to look after yourself, to provide for yourself.

In the 30 years since I moved to that village, we have had Women’s Lib, Equality legislation, a burgeoning welfare state, an army of social workers, a state that wishes to be responsible for every facet of our lives – and a public that is shocked when a judge gives a woman 37 years for a brutal murder; the TV announcers last night were running through the list of people who should have been held responsible for that murder; the supermarket who sold her the knife, mental health workers, the policemen, the Doctors, ‘her mental state’, although that is something she was patently aware of herself, having made three telephone calls saying she felt like killing someone…

Children, women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, the unemployed - they’re all victims now. Victims of whom? Well, there’s only one group left! White, middle class, heterosexual men…it can’t be long now before they are outlawed.

My, what progress we have made in 30 years. If Michael Gove wants to teach history, he might usefully start by going back 30 years and teaching a bit of social history, of how people lived without recourse to hundreds of billions of social welfare fund, without feeling victimised or traumatised by life. He’ll be teaching it to a generation who genuinely don’t realise that they can just get on with life, make the best of what is around them, enjoy, and live to a ripe old age.

As far as I am aware, not one of those women failed to make it to at least 90.

Whoever named the Police trawling operation in the wake of the Savile allegations ’Operation Yewtree’ had a sense of humour. The Yewtree is famous for its slow growth and longevity, and its raucously attractive fruit which appeals to little birdies – but contains a deadly poisonous seed. Operation Yewtree has certainly lived up to that.

That seed was spawned yesterday. The private company ACPO – The Association of Chief Police Officers - are expected to approve a ‘National Scoping Panel’ to review complaints of sex abuse not pursued by Police or Prosecutors. ‘Not pursued by Police or Prosecutors’ could merely mean those cases which were reported to Police but not proceeded with because of lack of evidence, the unwillingness of alleged victims to give evidence in court; a nationwide ‘cold case’ review to see whether the guidelines for prosecution of today can be retrospectively applied to historic cases.

It could also mean another offspring of Operation Yewtree which resulted in the joint NSPCC/Metropolitan Police report ‘Giving Victims a Voice’ and trial by media and public opinion of the outpourings of hundreds of people who had been encouraged to come forward with their laughably spurious claims of satanic rituals and the detritus of severely damaged minds being given the same credence as children who really had been sexually abused.

If it is the former, then I am all in favour of it – with some reservations.

The first, and most important is that it should be conducted with the same level of secrecy afforded to, say, cases in the Court of Protection, where the lives and traumas of the mentally ill are not considered a subject for public conjecture. Those subjected to sexual abuse and those accused of that most heinous of crimes should be afforded the same dignity.  It should be an outright offence for anyone, media, blogger, armchair detective, to identify any party to the proceedings, on pain of contempt of court, ahead of any successful prosecution.

Recently, allegations of sexual abuse have become a national game rivaling ‘Big Brother’. Who will be next to be outed from the ‘decent human being’ house by publicity hungry armchair detectives keen to feed the appetite of their army of sad Queens and sour Widows who hang on their every tweet? It has to stop. Sexual abuse of children is too serious a matter to be allowed to fuel celebrity television ambitions.

If this is to be a national scoping exercise to encompass every allegation of sexual abuse from every alleged victim regarding every alleged perpetrator then there is simply no requirement for publicity. The only possible justification for past trawling exercises was that victim (a) might not know that alleged perpetrator (b) was being investigated – however, if this is to be a series of regional panels examining every and all allegations by professionals in a calm and intensely private environment then there is simply no need for publicity.

No need for anyone to go to the media with their unresolved allegations, no need for prime time television to conduct their own half-baked investigations, no need for any leaking of names under investigation to be given out to publicity hungry would-be television pundits. No need to wait until someone is dead before voicing misgivings about their behaviour.

My second reservation would be – who is to serve on these National Scoping Panels? Dedicated and trained professional Police Officers; or is to be yet another Quango, leaving room for every empire building charity with a vested interest in demanding funds to cope ‘with the scale of the problem’ – I haven’t forgotten how hard the RSPCA lobbied to be allowed to enlarge their remit, once permitted we were treated to a series of TV ads bemoaning the fact that ‘Parliament had increased their work load’ and they now desperately need ‘more funds’ to cope with the work ‘forced upon them by legislation’.

Are we to have self appointed ‘child protection experts’ sitting on these panels? I was so fascinated by the fact that after 11 years on the beat, ‘child protection expert’ Mark Williams-Thomas had quit the force a matter of months after finally making it into CID, a unusual action to say the least, that I went to considerable length to track down his former Commanding Officer, now happily retired. So much for his ‘glittering career’, it took several attempts to jog his memory to even recollect who MWT was before he finally said ’Good God, is that the same man?’ I had been expecting to find that the ‘glittering career’ might have proved slightly tarnished hence the early retirement; but no, it was utterly unmemorable! Keen students of the Pollard report have been amused to find that the BBC paid this man £500 of licence payers money to use his ‘expertise and contacts’ to find out whether Surrey Police had taken the original ‘groping’ allegations from Duncroft seriously and investigated, only to see that he ‘e-mailed Surrey Police media department’ to ask them that very question. One of the researchers could have done exactly that, and saved the licence payers £500…crikey, a humble blogger could and would have done just that.

If Keir Starmer is serious, and intends to set up regional panels where anyone who believes themselves to be a victim of sexual abuse can go and have their allegations heard by calm professionals in a secure environment with absolutely no question of leaking to publicity hungry empire builders, news starved media employees, or self appointed ‘lay advisors’ dragging them round meeting halls to discuss the presence or otherwise of genital infections, then I am all in favour.  It’s what we used to call Police Stations, but I quite accept that the reputation of Police Stations as a place where you expected to have your allegations taken seriously has been tarnished in the minds of some, and if renaming them ‘National Scoping Panel’ and putting them in a different building, with a wider remit will help, go for it.

It is not just the damage to reputations of those dragged in to the Savile net by media and public hysteria that concerns me – it is the damage to those genuinely sexually abused who must now feel that if they are one of the 90% of abuse cases that involve humble family members or the local plumber/bus driver/care worker that no one will be interested and that the only way to have your trauma taken seriously is to name a celebrity and invoke the public court of media.

The Home Affairs Committee in 2002 said that: ”A new genre of miscarriages of justice has arisen from the over-enthusiastic pursuit of these allegations”. That was in response to the last ‘moral outrage’ in the late 1990s when many were wrongfully convicted following allegations of historical child abuse in children’s homes and other institutions. There is a sense that the Police have become over cautious as a result, and a new approach is required.

Let that approach be uncontrovertibly professional and discrete; no more TV parading of victims half disguised in the shadows, no more media scoops; no more self appointed experts.

Ping! went the computer in the middle of the night as a rash of correspondents e-mailed to warn me that yet another Savile report was out. Several pointed to the Guardian headline published a dutiful couple of minutes after the report’s embargo deadline of midnight.

“Police could have stopped Jimmy Savile in the 1960s, says official report”.

Don’t tell me that the Bebe Roberts spurious Daily Mail article had been accepted as fact, surely not! No link to any report of course, they wouldn’t want we plebs actually looking at the source and checking facts would they? It took half an hour or so to track down the report, since it was only available to the public at midnight and Google was a bit slow in finding it. The main stream media get it hours beforehand, so that they have a chance to get their agenda straight.  Consequently I haven’t had a lot of much needed beauty sleep…

Once I had the report in my hand, it didn’t take long to track down the offending paragraph, page 7 actually; it is the only part of the report that could possibly be twisted into that categorical statement that ‘Savile could have been stopped’.

It is impossible to state categorically that a prosecution would have resulted, if all these links (including the MPS intelligence) had been made known, not only to all the investigating teams but also to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).

OK, the Guardian headline is true only in the sense that if today’s guidelines for informing alleged victims of the presence of other alleged victims had been in place back 50 years ago the CPS might have taken a different view, and might have acted differently, and it might have resulted in Savile being taken to court, and that might have resulted in a successful prosecution? Not that this redefinition stopped a rash of commentators landing on the Guardian web site saying ‘knew it all along, protected by the mighty and the powerful, da dum, da dum’.

So what are the 1960s allegations that would have ‘stopped Savile’ – by which I presume they mean a successful prosecution, a life wasted away in a dingy Wormwood Scrubs cell, or chemical castration at the very least….after all, what else would stop a rampant paedophile from defiling an entire generation?

Drusilla Sharpling, author of the latest Savile report, is one of the Merry Knives of Winsor; Tom Winsor, author of the report currently decimating the Police ranks has a cutlery box full of them, who is the sharpest of them all, we know not.  ’Her Majesty’s Inspector of Constabulary (HMIC)’  are charged with making the independent inspection of the Police which resulted in the report on pay and conditions  which has so upset the rank and file.

Last November, following the hundreds of ‘Yewtree’ allegations that emerged, the Home Secretary formally commissioned HMIC to review the recording and investigation of the Yewtree allegations by police forces across England and Wales. The entire British Isles, including Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary for Scotland (HMICS) and Jersey Police managed to come up with seven mentions of Savile’s name. Seven. Our Drusilla has trawled through e-mails, and intelligence reports, notebooks and incident reports, across all 43 Police forces, liaising with Jersey and Scotland, looking for all those reports of people going to their police station to report abuse by Savile and evidence of top level cover ups, favours being called in by senior officers, phone calls from prominent politicians, to prevent Savile being brought to justice…and she ended up with seven examples to base her report on?

Best look at the seven examples closely then! Actually there are more than seven examples, since Ms Sharpling includes allegations of reports as well as reported incidents somewhat confusingly, and gives them all the same credibility.

The earliest allegation of a report not being taken ‘seriously’ and not recorded we are told, was a Cheshire male in 1963. Interestingly, since this was 3 years before homosexuality was legalised; Ms Sharpling doesn’t dwell on the details, nor even point out whether the man was legally a child at that time or not. Rape, and male rape is a particularly unpleasant crime for which there is now some redress – but in an age when the victim would have been prosecuted as well as the perpetrator, it might have been kinder for Ms Sharpling to have pointed out that the advice given to him by the police – to ‘forget about it’ and ‘move on’ – was not as callous as might be seen with hindsight. The law on homosexuality would have had to be changed back in 1963 for this to be one of the occasions when Savile ‘could have been stopped’.

Then she moves onto another allegation of a report not being taken seriously and not recorded – a man claiming his girlfriend was assaulted on Top of the Pops. Also not one of Ms Sharpling’s seven incidents ‘when Savile could have been stopped’.

Finally we move onto the first five of the seven.

A 2003 MPS crime report based on the complaint of the victim who stated that Savile had indecently assaulted her in the 1970s (the 2003 MPS report);

A 2007 Surrey crime report based on the complaints of three victims who stated that Savile had indecently assaulted them in the 1970s and 1980s (the 2007 Surrey report);

A 2008 Sussex crime report based on the complaint of a victim who stated that Savile had indecently assaulted her in 1970 (the 2008 Sussex report).

Well, none of those ‘could have stopped Savile in the 1960s’ could they? They were all reported 40 years after the 1960s. Must delve deeper.

What have we here? An entry in the Metropolitan Police Services Paedophile Intelligence Unit from 1964. So these matters were taken seriously enough in 1964 to warrant an independent unit eh?

“BATTERSEA BRIDGE ROAD, (WA) – 4 older girls & youth named [name] (? Homosexual) live at – Jimmy SAVILLE (sic) well known disc jockey frequents –used by absconders from DUNCROFT APP SCHOOL”.

Wow, that’s odd. 1964, just the time when I was first an absconder from Duncroft - and living in Battersea Bridge Road! In a house rented by four older girls, who ran the fan club for The Animals, and one of the girls was Don Arden’s secretary and frequently on Top of the Pops… couldn’t be the same house could it? Had I managed to miss being mauled by Savile yet again?

I doubt it, for on the next page we find:“DUNCROFT APP SCHOOL – Absconders – Vice Ring.

[Name] ….living on (sic) immoral earnings of [names of two females identified as DUNCROFT girls].2 yrs imp.[Name]…Charged with [name] as above, also further charged with harbouring [female‟s name] – failed to appear…on 20/10/64 having estreated his bail & thought to be in Holland.

[Name], [address]. At CCC (Central Criminal Court) on 5/11/1964. Charged with living on (sic) earnings & procuring [two female names]. Found NOT GUILTY. No connection with [name and name] above, but all DUNCROFT girls.

The address (sic) used by [name and name] were [address given]. All men were coloured. [Name of female] (ex-Duncroft) introduced the girls to the men concerned.”

“All men were coloured.” Nope, must have been another group of Duncroft girls, the house I was living in was definitely not being used as a brothel, nor were there any coloured men anywhere near it. Odd that we never bumped into each other though – perhaps they were much older than I.

Still, we know that Savile was a visitor to a house of ill repute, no mention of any under age children though – could that have been enough intelligence ‘to stop Savile in the 1960s’? Is being a disc jockey and friendly with a pimp sufficient to lock someone up for life, or castrate them? I doubt it:

We have considered whether the MPS had an opportunity to intervene and halt Savile’s offending in the 1960s. We cannot say for certain, but on the basis of what we know now, there appears to have been, at the very least, an opportunity to investigate his behaviour then, although it is impossible to say whether such an investigation would have led to Savile’s prosecution.

Presumably a house of ill repute would have been under surveillance for some time? Do we have a note of all other visitors to that house, should they all have been investigated as potential paedophiles?

Then we have the seventh and final occasion on which ‘Savile could have been stopped in the 1960s’. It is an anonymous letter received in 1998. A full 38 years after ‘Savile could have been stopped in the 1960s!’ So the evidence we are left with for the Guardian’s headline is that Savile was a visitor to a house lived in by a pimp and ‘four older girls’ where some ex-Duncroft girls had at one time resided…

So much for the headlines. What of the rest of the report? Well, there is the 2003 15 year old girl who claimed that Savile ‘put his hand on her bum’. Should have been better investigated screeches Ms Sharpling, could have been tied in with the 1964 report that he was once seen going into a house of ill-repute, any fool could have seen that he was a paedophile from that alone, and what about the anonymous letter claiming he was ‘into rent boys’ – a definite pattern of behaviour emerging here…

Then there was the 2007 Surrey Police investigation into the ‘Duncroft allegations’, well, if only the CPS had known then that he had once been seen to have gone into a house in Battersea Bridge Road, and as for patting a 15 year old girl on the bum, well they would have seen the light and acted very, very, differently. It’s all the fault of the Police for following their guidelines and not telling all and sundry that this disc jockey went to a house of (adult female) ill repute even though he was into rent boys…

So says the Independent Inspector of Constabulary in the report that hardly anyone will bother to read.  Absolutely clearing the CPS of any blame in the matter.

Handy that, for you’ll never guess who was Head of the CPS for the metropolitan district at the time – oh look, Drusilla Sharpling, now Independent Inspector of the Constabulary.

Would you ever!

*My apologies to my readers who are bored stiff with this subject, but I am determined to get these things down as a matter of record – one day people will look back and ask how it came about that an entire nation was groomed…and not by Savile! The apologies are necessary for after an hour or two’s sleep, there will be a second post today – this is not the only piece of shite to come out regarding Savile today…spelling errors will be amended then, too tired right now. Feel free to sub-edit in the comments.

A while ago, someone drew my attention to a Tweet from @fleetstreetfox regarding Lord Rennard. I was quite shocked at the time, for Susan Boniface has said that the reason she took up the ‘anonymous identity ‘ of fleetstreetfox was to allow her to write of things that might have caused a problem in her day job as Mirror journalist. Now I can quite understand that the tabloids are all under orders to follow the party line on Savile – ‘definitely’ Britain’s worst ever paedophile, despite a startling lack of evidence – but this was an anonymous comment apparently buying into the party line that Savile ‘raped children’, a claim that had only previously appeared in the uncontested Yewtree allegations.

Quite by chance, last week one of those ‘child rape’ allegations made it into the harsh light of day, in evidence given ‘under oath’ no less. We haven’t seen anything that substantial in the entire Savile saga so far – unless you count Fiona Scott-Johnston giving a statement ‘under caution’ at Staines police station, which I seriously hope is a misunderstanding on the part of the woman described as devious and manipulative by Meiron Jones and other Newsnight researchers, for the only reason that a ‘victim’ might be required to attend an interview under caution would be if they were suspected of having committed a criminal offence themselves, like perjury or conspiracy to waste police time,  and that surely can’t be a possibility?

This new and brave survivor of historic abuse had decided to publicly identify herself after 34 years of silence as Leisha Brookes, now aged 45. What a horrific tale she had to tell. At nine years old she was befriended ‘by a cameraman’ who she thought ‘would make her famous’. She was taken to meet Jimmy Savile three or four times at BBC centre. For two years this nine year old was regularly encouraged to ‘sit on the knee’ of 35 other men at the BBC. Or maybe the 35 ‘other men’ were seen on the three or four occasions  she also saw Savile. That’s nearly nine pairs of knees on each occasion, but however many pairs of knees were involved, it is difficult to see the evidence of abuse, or why Savile is singled out for naming in this shocking account - if there are 35 child abusers still alive, including the cameraman, why is the Sunday Express so shy of naming them? Surely they are not waiting for them to die, and be named and shamed like Savile? There could be children at risk right now!

Still, Ms Brookes hugged her secret to herself for 34 years, not telling her parents, nor teachers, nor even confiding in a friend, narry a phone call to child line, nor even an anonymous letter to the BBC warning them of the dangers lurking within; nobody noticed that this innocent child was being horrifically abused by being forced to sit on men’s knees as the price of potential fame. The damage done was immense. Her five children were taken into care as a result of her mental health issues. Her life ruined.

Still she forced herself to watch the BBC, despite the terrible memories it must have brought back for her. The one thing she couldn’t bring herself to do was to pay a TV licence. To give the BBC money after all that had happened to her was a step too far; three times in the past seven years she has been fined for not having a TV licence citing ‘personal reasons’ for her refusal to pay. Until last November when she finally decided to give evidence to Operation Yewtree. Savile was dead and she felt that she could safely disclose her ghastly secret.

Last Friday, she was back in Colchester court for the fourth time in seven years – failing to pay her TV licence yet again. This time she was prepared, the knowledge of all those other ‘Yewtree’ victims had given her fresh courage; the stunned magistrates listened in shocked silence as she explained how sitting on Savile’s knee 34 years ago had wrecked her childhood and left her a broken woman who couldn’t possibly agree to pay a penny piece to the BBC:

“I have always refused to buy a TV licence because I was one of the children that was sexually abused at the BBC.” Miss Brookes went on to state that she had been abused by Savile and had documents in court proving that she had given evidence to police as part of Operation Yewtree.

‘No matter what you fine me , I am not going to give a penny to my abusers from the BBC. I cannot pay the BBC or anyone connected with it.’

Personally, if it was me, I’d refuse to have a television in the house, rather than just to pay the licence fee; all those repeats of Top of the Pops must have reignited the nightmare. The article in the Express and the Mail detailing this story have attracted a rash of comments along the lines of ‘starve the BBC, none of us should be paying those sorry abusers a penny….’ which might prove a tad inconvenient for Ms Brooks.

See, if we all take this line and refuse to pay a licence fee, then her court case against the BBC for allowing her to sit on all those knees all that time ago, will come to a sorry end, on account of there being no money to pay the victims….

Still, she’s suing the Savile charitable estate as well. I do wish she’d name those other 35 abusers though, a little thought for other potential victims wouldn’t go amiss.

As it happens, I think a countrywide refusal to pay the BBC another penny would be an excellent idea. I will be outraged if licence payers money, which should be used to ‘educate, entertain and inform’ is used to pay compensation from an organisation which willfully allowed nine year olds to be taken to a workplace and sat on a man’s knee. The compensation should come personally from the pockets of the executives, producers and researchers who allowed such a shocking thing to happen, it shouldn’t be allowed to penalise the licence fee payers who had no control whatsoever over what was happening at the organisation.

Name the other 35 men Ms Brookes, and let’s see some personal responsibility for what happened. They are still alive you say? Good, let’s see them in court now you have your courage in both hands. You’ve proved you can give evidence under oath, take the next step. Protect other children!

So the first of the Yewtree branches has crashed to the ground, a sound virtually unheard in the forest of bad news today.

The ‘famous actress’ (I had to look her up such a household name was she…) (we are not allowed to mention her name – her publicist must be devastated) who alleged that Wilfred De’Ath (I definitely had to look him up) might have fondled her when she might have been a teenager in it might have been a cinema, has decided to withdraw her allegation. She still maintains it is true, but feels that she will be lonely in court, since no one else has come forward with similar allegations about the same man. She only came forward to Yewtree, she says, in the hope that it might give others the courage to come forward.

She is of course, an employee of ITV, the company which paid Mark Williams-Thomas to make the ‘Exposure’ programme, on which Wilfred De’Ath was such a willing witness against the ‘disgusting behaviour’ of Jimmy Savile.

De’Ath can now be heard complaining bitterly about the hardship that is felt by the man ‘dragged from his home at 7am’ by seven policeman on the strength of ‘spurious allegations’ – an event that was naturally leaked to the press. Why it was Remembrance Sunday, and he was on his way to take the collection at Church….how could anybody think such a thing about such a charitable individual?

Probably in the same way that he could cheerfully report – when prompted by being dragged from the unknown to appear as star witness in the ‘Exposure’ programme, that one ‘knew for a fact’ that Savile had spent the night in a flat with a girl who was no more than 12 ‘or probably 10′. Apparently one can tell the age of a girl that one has only seen for a few moments with remarkable accuracy, for De’Ath, who has in the past cheerfully described himself as a ‘sexual predator’ – that is himself, not Savile! – is equally sure that the ‘hundreds of girls’ that he has slept with over the years were all over 16. Did they have their date of birth tattooed on their forehead Wilfred?

He now claims that he was ‘so frightened of Savile’ – ‘He was a very intimidating physical presence. He had been a boxer and a wrestler … and he was in with some very, very rough people’ – that even though he was a father of a young daughter himself, he couldn’t possibly have reported this event to the Police. So frightened, that he chose to tackle Savile in person the next morning?

He says that the Police ’failed miserably’ when they ‘could have’ got Savile, by failing to act on the very same sort of spurious allegations that he now complains he is the victim of.

In fact, he believes that Operation Yewtree ‘ has gone too far’, and agrees with Jim Davidson that ‘it is getting silly now’.

Coming from the man who was only too ready to take an appearance fee and walk the corridors of ITV one last time (such a refreshing change from his lonely bed sit in Cambridge) and see Savile’s reputation trashed by ‘spurious allegations’ that will never be tested, he should count himself lucky that nobody had ever heard of him until this – a more famous name would certainly have tempted a few other ladies from the wood work – his outburst is the most unmitigated piece of rank hypocrisy I have heard this year.

The daft old goat would have served himself better by keeping his mouth shut.

When I saw the Exposure programme, I formed the opinion that De’Ath was  a bitter and jealous man. Now I’m convinced. It must be quite galling to find yourself the centre of all this publicity and no one, but no one, wants to claim that you ever groped them….

Back to your seedy bed-sit Wilfred. You’ve served your purpose.

Edited by Anna: Since posting this, I have seen two further posts by Moor Larkin and Chris Barratt, that are perfect examples of the art of blogging. Beautifully researched and written, they are essential reading for anyone following the trail of disingenuous ‘witnesses’ to the Savile saga.

Moor Larkin: http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/exposition-pt2.html

Chris Barratt: http://chrisbarratt.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/yew-turn-sudden-death/

Both fine examples of the sort of investigative work that the main stream media should be doing – but are failing to do so, for their own reasons. Do take the time to read them.