“I “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.” – Anna Raccoon blog, 26 October, 2012
When Meirion Jones emailed me early last month, asking for an interview, I was intrigued. Here was a guy, as I soon discovered, with a big reputation as a top flight TV documentary maker, winner of the Daniel Pearl Award for his investigation of Trafigura’s toxic waste dumping in Africa and star of numerous other genuinely important exposés. Yet he was the also the man behind the wretchedly inadequate Newsnight exposure of Jimmy Savile, rightly dropped by BBC executives (who were then castigated for their cowardice) because it did not stand up. Yes, there were BBC cockups, but the independent Pollard Report concluded in December that the decision to drop the programme had been taken in good faith. Jones was also the man so ball-breakingly denounced by a woman who had been right at the epicentre of the allegations – a former pupil at Duncroft School for girls. Blogging as Anna Raccoon, her detailed assessment portrayed a “despicably dishonest” Jones who had exploited a vulnerable, unstable, supposed “victim” and failed to disclose that his own aunt had been headmistress of the school.
Strong stuff, and before deciding how to respond to Jones’s invitation, I decided I would first interview him, quizzing him for about 45 minutes by phone over Anna Raccoon’s allegations. His mixture of plausible denial, and assurances supported by contextual detail, left me unable to nail any particular falsehood or bad practice on his part: for that I would have needed aces up my sleeve from serious investigative legwork of my own, and I had not been resourced for that. His strongest point was that his accuser had not been at the school in the era when Savile was a regular there, whereas Jones had visited his aunt frequently at her home in the school grounds and personally seen Savile on the premises a number of times. My impression remains that Raccoon is entirely right to regard the Duncroft part of the case against Savile as thin to vanishing; but that does not mean Jones was dishonest or behaved improperly.
In the end, I think, it comes down to a clash of values: what constitutes a scandal depends on what you think is reasonable behavior. Public standards have changed. Duncroft was clearly a very special place decades ago. It was a residential school for highly intelligent but “wayward” girls, as they would once have been called – the “hard to handle” daughters of elite families, including top military brass, film stars and even minor royalty. Jones’s aunt has admitted the girls were “no angels”. Many of them – including the key witness in Meirion Jones’s ditched film, who later “starred” in the ITV follow-up, were thrilled at the time to see a bit of action with Savile. It was all very St Trinians: “…an unorthodox girls’ school where the younger girls wreak havoc and the older girls express their femininity overtly, turning their shapeless schoolgirl dress into something sexy and risqué.” Would the audiences of the early St Trinians films half a century ago have been shocked by Savile’s escapades? They might have been merely amused, as they were by the films themselves.
But why, you might wonder, was Jones interested in me? After all, I’m not an old Duncroft girl, and I doubt I’d be mistaken for a St Trinians one either, even if I were to slip into a gym slip (perish the thought!) Turns out he’d been alerted to my existence as a result of discovering this very blog, Heretic TOC. Or, rather, my continued existence. He knew of my work with PIE in the 1970s – which is why he wanted to talk – but until seeing Heretic TOC he thought I was dead! Like Jon Henley of the Guardian a few months ago, he said he would like to get my views on why British society, along with others, is now so militantly hostile to paedophilia compared to just two or three decades ago. He said he just wanted an off-the-record discussion, not an on-camera piece. No particular programme had been commissioned. He wanted background because the theme is “hot” and likely to remain so for some time to come.
Obviously, it would have been crazy to hold out hopes of good publicity coming out of a meeting with a guy who had done so much to trash Savile, and I didn’t. But I was curious: on my side there was nothing to lose, as my life has long been an open book. Besides, he was offering a modest fee and I thought such a meeting could yield some lowdown on any other looming scandals he might be nosing into; it might also offer insights into how a guy with Jones’s reputation goes about this type of story. Anna Raccoon’s “take no prisoners” views on that are entertainingly colourful but, well, there may be a touch of St Trinians in her!
So Jones and I met. Not, dear readers, clandestinely in an underground car park, but in a plain business boardroom suite chosen and hired by me in a quiet location in the north of England where I could audio record the whole encounter with good sound quality. That was one of my terms: off the record, but on my recorder! He readily agreed to that, but unfortunately I cannot go into specifics about the questions he asked: that was his prior stipulation, although he knows I’ll be blogging.
What I can give, though, is the clear impression I formed of a man who, without being in the least bit underhand or devious, so far as I could tell, is still on a mission to identify and hunt down “guilty parties” from the past – not Savile, this time, but other “powerful people in high places”, perhaps people “at the heart of government”. These and other clichés of the conspiracy-minded appear to depend for their appeal on a simplistic Manichean split between goodies and baddies, with the baddies as the evil, controlling insiders. Meirion Jones and his ilk, in another dodgy binary, appear to see themselves as heroic lone rangers, outsiders riding into town to right all the wrongs. Well, it may work with tightly focused, rather distinct wrongs, such as toxic waste dumping and – Jones’s latest big story – bogus bomb detectors, reliance on which may have cost hundreds of lives in post-war Iraq; but in matters of more complex cultural change it seems to me like a hopelessly wrong-headed mode of investigation.
It is too narrow, too blinkered. Yes, we discussed some of the “wide-ranging” background issues in which he had initially expressed an interest – the rise of feminism, for instance – but there were strong indications that to him this was all just a nebulous and irritating distraction from the real business at hand. Only when we were focusing minutely on the culture of the Home Office in the late 1970s did I sense from him any real sense of engagement, and that is not even my area of insider knowledge: he would do better to ask a conventional historian! Perhaps he will.
Thankyou for the ‘dropbox’. I had heard of this “Bjorn” story but not in detail.
There are references to a couple of articles, one of which includes older interview material from Jones, on this blogpost I made last December. They may be known to you already.
http://jimcannotfixthis.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/who-investigates-investigators.html
This passage I found quite illuminating….
“When asked what factors determined whether a subject should be investigated, Nick Davies maintained that, “it’s dictated by a moral agenda: You have to select subjects that deserve to be investigated”. This sentiment was also supported by Meirion Jones, who claims for many it is a fact of “justice and injustice, if you know what I mean? It’s not party political. Investigative journalists tend to have a very strong feeling that something is unjust and therefore something needs to be done about it.”. It appears that impartiality is less of a factor in investigative reporting; one has to get a tad subjective in order to understand the consequences of any wrong-doing.”
It’s from this article, if you want to cut to the chase… 😉
http://cpshaw.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/investigative-reporting-is-it-still-a-staple-of-the-modern-press/
[TOC: Interesting. Thanks!]
My own impression is that at the very start of this, Jones believed he had some kind of “inside-track” on an exploitation story along the lines of a Bryn Estyn or Haut de la Garenne; except this one was for girls. The long history of care home scandals seems to have always revolved around teenage boys. To get a heterosexual angle would be a huge journalistic coup. Bear in mind that the doyen of British investigative journalists, Nick Davies, is a long-time believer in these “paedophile rings” and in his website has columns referring to there being over a million paedophiles in the UK..
In the Panorama show “What the BBC knew” Jones is vox-popped against some Hammer-Horror-style imagery of Duncroft – behind tall, iron gates, and he is burbling about what a strange place Duncroft was – with his half-remembered visits from film-stars and ‘minor’ Royalty….. not just Jimmy Savile.
I cannot now see where I saw the quote, but I recall his mother being said to have said to her sister (the headmistress) at some family meeting in the recent past, something about ‘how could she have allowed such things to go on’.
Somehow or other I think that this was the emotional base of Jones’ project. He believed that the headmistress had somehow been part of an ongoing girls-for-use care-home scandal and that Savile was the tip of some kind of ice-berg that somehow would lead him to a huge scandal. This is why he never approached the Aunt, who would obviously have been the obvious person for him to get fuller information from, about Savile’s visits….. if he believed it was only about Savile.
He never approached her because he thought she was at the core of his investigation. He’s hardly likely to admit to such foolishness now.
Yes, although both of those scandals were grossly exaggerated, just like the Savile one, as far as I recall. Haut de la Garenne may have been a hard place, with tough corporal punishment etc (as there was at most schools when I was young, including my own), but I rather think early allegations of grotesque stuff such as kids being murdered turned out to be based on findings on animal bones, and I don’t think sexual abuse was ever shown to be endemic. As for Bryn Estyn, did you ever see the excellent Richard Webster’s book, The Secret of Bryn Estyn? The secret, which did not interest the media at all, was that most of the allegations were false. Some of them were made by out-and-out compensation seekers and attention getters who had not even been at Bryn Estyn at the same time as the staff members they were accusing.
Davies is perhaps the most overrated journalist in Britain today. Not to put too fine a point on it, he’s a sensationist who plays fast and loose with the facts, as I had occasion to note in his coverage about 15 years ago of an alleged “snuff movie” story involving a pornographic video dubbed “the Bjorn Tape”; it was implied that this was a “snuff” movie and that a young boy in it called Bjorn had been murdered. But following Davies’ award-winning story, the boy was discovered alive and apparently well the following year! I wrote about this for a conference paper in 2000. I have put the relevant extract on Dropbox.
While we in the US have our own media witch hunts (i,e, http://www.shfri.net/dlr/bookburn.cgi ), I am a long, long, way from UK journalism and politics. It is well that you are at least being interviewed, and perhaps some as yet unrecognized benefits will come out of this contact.
I hope not, beyond causing everyone to seriously reconsider their so-called ‘research’ and its global impacts.
The issue does not lie with journalists but with those who feed them, from both sides of this silly schoolyard argument; in the resulting hysteria people all over the planet being rounded up and incarcerated.
In Western Australia alone, tens of thousands of men have been arrested; hundreds are still in prison, at rates over 20 times those in the US and the UK, the place very badly disrupted by the whole thing.
It has all come from whinging immigrant Poms, Yanks and New Zealanders – check their profiles for yourselves.
That’s my gripe, nothing else.
A footnote then I’ll drop this topic, I really do have a lot of work on my plate.
Nowhere in these past 20-odd years, apart from some girls on the SBS Insight program, ‘The Naked Eye’, of 24 June 2008, who had modelled nude and the images published, have I witnessed such anger and disgust at the grievous insult to adults and young adults set aside by these ‘investigative journalists’ and ‘child protection’ vigilantes as having been ‘exploited’ and ‘sexually abused’ when they were children.
It has all been an industry built around dragging out ‘victims’ kicking and screaming, to complain and confess, while others of us are shoved summarily out of the way, and worse imprisoned as a ‘danger to society’.
It is my firm, well-informed and long-held opinion that if we are to be uttering heresies, these are the heresies in urgent need of uttering. The human body is beautiful, that of children especially so.
All those stupid people are doing is taking something sacred and beautiful and turning it into filth and guilt and shame. That is absolutely the very worst harm that can be done to a child, much less ‘society’, especially as they proceed through their puberty.
And worse by far, the gross insult to our intelligence, our personal integrity, our ability to look after ourselves, and not least our sense of ourselves as human beings, simply cannot be allowed to pass.
I never saw Meirion at the school myself – I was there from 1962 to 1964 and then on and off through 1965. I don’t know where he would have been bunked, for a start. There was very little room, and Margaret Jones had a small separate flat upstairs and a study on the ground floor. Maybe they just came for the day.
I know Margaret Jones has at least one photograph of Meirion with Jimmy Savile at one of the garden parties. Margaret has also stated several times, on and off the record, that her mother had no time for Jimmy, and one time he went to kiss her hand and she leapt backwards, saying something along the lines of “Get away from me!” Margaret has also said, on and off the record, that she wasn’t that keen on Jimmy but the girls really liked him coming around so she put up with it.
It beggars human nature that someone like Jimmy, crass as he may have been, would have been persona non grata among a bunch of girls who were pretty bored, and the access that Jimmy provided, i.e. cigs, sweets, rides in the Rolls, trips to London to the BBC and so on, would have been manna from heaven for them. They were not about to complain to the staff, because if they had, and if I know Margaret Jones, that would have been the end of his visits, with all the trappings attendant thereon. So, they either put up with it for the pay-off or, more likely, nothing happened.
Karin Ward can’t even begin to figure out where it was she went in London – someone told her it was the White City, so she went along with that – but in fact it was the old Empire Theater in Shepherds Bush that she went to. She admits to having to contact former pupils while she was working on her book, because she really didn’t remember anything much.
I was told by one of the women who was there, and is somewhat of a ring leader in this sorry scenario, that a bunch of the girls broke out one night, during the Savile era, with the aid of a staff member who left a door unlocked, and went en masse to the police station in Staines to complain about Savile, but that the police simply put them in cars and drove them back to Duncroft. I can’t even begin to believe that ever happened.
Whether this began situation with Meirion and Mark Williams Thomas began innocently, I can only speculate, but what Meirion should have done, as an ethical journalist, knowing that he was sitting on a keg of dynamite with this story, is to dissociate himself from the story and have another producer/journalist take it over. But because of his relationship with his aunt he couldn’t resist it. And he didn’t even have the common decency to telephone her or write her a letter, advising her that this was about to blow up. What does that say about his character? [TOC: Again, highly interesting. Many thanks.]
Not every girl at Duncroft in those days was from the elite. The requirement was a high IQ mostly – when I was there in the 60s, we had girls from various walks of life. Certainly some from the ‘upper classes,’ but not predominantly.
To address Meirion – it needs to be clearly understood that Meirion and his mother were engaged in a family squabble with his aunt Margaret. This squabble, as I understand it, is of fairly recent vintage and involves real estate. Until this blew up, there was nary a hint of dissatisfaction with the way his aunt ran her school. It also bears remembering that Mrs. Jones, mother of both Margaret and her sister, and grandmother to Meirion, LIVED AT DUNCROFT with her daughter, in the separate house. Mrs. Jones was not a fan of Jimmy Savile’s and if there had been any hint of impropriety, I’m pretty sure she would have mentioned it to her daughter.
I’m glad to see that the Duncroft angle with Savile is dying the death it deserves. It was a non-starter with me from the beginning, and I was glad to see Anna pile in on the ridiculous lies told by Bebe Roberts to the Daily Mail, who lapped it all up without even bothering to fact-check.
Fascinating. Thanks very much, Mewsical. I confronted Meirion with a press story I had seen which claimed there had been a rift between him and his aunt. He very much downplayed any such suggestion and made no mention of a property dispute. His only concession was that amongst any set of relatives there will always be some you get on with better than others. As for Meirion’s grandmother living at Duncroft, he did actually tell me this. He said he visited Duncroft with his mother, three or four times a year, from when he was a very young child. In 1970 his grandmother also went to live there, which meant visits became more frequent: more like one a month. The most intensive time was around 1975-6. In total, he says, he personally saw Jimmy Savile there about half a dozen times. He (Meirion) stopped going after 1978, when his mum died. She “reluctantly” made Savile’s lunch for him once, when she was there with her aunt.
OK, I’m inclined to accept this. I don’t want to play with words like ‘elite’ which plainly has a different connotation in England than it does in Australia where we acknowledge no aristocracy or ‘upper class’.
There was a lot of IQ testing in the 1960s; mine was done in 1961 and found to be off the scale (no boast, simply sad reality for a lot of ‘misfit’ kids in those days) and I was sent to grammar. I joined Mensa (IQ>98%ile) in 1978 and ISPE (IQ>99.9%ile) in 1982, and finally entered university in 1985.
Here in WA we have Perth Modern School, specifically catering for Gifted and Talented Children (e.g., Bob Hawke, Rolf Harris), yet it is neither an approved nor a grammar school and never was. It’s focus is quite different.
Institutionally, Duncroft being an approved school modeled on the grammar school not the borstal or industrial school is correct, as is my observation on the outlook and disposition of those coming out of such schools.
Yes, we broke out too. I started smoking there just past puberty and continued until 1985, except I’d lost my ‘virginity’ a good six years before, all the same highjinks; girls and boys that age are no different, and I too cannot begin to believe such stories about Jimmy Savile.
But I’ll hand it over there – I wouldn’t think of challenging somebody who was actually there – simply pleased to see that our memories resonate and ridicule of this Meirion Jones and his beat-up Savile Affair on the same grounds.
You are quite right – Ms Raccoon was not there during the 1970s – however, the same staff were there.
She was there during the 1960s, which was when Bebe Roberts claimed to the Daily Mail that she was molested by Savile on a visit there – and it was that interview which prompted my series of articles. [TOC: Thanks for this clarification, Anna, and for honouring Heretic TOC with your contribution. Cheers!]
Now, my second and longer point of departure, if it passes muster, lies in the idea of such schools as Duncroft Approved School, which were quite correctly the tough end of the spectrum; set aside for dealing with the incorrigibles, but they were nonetheless modeled on the grammar school, not the borstal or industrial school.
Tom is correct in pointing out that these were schools for children of elite families, not working class. Here in Australia, ‘approved schooling’ was done at an ordinary grammar school where difficult to manage kids like myself I guess from old wool-growing and station families became best mates with offspring of often high church officials, politicians and military, and a lot more I know for a fact sent out here to the colonies in preference to an approved school back in England.
For the most part, in Australia in those days, most of our lot were bush kids anyway, rough around the edges you might say. They were the post-war years, coming out of two world wars, global depression and extended drought.
Times really were tough. Our education was rightly modeled on the Outbound movement patronised most conspicuously by Louis Mountbatten. That’s the reason Charles was first sent to the tough Gordonstoun (correct this time) and then the more reasonable Timbertop.
Kids going into such a school may have been young tearaways, but by God when they came out they were disciplined and focused. The place I attended seriously saved my bacon, and I’m not the only one by a very long shot.
Children from such families, coming out of such schools, were then and are now highly selective in who they fool around with sexually, however you want to put it, and neither are they promiscuous or predatory or abusive.
Edmund’s portrayal of Alexander and his approach is the most accurate I have ever read, anywhere, though C S Lewis also has an interesting view on the matter.
In Australia, it was always pubescent boys from poor working class families who went out looking for a blow job, and girls for a fuck; both seeking to elevate themselves by finding a sex partner higher up in the social order and usually failing. Even today, you can see where teenage pregnancies are concentrated.
My issue with these latest, retrospective, child sexual abuse ‘scandals’, and the people trying to protect poor children, is that they turn the society of the day upside down, trying to make out that it was the unmanagable elites who preyed on them and not the other way around.
The idea is so fundamentally preposterous it is beyond laughable. The only thing I can begin to think of Jimmy Savile is that he came from an impoverished family and lacked the necessary finesse; a nouveau riche. He may have habitually revisited his childhood haunts, but that would have been the extent of it.
Nothing else makes sense. Why else would he bother?
I suspect “approved” in the UK context was a bit of a euphemism from the start. The name implies merit of some sort, but the kids attending these schools were hardly approved ofthemselves and for the most part were definitely products of the lower orders, not the elite. Duncroft, as I said, was very unusual in catering specifically for intelligent girls, and those deemed to be intelligent were often from the elite.
No, the ‘approved’ designation meant that the school was formally approved by a court, in dealing with cases of children unable to be controlled by their parents.
I think it is more than simple intelligence, perhaps what we call today ADHD, because poor children were summarily sent to a borstal or industrial school regardless. And from our experience here in Australia, long seen as the alternative, children sent away were all upper middle class or upper class.
The problem for those families had far more to do with “keeping up appearances”. I guess you could argue there too that an ‘approved school’ run on grammar school lines presented a sufficiently acceptable explanation.
OK, from my perspective, the first point of departure swings around Tom’s idea that “In the end . . . it comes down to a clash of values”, where I would put it as a clash of professional standards.
There is a continuum, ranging from simple wanting to know the truth, through all this ‘investigative journalism’ and premptive sociology, criminology, sexology sort of stuff, to highly qualified and disciplined, peer reviewed (in this case) social historiography.
It is not difficult to see where on that continuum I place some of these people. We get them here in Western Australia touting their stuff, earning popularity points among the freshers with their scandalous left-wing political exposés, but they don’t last long.
It is not an issue of media or documentary film-making because we all do that anyway – multimedia presentation is now standard practice – but of methodology, properly determining the reliability and validity of facts before then undertaking a fair and reasonable interpretation of said facts.
At the very least, first hand sources must be interviewed, not second hand or hearsay, or biased opinions from people with an already stated agenda, or some childhood memory for seeing somebody while visiting an aunty.
The BBC was quite right to drop the Newsnight program on Savile, as a load of utter codswhallop.
For me as I lay in my bed on this Sunday morning, reading this post on my mobile phone, I would call this item ‘a good read’, a nice mix of style and at least one idea which for me is worth more thought.
First style, the use of the St Trinians image is lovely, not only the idea of Tom O’Carroll in a dress, but the way that image is very much a part of what I would call a British identity. Very nicely done.
Second, this a the bit I want to muse on, is the issue on how people enter a situation. Some enter with the desire to understand, a wanting to unpack what one sees and follow the threads that are made visible. Others, however ride in to town on their horse, they know why they are there, and such reflective curiosity is not how they go about things. Meirion Jones does seem to be just this kind of animal, he is in town on “a mission to identify and hunt down “guilty parties” from the past”. What I see as food for thought is to look at people and ask, just why are your here, what do you want? To not ask this question is possibly a very unwise omission.
I will get on this my Sunday, and yes, this was written after I got out of bed.
>”Very nicely done.”
Thanks. HT aims to please where possible!
This is one post I have printed and will sit reading and making notes before commenting further.
Reason being that finally some resonance is happening here, especially with private (in England curiously ‘public’, a misnomer either way because the educational model was based on the European gymnasium – Gr. gymnós – school, not on who owned the bloody place) boarding schools in those days; ie, post-war 1960s and 70s.
I know that on my return home the gossip here in Australia too had already started.