To still be stunned that The Royals were close with Jimmy Savile?

[ThatCleverExpert]

It still blows my mind that the Royal Family had such a long-standing relationship with Jimmy Savile. Prince Charles sought his advice multiple times and he was treated like some kind of national treasure, even given access to hospitals and prisons.

Meanwhile, this was a man who was later exposed as a prolific predator - someone who abused vulnerable people, including children and even corpses in hospital mortuaries.
How did nobody see it? How was he so protected? And how was someone like that allowed so close to people in power?

I know it was a different time but AIBU to think the whole thing is still just horrifying?

I am just as surprised he was given access to children.the royals and elite, less so. Everyone puts the upper crust on a pedestal for some reason....even though there is so much historical information that should not ever want those with power anywhere near those who do not. Most importantly, children. But this will still continue for decades longer.

If everyone can acknowledge why this was such open knowledge, why do all the people who were effectively coconspirators, never have to answer to that? Yet, if a person who is aware of a crime, who is not rich or royalty, are deemed and prosecuted in court, under joint enterprise, in the courts?

The Royal family and the rich are not plain sight. That would be like comparing him getting on with the takeaway staff he frequented every Friday night....and them having no idea what he did.

There is a man in our neighbourhood we nicknamed Jimmy Saville.
master manipulator, behaves strangely around children, a friend to everyone, in a trusted profession.
He has been confronted for grooming, reported but given no nothing bad has happened, he can crack on with grooming kids galore.
some parents steer clear, some are naive and don’t!

I think he was a powerful personality and physically strong and threatening. It was a different time then as well.

Me too. He was as creepy as anything. We (my siblings/friends) didn't know about paedophilia (thank God) but there was something 'not right' about him.

People are totally shocked and horrified to find a family member or partner is a pedophile so I wouldn’t be judging the royals here. These people are very good at hiding.

If no one knew, how come Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols aka Johnny Lyndon accused Jimmy Saville publically of being a hypocrite in 1978, the recording still exists, and he said everyone knew on TOTP what Saville was up to! And it was Johnny Lyndon who got banned from the BBC for being too contentious!

I think there is more to be uncovered about who protected him and why.

Kincora too

And that place in Canada

I remember being told by another child in the playground in the 70's that Jimmy Savile had sex with dead bodies. If such rumours reached my primary school in the West Midlands then lots of people knew he was up to no good. I didn't really believe it but always thought he was weird and unappealing. I think by the time these sorts of rumours surfaced he had made himself untouchable by the company he kept.

^^ 100%.
Very little information was available back then, no social media, television was very tightly regulated and the general public thought that Jimmy Saville was someone raising millions for charity.
Of course there were creepy individuals around but children weren’t believed and adults frequently refused to listen.
Safeguarding was decades away.
It’s all very well piously saying that the Royal family and others should have known better but how on earth were they going to do that when Saville and others were so adept at covering their tracks? No one knew the extent of the horrific truth until after Saville’s death ffs!
No, I’m not defending anyone but I am fed up with this assumption that the Royal family colluded with paedophiles etc.
I’m in my 70’s and lived through those times.

Bullshit. What ‘young people at the palace’?

Absolutely. Many here wouldn’t recognise the England of fifty years ago at all. The 1970s were a different planet, socially and culturally, from this present version.

In the early 70s, Gary Glitter's brother used to park outside our school and pick up young girls to bring to GG for ‘parties’, and gawd only knows what went on. In my year alone, three girls were shagging teachers.
Imagine the Daily Mail on that stuff.
Bowie, Wyman, ‘Stray Cat blues’ from the previous decade, nothing there alarmed anyone about underage sex and much older men. ‘Get it while you can’ seemed to be the motto

I do not believe any senior royals had a clue about JS, and I do not indict the King for his adoration of Mountbatten.
There’s no way Charles knew anything about Kincora or any other crimes; no way. Nobody did ( well, except for the Provisional IRA, who certainly did)

(Courtiers are another matter. I could well imagine the late Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret too, ginfully gossipping with favourites about appalling rumours, and worse.
Prince Philip might have been apprised here or there, but probably knew that Brenda, like Queen Victoria, would not wish to be informed)

Well said @Millytante , I totally agree with everything you’ve written.
Life 50 years ago bears little resemblance to today, I suspect many on here were years away from being born let alone living then.

Very good points raised by @Millytante.
Jim’ll Fix It was a hugely popular primetime tv programme for kids my age and I wrote in to appear on it. Luckily for me, I wasn’t successful but gutted at the time.
I don’t think the Royals would have known about the pervert but the BBC should hang their heads in shame because they definitely did.

What @Millytante said. I also don’t think they were particularly ‘close’ as such. They thought some kind of contact with this man was a short cut to seeming more ‘in touch’ (God help us) and publicised their meetings on that basis. Savile as a manipulative user knew how to make the most of that.

It’s also true that if you grew up as I did reading novels from the 30s and 40s, all sexual ‘sin’ was lumped together. It was extremely shocking for a couple to live together without being married - in Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, a judge talks to a jury equating a woman having a lover and not being married as being pretty much as bad as murder. There were degrees, but in many circles, two adult men having sex would have been considered morally ‘worse’ than a man in his 20s raping a 14 year old girl, or even younger. And nobody would have used the word rape about the latter either. There’s an entire plot line in Nancy Mitford’s bestseller Love in a Cold Climate about a man nicknamed the Lecherous Lecturer who ‘took Jassy [14] up to the roof and did all sorts of thrilling things to her, at least she could easily see how they would have been thrilling with anyone else but the Lecturer’. I laughed at that line in the 80s just like everyone else who’s read the novel. The other characters talk about this man with mild disapproval for possible ‘détournement de jeunesse’ but there’s no suggestion that it’s anything other than mildly annoying and titillating to have this character about, and he is never ostracised for any of this. In the novel he marries one of the young girls, SHE is ostracised because he is her uncle by marriage and she’s called an ‘incestuous trollop’ by her mother, they are both miserable and he is eventually given a happy ending with another man - this was the shocking bit to the readers of the time. But it again shows the homophobic theory that men who loved men had no morals and probably liked children as well. It was as shocking for Savile to be thought to be gay as it was for him to be thought to be raping kids. That’s what we don’t get now (and thank goodness for that).

They are all weirdos!

I know 2 very intelligent people who met JS. Both of whom were shocked to find out what he had done. There is such a thing as grooming.
I’ve also met some very dangerous men. All of whom were incredibly beguiling, intelligent, interesting and charming. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

This is absolutely correct. Many on Mumsnet are determined to look at the past through a current lens. *

I was a child in the 70s, and I loved Jim'll Fix It, applied multiple times, for a very wide range of things. Repeatedly to meet Zammo and Jonah from Grange Hill, but also weird stuff like bell ringing and dry stone walking. Genuinely didn't know. Didn't like the jewellery but didn't think about him as such, it was just such a great concept. I remember him always being front and centre of marathon broadcasting. Alarmingly I was at secondary school with a girl who had a 'special relationship' with him. She was a talented musician and met him that way. She used to describe him as her best friend. We all thought it was a bit odd, but that was it. Her parents, nice middle class people, still see them now, didn't think anything of it. She used to go and stay with him and everything. At sixth form - one of the boys made the news as his long lost letter to Jim'll Fix It was found in a box at the BBC and they invited him on, even though years had passed. We all thought it was great in a funny/ironic way! He dined out on that for years.

They’re not the sharpest tools in the box, are they?

That monster managed to hoodwink families of disabled children, he was a master manipulator. That’s what they do.

I think Jill Dando was about to expose the BBC with all the shit that’s come out in recent years

she was credible, very well liked, a proper journalist and not someone the public would easily dismiss if she said stuff

I think that she may have been doing research on this possibly spoke to the wrong person

I mean in all this time they have never found her “ professional killer “ and who would hire a professional hitman - the government

A friend who grew up in Leeds said it was common knowledge he was a wrong un.

Not that I am a royalist, but the whole nation inc.media were taken in by this psychopathic abuser. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. He pulled the wool over so many people’s eyes, in retrospect we think how did they let him get away with it but in reality they saw the good work he did and were blind to other things

The cost of defending a libel action is bankruptcy for most people. So someone with a good lawyer can silence other people when allegations are made. Robert Maxwell an example, who was robbing pension funds.

Then you have the police in West Yorkshire accepting hospitality from Jimmy Savile (which he openly spoke about).