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Owzabout That Then? The Jimmy Savile Revelations & Aftermath

Swifty said:
* UPSETTING STORY WARNING*

When I was at school, I had a mate called Arron. He was good fun, cheeky etc and a few of us used to knock around together .. we used to enjoy listening to skate punk and pushing boundaries although never anything serious or illegal.

My Dad was always encouraging me to work in my school holidays so when Mathew, the gardener at a local timeshare hall invited me and Arron one night to a glitzy party there, I knew this was my chance to network and try and find some work to impress my Dad.

Mathew picked us up, we were each given a ticket which allowed us a free buffet and a bottle of red wine each. Mathew got drunk and started talking about sex in a way that I now know was wrong but at the time I'd heard as bad in the playground so it didn't ring any alarm bells. Arron ended up drinking his whole bottle of wine and getting blind drunk, Mathew was thrown out for being found in a bedroom with two women and bringing two kids with him so he offered to give me and Arron a lift back to my house. My parents had gone out for the night to visit some friends but my big Sister was in so told me to phone my Dad and tell him what was going on. Mathew offered to undress Arron so Arron could sleep on my sofa bed in my bedroom.

My Dad got home and thrashed the living daylights out of me, it wasn't until afterwards that I discovered Mathew was a paedophile, it just hadn't even occured to me that Arron could be in danger. Arron avoided me from then on at school but the penny still hadn't dropped with me as to what could have happened to him in my bedroom. I though he just didn't want to speak to me because my Dad had given me a thrashing and I'd cried afterwards. Mathew left our community not long afterwards, I sometimes wonder about the circumstances that made him leave so quickly.

Fast forward to '99, I was living in Burton on Trent when I bumped into Arron, he invited me around to his flat for a cup of tea, nothing was spoken about and I didn't ever see him again.

One day, not long after I saw him for the last time I received a phone call from my Mum who told me Arron was on the front cover of The Burton Mail newspaper, he'd been arrested for giving his credit card details to download child porn images through 'Operation Ore' and his face filled the whole of the front cover of the paper. He was sent to prison for 6 months and had to sign the sex offender's register ... I saw a new girlfriend of his a couple of years later who tried to talk me into going around to see him but I couldn't face it. I sometimes feel guilty about leaving him alone with Mathew in my bedroom, if I'd stayed maybe he wouldn't have been abused? .. I didn't know then and I don't know now ..
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Holy shit Swifty, you were a kid at the time - you couldn't have known what was going on.
You had a bit of a lucky escape yourself.
 
Swifty you didn't deserve to be thrashed, Matthew should have been. Was he still there when your father arrived?

Thats a really sad story Coastal James.
 
ramonmercado said:
Swifty you didn't deserve to be thrashed, Matthew should have been. Was he still there when your father arrived?

Thats a really sad story Coastal James.
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No, Mathew had left by then ... he turned up in our driveway not long after, drunk and mouthing off at my Mum on his tractor mower when she was on her own .. he left not long after that, I've got a feeling my Dad had something to do with that, not that he'd ever tell me understandably.
 
Coastaljames said:
Yes, it is possible. As I said- depends on one's individual moral goalposts.




Not at all your fault mate, obviously. Horrible story. And horrible in that history often repeats itself when it comes to this stuff.

Here's my horrible story - I met a guy when I was working in prisons. Not a nice looking fellow. Actually looked like one's stereotype "paedo". In fact he wasn't one. In fact he had a truly horrible history of being sexually abused by male relatives all through his childhood. And I mean dark, dark sexual abuse. I'm not shocked by much but this was horrible. I'll spare you the details. Anyway- this guy was a really sad case, tragic. He kept getting nicked for setting bins alight. Most arsonists, statistically have a history of being sexually abused. He had a way of self-harming which clearly showed how messed up he was from the horrible abuse he'd been put through. Again- I'll spare you the details. Anyway...one day I saw the paper and it reported that this guy had been walking through the park one day when he was on the out. A bunch of local scumbags saw him and started trouble with him accusing him of being a paedo, a nonce, of eyeing up kids. he was doing nothing of the sort. He got attacked and in the end these scumbags kicked his head in until he was dead.

Killed for being something he wasn't after a life of being used so horribly...and literally broken in everyway. I admit, jaded cynical bastard that i am, I cried when I read it.
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I'm relieved that, for a short time at least, he had you to talk to Coastal .. that's very sad what he was put through ..
 
Coal said:
As a society if we're prepared to accept and retain 'great works' by those shown to be unspeakably vile, what example are we setting?
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One in which we recognise the genuine contradictions of the human condition. It doesn't imply an acceptance or normalising of the artist's crime.

I don't like child abuse or child abusers one little bit, but I understand that their crimes do not stop them from being human; were that they did, for then we could write them off as qualitatively distinct from ourselves and mete out the retribution it seems so natural to want to deliver. Alas, they are all too human and have lapsed spectacularly from that which we can accept and violated an almost fundamental moral prohibition: man-apes are capable of both incredible feats of moral endurance and horrific depravity - sometimes (albeit rarely - the mass of humanity like the mass of perverts produces little of truly enduring value) in the same individual. If the artwork is valuable, why not salvage what may be salvaged from the wreck of at least one, possibly a number of lives?

I say merely 'possible'.
 
Yithian said:
It doesn't imply an acceptance or normalising of the artist's crime.
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It's not that intellectual for me. Much more basic. Maybe I'm generally simpler. I look at Gill's church and I think, "Hmm...really interesting, quite beautiful, definitely groundbreaking..." and then I remember...and I think- wanker. And I don't want anything more to do with him or his art.

It's that simple.
 
Yithian said:
One in which we recognise the genuine contradictions of the human condition. It doesn't imply an acceptance or normalising of the artist's crime.

I don't like child abuse or child abusers one little bit, but I understand that their crimes do not stop them from being human; were that they did, for then we could write them off as qualitatively distinct from ourselves and mete out the retribution it seems so natural to want to deliver. Alas, they are all too human and have lapsed spectacularly from that which we can accept and violated an almost fundamental moral prohibition: man-apes are capable of both incredible feats of moral endurance and horrific depravity - sometimes (albeit rarely - the mass of humanity like the mass of perverts produces little of truly enduring value) in the same individual. If the artwork is valuable, why not salvage what may be salvaged from the wreck of at least one, possibly a number of lives?

I say merely 'possible'.
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It's an argument for the retaining of what would otherwise be salvaged, but an appeal to the human condition is not, in my view, a strong one.

One can make the same argument for any crime where one has given into a base urge, to steal, to commit violence, to cheat on one's spouse and so on. Just human nature isn't it? Well yes.

While the broad spectrum of behaviour in undoubtedly a part of what it is to be human, by it's very definition, there is a fine line between civilized/decent and human.

You 'become civilized' by not pandering to urges that are simply based on a million year old survival of the genes/self reaction. E.g. behaving in a more altruistic way, perhaps based on some code of ethics which allow you to move on from 'human behaviour' to 'civilized' human. Without this there is no civilization, literally.

That some can hop back and forth over the 'line' is not and never should be a justification to normalise or by implication assent to all 'human behaviour'. And praising/using/showing the 'good works' of a serial child abuser does normalise it, whether this is the intention or not.

If you hold something up and praise it, there is an implied praise for the maker and the 'human' part of us learns by example. Monkey see monkey do.

Otherwise I might as well toddle down the road and stab the nearest nonce. "Human nature innit? See this fantastic good charitable thing I did the previous day. Not guilty M'lud."
 
Coal said:
It's an argument for the retaining of what would otherwise be salvaged, but an appeal to the human condition is not, in my view, a strong one.

One can make the same argument for any crime where one has given into a base urge, to steal, to commit violence, to cheat on one's spouse and so on. Just human nature isn't it? Well yes.

While the broad spectrum of behaviour in undoubtedly a part of what it is to be human, by it's very definition, there is a fine line between civilized/decent and human.

You 'become civilized' by not pandering to urges that are simply based on a million year old survival of the genes/self reaction. E.g. behaving in a more altruistic way, perhaps based on some code of ethics which allow you to move on from 'human behaviour' to 'civilized' human. Without this there is no civilization, literally.

That some can hop back and forth over the 'line' is not and never should be a justification to normalise or by implication assent to all 'human behaviour'. And praising/using/showing the 'good works' of a serial child abuser does normalise it, whether this is the intention or not.

If you hold something up and praise it, there is an implied praise for the maker and the 'human' part of us learns by example. Monkey see monkey do.

Otherwise I might as well toddle down the road and stab the nearest nonce. "Human nature innit? See this fantastic good charitable thing I did the previous day. Not guilty M'lud."
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Excellent post.
 
Coastaljames said:
It's not that intellectual for me. Much more basic. Maybe I'm generally simpler. I look at Gill's church and I think, "Hmm...really interesting, quite beautiful, definitely groundbreaking..." and then I remember...and I think- wanker. And I don't want anything more to do with him or his art.

It's that simple.
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I used to know a bloke for a short time who turned out to be incredibly dangerous .. I found out too late that he's had prostitutes working for him, one of them he caught up with a year later as the newspapers told it, she'd escaped his influence, started a new life when he and his brother drove past a takeaway she was ordering from, parked up, entered and grabbed a knife from behind the counter then proceeded to slash the back of her legs as punishment.

Before I'd learned that he was a psycho, he'd drawn a fantastic picture of a man that he gave me, copied from the back of a DVD cover .. after he tried to smash my door in two nights in a row (the police arresting him both times), a couple of D.C.'s visited me and I found myself blurting out that he was a great artist for some stupid reason. They both looked at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world and one of them quipped back at me "Yeah .. he's really great at pottery as well!" and they left .. I threw the art away. Throwing the baby out with the bath water so to speak.
 
Let me try to give an anecdotal example from my own life to explain my thinking.

About ten years ago I discovered that a catholic priest I knew well had been imprisoned in his 80s on two cases of child abuse (offences in close temporal proximity, two victims of near-puberty age, but that is neither here nor there) in either (I forget) the late 50s or early 60s. At this stage, no doubt, readers are rolling their eyes and muttering that they've heard this one before, but there are complicating factors beyond the psychological one that I admired him a great deal.

It seems that he was indeed guilty as charged, pled guilty and expressed great remorse before being sent to jail. The investigation found, however, that there was no repetition of the offence -- quite the contrary. The life he had gone on to lead was as exemplary as one could imagine: he had worked tirelessly - and I don't mean that figuratively - for the poor and needy in his parish; taught at a highly respected university where he was roundly considered the humblest and most selfless person on the campus despite a formidable intellect and an absurd chain of post-nominal qualifications; ministered to the sick and the dying in hospices and old-age people's homes in his city and done more civic work than most of us would deem sensible. Almost everybody consulted during the trial had effusive praise for him and a deep shock that he could have committed such acts. His list of character references at trial would have put Mother Teresa's to shame, yet he had not the courage to confess himself, though he said that he had contemplated it daily for years.

Without an appeal to crude utilitarianism, it is clear than this man brought far more good into the world that the evil he perpetrated, and yet one knows that beneath it all there is a deeply unpleasant and corrosive act against society and a crime that has probably ruined two other lives. One knows that good works cannot erase the offence, yet it remains good work. I still have academic material written by him (though he's probably dead by now) and I simply can't say it's worthless as it is clearly the product of a first-class intellect.

All of which is why I am where I am now on this subject.
 
Yithian said:
...it is clear than this man brought far more good into the world that the evil he perpetrated...
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Doubt the victims would agree.

Or many, many others. I learnt a long time ago working with convicted sex offenders that just one act is very often like a stone thrown in a pond. It's never just one act. it creates ripples of pain and horror that can pulse through whole families, whole communities. Ripples of pain and horror that can pulse through whole generations leaving them damaged and infected.

There is very, very rarely only ever one act.
 
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I doubt they would either, but then we wouldn't expect a dispassionate opinion from them. I think a neutral observer would favour my judgment, but who knows?

From your tone it sounds - and please correct me if I'm wrong - that you think that I don't care about victims of the abuse in this and the other cases where the perpetrator has produced something of cultural value.

If this is the case, I assure you that I do care, but I have seen, in this case at least, that the same person who has treated children like means to a sexual end has then sacrificed a lot of his own life for others.

It's clearly a more nuanced subject than black and white -- in some cases at least.
 
Yithian said:
Let me try to give an anecdotal example from my own life to explain my thinking.

About ten years ago I discovered that a catholic priest I knew well had been imprisoned in his 80s on two cases of child abuse (offences in close temporal proximity, two victims of near-puberty age, but that is neither here nor there) in either (I forget) the late 50s or early 60s. At this stage, no doubt, readers are rolling their eyes and muttering that they've heard this one before, but there are complicating factors beyond the psychological one that I admired him a great deal.

It seems that he was indeed guilty as charged, pled guilty and expressed great remorse before being sent to jail. The investigation found, however, that there was no repetition of the offence -- quite the contrary. The life he had gone on to lead was as exemplary as one could imagine: he had worked tirelessly - and I don't mean that figuratively - for the poor and needy in his parish; taught at a highly respected university where he was roundly considered the humblest and most selfless person on the campus despite a formidable intellect and an absurd chain of post-nominal qualifications; ministered to the sick and the dying in hospices and old-age people's homes in his city and done more civic work than most of us would deem sensible. Almost everybody consulted during the trial had effusive praise for him and a deep shock that he could have committed such acts. His list of character references at trial would have put Mother Teresa's to shame, yet he had not the courage to confess himself, though he said that he had contemplated it daily for years.

Without an appeal to crude utilitarianism, it is clear that this man brought far more good into the world that the evil he perpetrated, and yet one knows that beneath it all there is a deeply unpleasant and corrosive act against society and a crime that has probably ruined two other lives. One knows that good works cannot erase the offence, yet it remains good work. I still have academic material written by him (though he's probably dead by now) and I simply can't say it's worthless as it is clearly the product of a first-class intellect.

All of which is why I am where I am now on this subject.
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That's nice post.

I'd say this as ONLY a counter argument (which is to say, I respect your view and the veracity of it).

If he wasn't defrocked he should have been.

The good works are him providing for himself a moral counterbalance for his bad works. This is precisely the behaviour that seeks to excuse such crimes, often in the eyes of the abusers themselves.

Arguably, for a truly humble and penitent man, you'd not know any of the above as he would have felt no need to tell anyone or indeed to keep his name and vocation. His academic works didn't have to have his name on them. Indeed his academic career might have been entirely sacrificed to more humble works. 'We' only have his word that no other offense was committed and he wouldn't be the first person to have a long list of character references who were entirely wrong.

I'm not doubting your personal belief in this person, only that prima facie, the statement doesn't support any kind of endorsement of 'good works' by a 'bad person'. For the truly penitent, the good work is it's own reward is it not? So no external endorsement is required.

Coastaljames said:
Doubt the victims would agree.
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Quite.
 
I don't believe he was seeking glory. He attracted praise without courting it.
I can't say more without naming him and I'd rather not.
 
It sounds like this priest was trying to repent, but still ..

John Wayne Gacy raised a large amount of money for charity and performed a load of free work as a clown. He did a lot of good work on that level .. he also sadistically tortured, murdered and raped rent boys, burying them in his cellar. I'd call his efforts for charity work blood money and a smoke screen even though that money went to good causes ..

 
Sorry to go a bit O/T but i feel this is relevant to this topic.

As a young girl I was sexually abused by an older family member for a number of years - its something that i still struggle to deal with to this day. However, when I've told friends about it they usually say the same thing; "why didnt you tell anyone?" In my case I thought that he would marry me (although he never suggested this) and that this is just what happened when someone liked you. If i "told" then he'd never marry me and I'd have gone through all this for nothing. As an adult I can see how easy it must have been for someone like Savile to trick young girls into doing what he wanted, just as my family member did with me. The promise of a better life one day is such a strong pull for a vulnerable child that you'll do just about anything to try and get it.
 
I started to compile a list of artists, writers, film-makers etc. who were criminals . . .

It would be easier to compile a list of those that were not!

The ways they are dealt with seem to vary enormously.

William Golding, tried to rape a fifteen-year-old girl. He was a teenager himself at the time and the charge is posthumous, though it arose from his own papers.

"[Golding] had experimented, while a teacher at a public school, with setting boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies . . . "

Could we hope for a plainer case of the artwork reflecting the flawed artist? Yet it is too useful as a set book at GCSE to be flung aside. I have sometimes wondered if texts such as Lord of the Flies and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men were selected to depress the spirits of young people. In the event, only the latter has been chopped by the Goveian adventure - and only on the grounds that it is American! :eek:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
I started to compile a list of artists, writers, film-makers etc. who were criminals . . .

It would be easier to compile a list of those that were not!

The ways they are dealt with seem to vary enormously.

William Golding, tried to rape a fifteen-year-old girl. He was a teenager himself at the time and the charge is posthumous, though it arose from his own papers.

"[Golding] had experimented, while a teacher at a public school, with setting boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies . . . "

Could we hope for a plainer case of the artwork reflecting the flawed artist? Yet it is too useful as a set book at GCSE to be flung aside. I have sometimes wondered if texts such as Lord of the Flies and Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men were selected to depress the spirits of young people. In the event, only the latter has been chopped by the Goveian adventure - and only on the grounds that it is American! :eek:
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Yes, John Barrie, Lewis Carrol and Wagner all seemed to be widely suspected of having been paedophiles and yet we still enjoy - nay lionise - their works without airbrushing them from history, Soviet style. Nabokov seems to have been intimately aware of the inner workings of the paedophile mind, but he is still studied at universities and remains Martin Amis's key hero of letters.

Might there one day be a time when we're not so squeamishly naive as not to be aware that a person can do well in one area - but function in an utterly loathsome way in another. Indeed, as Robert Lous Stevenson pointed out 150 odd years ago - we are all this way, to an extent. Will we ever be able to acknowledge that, say, Gary Glitter was a cracking rock-pop performer? That Saville did do a lot of good work for charity (and I note that, as far as I know, none of its beneficiaries have returned his money in disgust!) And how has the reputation of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson, managed to get off so lightly?

As for Golding: I recall being surprised, but even sort of relieved, to read that he had a drink problem. This relief came from finding out that he wasn't such a dull goody goody after all. His status as a writer of a school text, the fact that he had been a schoolmaster, and his Christianity all lead me to assume so. But he was a first rate writer - and so was Steinbeck. I have never fund them at depressing, just honest. (Gove's opposition to Steinbeck's writing had a political subtext, I believe).
 
William Mayne's fall was a great grief to me. His writing had helped me through a decade and more of abuse as a child.

Interestingly (maybe) I have no problem enjoying his books myself and hunting down the ones I don't have. I just feel awkward about recommending them to other people for their children. Can recommend them to other adults with the caveat however.
 
IIRC Leni Riefenstahl's spectacular film of the Berlin Olympics pioneered many techniques of filming sports that are still used today. That surely makes it historically important in a way that Rolf Harris's TV shows aren't?
 
Yithian said:
it is clear than this man brought far more good into the world that the evil he perpetrated
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That is exactly the thinking that allowed Savile to get away with what he did to such an extent. I had heard the rumours about his predilections at least fifteen years before his death. It was something that was mentioned whenever his face popped up anywhere. People would say "but how is he allowed to get away with it?", and the reasoning was always "well... he raises so much for charity - he does so much good".

However, I do understand the point you're making, Yithian.
 
It's concerning that, out of the diverse community that post on here, we have so many that have experienced abuse when they were a child, or knew of a 'situation'. It makes me wonder how frequent it really is - I've seen some statistics that I was incredulous at at the time, but maybe they aren't so far wrong as I thought. And that I'm relatively lucky.

I also note that all the experiences on here that I've read (I can't guarantee I've read them all) the offender is at least known vaguely to the victim - so much for 'stranger danger'.

I don't know about airbrushing these people out though. (the slebs) . They were there , they were certainly part of my childhood and teenage years. Didn't care for Savile but I loved - not that way - Rolf as a kid. I can still remember some of his songs - that Christmas one he used to do about the white kangaroos etc. And Clement Freud on Just a Minute. Aren't we in danger of just brushing out part of our own pasts?

Eric Gill? Good grief. Is he the man the designed the Gill Sans typeface? That was everywhere from the 30's to the 60's.
 
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Cochise said:
I also note that all the experiences on here that I've read (I can't guarantee I've read them all) the offender is at least known vaguely to the victim - so much for 'stranger danger'.
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The vast, vast majority of sexual offences are carried out by family members or friends. The offender is nearly always known, generally intimately, by the victim. The idea of the predatory and unknown sex offender is largely a media creation.

Cochise said:
Is he the man the designed the Gill Sans typeface? That was everywhere from the 30's to the 60's.
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Indeed.
 
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