This started of as a comment on the ‘Beyond Contempt’ post, but it got rather long, so I’m sticking it up as a stand-alone for whatever it’s worth. I think a word about anachronistic assignment of moral values might be in order. Measuring the behaviour of Kings, Queens and Dictators in centuries with moral, religious, cultural and social outlooks and systems far removed from those of the 21st century might not be appropriate. Shouldn’t their behaviour be measured against the standards of their times?
When you come closer to our own times and behaviour, there might be value in measuring the ‘standards’ of the time to see how far we have come – or not. It is a salutary lesson to point out as Sipu has, that the British invented modern concentration camps – although history is littered with similar examples. I am sure our historians can probably bring some examples to mind better than I can, since I can’t think of any off-hand – mass murder, of course, is a different story, Carthago delenda erat, after all.
Similarly with slavery. I do not mean to denigrate the efforts of Britain, in particular, to end the slave trade, but it is as well to note that slavery, and chattel servitude, existed as a part of civilisation for all of it’s history and was only extinguished, (but, still, not entirely,) coincidentally with the development of technology that made it cheaper to use machines than manpower.
My point is, that we should consider peoples behaviour now against the standards that we all expect from each other, and the behaviour of people then against the standards that might have been expected of them in their own time.
We are what our history has made us and, for example, retrospectively stripping Henry VIII of his title would seem like the re-writing of history in the old USSR.
The Saville saga would seem to be set to run and run as the vultures of the meeja worry the carcass until it is stripped to the bone. Whether that is a productive use of time and resources is a matter of opinion, I guess. As far as I am concerned, I was never a great fan of pop music, though I had my must-have cutting edge technology, the iPod of it’s day, the Dansette ‘portable,’ and listened to Radio Luxenbourg and, in due course, Radio Caroline, but I didn’t watch TOtP – though I do remember ‘Oi’ll give it foive.’ So my own impression of the man was as a well-meaning whacko who, unlike many other well-meaning whackos of the time actually put his money where his mouth was. (Erm, that might not have come out the way it was intended…) Even though I wasn’t a great pop music fan, the behaviour of ‘groupies,’ and ‘wannabees,’ (though that term is also anachronistic 🙂 ,) was well-known, so the revelations should not come as that much of a surprise, I would have thought?
I’m also not sure that his behaviour shouldn’t be exposed, both for the sake of his victims and to try to ensure that the behavioural habit of exploitation is rooted out of the institutions involved. How effective that will be is, of course, another story entirely.
Boadicea's Chariot 
True Bravo old bean.
I watched a program last night about WII farming and how the Spams weedled their way into our social scene. I didn’t know that the white GIs would not be seen in the same room as the coloured GIs. This was 1943 but it just didn’t occur to me that brothers in arms would be that way.
Yes Jimmy Fixed It for himself in the end, but using others of the time as a yardstick, especially priests. He was nowhere near the global pariah the meeja are suggesting.
Now look at Lance Armstrong. He cheated to win and what’s more he did it repeatedly and in such a devious and premeditated fashion to be unprovable. Enough for him to be publicly stripped of medals and cast into obscurity you might think. But no, fellow team mates are now coming forward and defending his deceit. “So what if he did drugs? He won loadsa stuff.” Seems there is one rule for some and to he’ll with the others.
Just look at any episode of The Sweeney for example and recoil at what was considered respectable attitudes toward women.
Esther R should be very careful. Once the hacks are bored with Seville bashing you can bet they will be wummaging through her wheelie bin for a skeleton or two.
Hi Bravo, you make a fair point and I certainly would not disagree with the thrust of you are saying. However, that does not mean complications do not arise.
There is a lot to comment about and I may well write further at a later point, but for now I would say this.
Your phrase, ‘anachronistic assignment of moral values’ is apt. However, Jimmy Savile is being judged by contemporary values as opposed the values of the 50’s, 60’s and 70s, when his influence and status were at their greatest and when the majority of the alleged abuse took place. People’s attitudes to sexual abuse were far more relaxed then than they are now, just as attitudes towards race were very different at that time. We all remember the Black & White Minstrel Show and those advertisements that read, ‘No blacks, Irish or gypsies’. Television and the media were riddled with racial stereotypes.
Television and the media were also riddled with sexual stereotypes. The Sex Discrimination Laws only came into effect in 1975. Job descriptions until then, identified the sex, age and race of the preferred candidate. Females were secretaries, nurses, dental assistants and primary school teachers. In a business environment, they made the tea when clients came to the office. They were the subject of sexual innuendo and frequent, unwanted sexual advances. The term ‘sexual harassment’ did not exist. (In fact it only really came to prominence in the early 90s with the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill trial which was endlessly broadcast on the relatively new CNN.) Until then, bosses could attempt to sleep with their secretaries and if they were refused, no case was brought against them when the girl was subsequently dismissed.
People did not talk about ‘marital rape, ‘date rape’, or ‘statutory rape’. Rape had a different meaning then and not the ‘catch-all’ definition it has today. In Savile’s heyday, those who groped young girls were called ‘dirty old men’. Other men, sneered, sniggered or gave knowing winks, while women pursed their lips, sighed with exasperation or giggled at the recollection of their own experiences. While the obviously vulnerable were advised to steer clear, the more precocious were reprimanded for being too flirtatious and putting temptation in the man’s way. Some protective parents shielded their children from such men, while others calculated that they would work it out for themselves. Society was simply not as shocked by such behaviour.
What is more, because it was so common place, most victims did not feel nearly so traumatised, if at all, as they would today. To put it brutally, they did not know that they were supposed to be. Victims are created by the act of their being designated as such. It is the knowledge that you are being abused, rather than the physical act itself that is so destructive. A woman who genuinely falls down the stairs and breaks her nose is physically no worse off than one who is pushed down the stairs by her husband. What makes the difference is the knowledge that she was pushed deliberately as opposed to being pushed by accident or in jest.
Since the emergence of the Feminist, Civil and Human Rights movements, people are becoming far more aware of what is and what is not acceptable behaviour. Up until the middle of the 20th century, few black people in America would have been deeply offended by the use of what we must now call the ‘N Word’. It was the same in South Africa with the ‘K Word’ and even in Zimbabwe with the ‘M Word’. (M stands for ‘Muntu’ and is the Shona equivalent of Bantu. It simply means a person, but because white farmers referred to their black employees as muntus, it is now deemed to be derogatory.) Such terms were used whether any bile or hatred or hatred was intended or not. It was only when those words became symbolic of racial inequality that that black people and others, saw them as being offensive. But they are still just words.
Rightly or wrongly pressure groups, such as those pursuing an equal rights agenda, gain traction by creating victims. Tell a man that he has been robbed by his local finance company or bank and he will sign a petition demanding a criminal investigation so that compensation can be paid, even though he had no idea of his loss before hand. It does not matter that the loss is real. It only has to be perceived for him to feel wronged.
If one looks at the sexual attitudes of the third quarter of the 20th century, it is quite clear that women were treated as second class citizens. Married men had conjugal rights and few women would bother contesting the fact, or certainly considerably fewer than would be the case today. There were all sorts of legal issues that made the married man head of the house and gave him rights that the wife did not have. Those attitudes would be completely unacceptable today, but they were common place in our parents’ generation and there are, I am sure, many members of the Chariot who will recall that culture.
Jimmy Savile was born in 1926. He grew up before and during the War. The attitudes of his generation were very different from those born post 1945 and certainly very different from those born after 1965 a period when many of today’s prominent journalists and politicians were born. For much of his career, certainly during the 60s, Savile’s employers and managers would have belonged to an even older generation. They would have been far less shocked by such behaviour.
I have very little doubt that while there is certainly a great deal of truth in the accusations that have been levelled against the man, there is also a great deal of exaggeration and invention as well. The media have begun a feeding frenzy. They cannot be sued for any allegations and stories they print seeing as how Savile is dead. All they have to do is to comb through the records of the various institutions that Svaile worked at or visited, to find people who, for a price, will state publicly that they were either abused, or that they witnessed abuse. It seems totally inconceivable to me that if the abuse was as widespread as it is alleged to have been AND that abuse, in all its forms, was perceived at the time to be as wicked as it is today, Savile would have been stopped by somebody. The point is, either Savile did not abuse that many girls, or the extent to which he did was considered relatively insignificant by victims and by those who should have been responsible for them and for Savile. There are a lot of cowards in this world, but I simply do not buy the notion that throughout his entire career, not one person was prepared to make a stand and say that a dangerous rapist was operating with impunity.
Those people such as Esther Rancid, who weep their crocodile’s tears, are doing so because they have something to gain. The chance to revive a fading career, Savile’s estate, the BBC coffers, 15 minutes of fame, a justification for a screwed up life, the lure of cheque book wielding journalists are all motives to denigrate a man, who is unable to defend himself and who lived in a time when things were different.
Sorry about the lack of paragraph breaks. It all went haywire when I moved it from Word to WordPress.
Enjoyed reading your blog, Bravo. Very interesting, as were the comments that followed.
When the first concentration camps were used during the Boer War, it was to keep the Boers’ families together in one place, rather than in all the widely separated farms and homesteads, providing sustenance to the Boer fighters. There was no intention to cause harm, although there was also no forethought about the possible spread of disease.
Sipu, your last sentence strikes me as a little odd. Savile “lived in a time when things were different”. Has it recently been legal to have sex with underage girls or to grope hospital patients who may be paralysed or unconscious and unable to defend themselves? The one thing that is common to many of the stories of Savile’s abuse is that no child liked to complain because he was “so famous” and no one would believe them. A very cunning, devious predator.
Sheona, I do agree with Sipu – things were different in that time and in that particular area of the popular culture. For example, I can remember crowds of teenage, (maybe,) girls hanging around the stage door of the Bedford Corn exchange prepared, to put it bluntly, to drop their drawers for anything in trousers that came through it.
You’re absolutely right, bravo, that there were always groupies, very willing groupies too. But between willing 15 year olds and 12 year olds who were not as precocious then as many are now, there is a difference. As for the children in hospital, words fail me. Groupies they were not!
I’m not at all sure that your first point is actually the case, Sheona, not on the mean streets of the SE London and mining estates and Married Quarters patches where I grew up, anyway. When I was fourteen, I had a twelve-year old girlfriend, who, I hastily add in my own defence, eased me out of a relationship with a girl of my own age very deftly. Adolescent fumblings remained adolescent fumblings, however… though I should add that in those ancient and unenlightened (?) days the sense of appropriate boundaries was much stronger – in most cases – than appears to be the case nowadays.
Agreed, this is very different from the apparent facts of the case under discussion and I am not apologising in any way for Saville’s behaviour, but it remains the case that the times and the mores were different and the fact that there were such groupies is part of the context.
Sheona, I do not condone abuse or any form of bad behaviour. Abuse, is by definition abuse, in what ever era you are speaking of. However, social mores are constantly changing and as Bravo has pointed out, we should judge people within the context of the society in which they live. What may be considered abuse in one society may be considered the norm in another. You, understandably, express horror at the idea of ‘willing 15 year olds’. But if you think about the fact that in France, 15 years is the age of consent and if you consider that many 15 year old girls could pass for 16 years old and if you think that ‘groupie sex’ at that time was standard practice for people in the music and broadcasting industries, on a ‘willing seller willing buyer basis’, then the occasional foray based on a ‘potentially’ deliberate misrepresentation of her age by the girl concerned could quite possibly seem entirely innocent.
Of course it gets much harder to explain that away with a 12 year old girl in the hospital ward. And please do not think that I want to find a way for it to be explained in such a way that it becomes acceptable to take advantage of anyone so young and vulnerable. I am not trying to make Savile into a nicer man than he was. It does appear that he was pretty unpleasant, certainly by today’s standards. Though as Bravo said elsewhere, ‘the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones’. And Savile did a lot of good.
But, I truly wonder to what extent these stories are true. I am sure that many of them are. But I am also sure that there is an inherent tendency for people to exaggerate and a motive for them to do so. There is also false memory to the extent that events have not so much been confused as have been totally imagined. There is also what we call in the business, ‘outright lies’.
Many people sail close to the wind, but there is a difference between dabbling on the edges of legality and going completely overboard. Savile had a great deal to lose by going after someone as young as 12. I doubt he would have got away with it even then if he had been reported for doing so. If he was getting his kicks with 16 willing year old girls he would have to been crazy to risk getting caught with someone as young as 12. But if this ‘anonymous woman’ is telling the truth, he was caught. It does not ring true, though I accept that does not mean it is not true.
I would not trust Savile were he alive today, especially having heard all the allegations that have been made against him, but I trust even less, many of the people who have been making them.
One thing to bear in mind, this scandal presents a wonderful opportunity for Sky and The Telegraph and all the other enemies of the BBC to go after the corporation and cause it as much damage as they can. I strongly suspect that reason more than any other is key to this campaign.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9603959/John-Peel-got-15-year-old-pregnant-after-meeting-at-Black-Sabbath-concert-claims-woman.html
It seems that Jimmy Savile was not the only person ‘doin’ it, doin’ it’. And John Peel was a certified saint.
I don’t think that disbelieving the more respected media takes this very far. if we discount the less reputable rags, there still remain enough well-researched articles to provide evidence for the prosection. Disliking a female ‘name’ is not grounds for disbelieving her either!
As I mentioned before on this subject I went to Top of the Pops 2 or 3 times with a couple of girls I worked with. There was an age limit on admission, I think it was 16 but might have been 18, I was 15 as were the girls. One of them openly stated she had no knickers on because she wanted a group by a DJ or pop star.
If they were in TotP then they were by their admission 16 and not 15 (even if they were 12)
This does not mean that Saville was innocent I believe he was a perv, even more so when we hear his admittance to the Athaneum club was sponsored by the Catholic Bishop of London.
Now as for all these people coming out of the woodwork all these years later I would like it on record that I wa sexually abused and seduced by Florence from the Magic Roundabout. (Boing went Zebedee)
It’s time for bed, said Florence and (censored)
Talking of low-life…
With Gary Glitter songs banned from just about every radio station it must hurt other members of the Glitter Gang to lose out on royalties. Double standards seem to exist as Pete Townsend of The Who admitted paying into a child sex website. He said he did this as he was researching for a book he was writing on child abuse. As far as I’m aware he received a police caution. Why aren’t the Who records banned? Is it because their records are perceived as being too good to ban. Ironically, their songs monopolise the CSI TV franchises.
Where’s the book, Pete?
Not just Pete Townsend and Gary Glitter but they should ban Henry VIII too. Greensleeves is paid far too often for my liking. 🙂
🙂
Paid??? Played!
I couldn’t agree more that ‘historical behaviour’ should not be treated by modern standards – but I do not think that the sexual groping of the sick or disabled, of any age, would have been considered acceptable in the 50s, 60s or 70s Nor was under-age sex condoned – consider the public outcry when it was discovered that Jerry Lee Lewis had married a 13 year old.
Nonetheless, I fail to see what is to be achieved (other than selling newspapers) by dragging up Savile’s past after his death. People have had years to bring up these allegations and they haven’t.
Boa, there are obviously accomplices out there who should be brought to book.