Back in the Seventies, when Jimmy Savile was at the height of his fame, he was interviewed by a newspaper about the death of a teenage girl.
The youngster was Claire McAlpine. She was just 15 years old and had been a regular dancer in the audience of Top Of The Pops.
Top of the Pops was the UKs answer to American Bandstand. It was hosted by the legendary Jimmy Savile, who is now legendary as an unbelievably sick pedophile.
On the morning of March 29, 1971, Claire, a former convent school pupil, was found lying on the floor of her bedroom at home in Watford, Hertfordshire, by her distraught mother. She had taken a fatal overdose.
Near her body was a bottle of tablets and her red diary. ‘Don’t laugh at me for being dramatic, but I just can’t take it any more,’ Claire wrote.
It was her last heartbreaking entry to her parents before she killed herself.
On the preceding pages, she had named a string of radio disc jockeys — and other showbusiness personalities, all household names — who, she claimed, had ‘used’ her.
One of the DJs, she said, had taken her to his house for the night and given her a pill which made her feel like she was ‘floating on a cloud’. Another had also invited her back to his ‘sumptuously furnished’ residence.
Savile, then in his 40s, who presented Top Of The Pops, was asked during the interview if he knew or remembered Claire from the show.
‘I studied a photograph of Claire very closely,’ he replied. ‘I cannot recollect ever seeing the girl in my life. They say she came from Watford. I don’t know anyone who lives in Watford.’
The inquest into Claire’s death was held shortly after the article appeared. The coroner ruled that Claire committed suicide after deciding her ‘day-dreams’ of becoming a pop star would never come true.
Claire’s diary was scrutinised by Scotland Yard, but no action was taken against the DJs, who, she alleged, had ‘used’ her for their own sexual gratification.
They were never even questioned, let alone identified. ‘It would be ridiculous to connect anyone or anything mentioned in her diary with reality,’ a police spokesman said at the time.
Or, to put another way, Claire was a portrayed as a troubled fantasist. Her death, however tragic, had nothing to do with a sex scandal involving the show-business establishment.
Does anyone reading her story for the first time today really believe that now?
Claire’s family and friends never doubted her.
And someone who knew Claire back then contacted the Mail this week to support the accusations contained in her diary.
The allegations made — and casually dismissed both within and outside the BBC — by Claire McAlpine all those years ago can point only to one dreadful conclusion: that far from being alone, the predatory behaviour displayed by Jimmy Savile, national icon and charity fundraiser, was common among many big show-business names of the time.
Indeed, all this week accusations have been appearing in national newspapers about various well-known DJs. How many famous men are sitting at home now terrified that the truth is about to come out?
They may not have been paedophiles (although we know of at least two, namely Jonathan King and former Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning, who were) but they were part of the same culture of permissiveness that allowed the moral boundary surrounding under-age sex to become blurred.
Might this be the real reason for the code of omerta (code of honour and silence) that seems to have prevented many of those who must have known about Jimmy Savile’s predilection for young girls from speaking out?
Even now, almost all the Radio 1 disc jockeys who worked alongside Savile for years have remained silent over the abuse allegations. Only one, Emperor Rosko, real name Mike Pasternak, was more candid when asked about Savile’s sexual misdemeanours.
‘I had heard rumours, but then most of us in the spotlight had rumours to deal with,’ he admitted.
Either way, it is difficult to imagine such a scenario arising in the very changed world of today. Back then, though, Britain was a very different place.
Original copies of Alice Cooper’s 1972 album School’s Out, for example, went on sale with a pair of panties (available in four different colours) wrapped around the record sleeve.
Blind Faith’s debut album (featuring the likes of Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Steve Winwood) was released at around the same time with a topless, pubescent girl on the cover.
One of Eric Clapton’s girlfriends from those days was only 16 when she started going out with him, and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was accompanying a 14-year-old model around Hollywood. Yet no one epitomised this laissez-faire sexual morality, which, in one way or another, allowed Jimmy Savile’s vile activities to continue for so long, than the late, saintly John Peel.
Bizarre: Late BBC Radio DJ John Peel, (right) who died in 2004, poses wearing a schoolgirl uniform in 1973.
Peel, awarded the OBE in 1998, is perhaps best remembered for his Saturday morning programme Home Truths on Radio 4 in which he talked about family life to Middle England.
But as a young man, he worked in Texas as a local radio station DJ and self-appointed ‘Beatles expert’.
When he was older, he recalled some of the ‘perks’ of the job in several newspaper interviews in the Seventies and Eighties.
Girls, some as young as 13, he said, used to queue up outside his studio to offer him sexual favours. ‘Well, of course, I didn’t ask for ID,’ he said.
‘All they wanted me to do was to abuse them sexually which, of course I was only too happy to do.
‘It was the glamour of the job . . . but frustratingly, American girls of that period — as they do now, actually — had this strange notion of virginity as a tangible thing which you surrendered to your husband on your wedding night. But then, Texas was largely Christian back then.
Even now, and allowing for Peel’s famously sardonic humour, it is troubling that those words came from Radio 4’s cuddly champion of middle-class values. One of the girls who queued up outside his studio was a girl called Shirley Anne Milburn. She and Peel were married in Texas on September 29, 1965.
Peel was 26 years old. Shirley Anne was just 15.
‘She lied about her age and so did her family,’ he would later declare.
Peel brought his wife to London two years later, but the marriage began to founder almost immediately as his star soared on Radio 1. They were divorced in 1973. Some years later, after returning to the U.S., she committed suicide.
Questions raised: The legendary DJ, (left) with his OBE, would brag about sex with young girls and married his first wife Shirley when he was 26 and she was 15.
By then, Peel — who married his second wife, Sheila, in 1974, and with whom he had four children — had become a pillar of the community in the village of Great Finborough, Suffolk.
Nevertheless, the DJ — who died in 2004 — kept up a running gag in his column in Sounds (a rock music weekly) in the mid-Seventies about how he preferred the company of fans when they were dressed as schoolgirls.
The column was often illustrated with photos of Peel posing with young girls dressed St Trinian’s-style in short gym skirts, stockings and suspenders. For one series of pictures, he dressed in a schoolgirl uniform himself.
Alan Lewis, a one-time editor of Sounds, says Peel’s regular references to schoolgirls were ‘half joking, half serious’. But he admits: ‘We really did go quite far on occasion.’
Unbelievably, Peel also ran a Schoolgirl of the Year competition on his Radio 1 show.
So, on the one hand, you have John Peel, and his ‘revelations’ about under-age girls queuing up for sex with him outside his studio in Texas, and on the other, Jimmy Savile — ‘Sir Jimmy’ — grooming girls as young as 12 by offering them sweets, cigarettes and tickets to be in the audience of his shows.
Let’s not forget Jonathan King, record producer and TV presenter, who like Savile, cruised the streets in his Rolls-Royce looking for victims, before being jailed for seven years in 2001 for attacks on young boys.
Chris Denning, a close friend of King’s and member of the original team of DJs hired by Radio 1 (along with the likes of Alan Freeman and Kenny Everett), was also locked up for four years in 2006 for sexually abusing children.
We have been given the names of two more DJs who were sexual predators, according to a victim of one of the stars and an associate of the other.
Seems like an astonishing number of perverts hired as DJs by the BBC.
One of them allegedly tried to rape a girl at a party in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, Central London, back in the Eighties. Many of the big-name DJs and their agents lived in apartments and townhouses in the Dolphin Square area.
‘I was just out of college and working for Capital Radio,’ the girl told the Mail this week. ‘I was probably around 21 at the time but was very petite and looked much younger. The party was being held at an agent’s place.
‘The DJ he represented just caught me by surprise. He was about twice my height and quadruple the weight of me, or so it seemed.
‘Suddenly, I was being yanked into a bedroom off the main reception room, where I was forced backwards onto the bed. I fought him off and managed to get out of the bedroom and left.’
Shows such as Top Of The Pops also became ‘happy hunting grounds’, it seems, for some DJs and other show-business personalities.
Music journalist David Hepworth, a former editor of Smash Hits magazine, offered this explanation: ‘Most of the DJs of the Seventies and Eighties had come up via the ballroom circuit or holiday camps. ‘They thought it part of their job to make sure the prettiest girls in the audience were hauled up on the stage to pose with them during personal appearances or TV spots.
‘This was an era when all any star-struck teenage girl wanted was to be in the audience of Top Of The Pops.
The podiums were high, skirts were short and the camera angles low.’ Pretty young girls, like poor Claire McAlpine were known as ‘Dolly Dancers’, which perhaps tells you all you need to know about the culture that prevailed back then.
Claire was adopted. Her birth name was Claire Ufland. She also used the stage name Samantha Claire and had been chosen to appear on Top Of The Pops on four occasions. But her mother, Vera McAlpine, began to suspect something was amiss after her daughter had stayed out all night following a phone call from a girl who said Claire would spend the night with her.
It was then that she decided to read Claire’s diary for the first time. She told her daughter she must never see the DJs concerned again and ‘grounded’ her for a month.
‘I’d been worried about her for some time,’ Mrs McAlpine said in an interview back then. ‘She was mad about the pop scene and always talking about disc jockeys and pop stars she met and how wonderful they all were. She simply idolised them.
‘I was very disturbed by other references in the diary, which mentioned many names. Some of the passages were so shocking that I would rather not repeat them. But the police know what they said.’
Just one month after Mrs McAlpine opened that diary, Claire was dead.
Jenni Bale knew Claire. She was 22 and also a dancer on Top Of The Pops. She says one of the DJs who abused Claire was Jimmy Savile, who ‘bluffed his way out of it’.
‘Claire’s diary entries were later described as fantasy by the police, a terrible slur against someone who couldn’t defend herself,’ said Jenni.
‘I believe Claire lost her life all those years ago because of what was done to her. She would probably be a mother herself now.’
We now know that Jimmy Savile was almost certainly one of the DJs named in Claire’s diary. The question is: who were the others?
So, where is the diary now?
 |
| Suicide: Claire McAlpine, 15, pictured dancing in the Top Of The Pops audience just weeks before she died |
Top of the Pops was the UKs answer to American Bandstand. It was hosted by the legendary Jimmy Savile, who is now legendary as an unbelievably sick pedophile.
On the morning of March 29, 1971, Claire, a former convent school pupil, was found lying on the floor of her bedroom at home in Watford, Hertfordshire, by her distraught mother. She had taken a fatal overdose.
Near her body was a bottle of tablets and her red diary. ‘Don’t laugh at me for being dramatic, but I just can’t take it any more,’ Claire wrote.
It was her last heartbreaking entry to her parents before she killed herself.
On the preceding pages, she had named a string of radio disc jockeys — and other showbusiness personalities, all household names — who, she claimed, had ‘used’ her.
One of the DJs, she said, had taken her to his house for the night and given her a pill which made her feel like she was ‘floating on a cloud’. Another had also invited her back to his ‘sumptuously furnished’ residence.
Savile, then in his 40s, who presented Top Of The Pops, was asked during the interview if he knew or remembered Claire from the show.
‘I studied a photograph of Claire very closely,’ he replied. ‘I cannot recollect ever seeing the girl in my life. They say she came from Watford. I don’t know anyone who lives in Watford.’
The inquest into Claire’s death was held shortly after the article appeared. The coroner ruled that Claire committed suicide after deciding her ‘day-dreams’ of becoming a pop star would never come true.
 |
| Jimmy Savile Legendary Pervert |
They were never even questioned, let alone identified. ‘It would be ridiculous to connect anyone or anything mentioned in her diary with reality,’ a police spokesman said at the time.
Or, to put another way, Claire was a portrayed as a troubled fantasist. Her death, however tragic, had nothing to do with a sex scandal involving the show-business establishment.
Does anyone reading her story for the first time today really believe that now?
Claire’s family and friends never doubted her.
And someone who knew Claire back then contacted the Mail this week to support the accusations contained in her diary.
 |
| A picture from Top of The Pops in 1971 shows Claire McAlpine, centre, dancing on stage with Jimmy Savile, third from right, only weeks before she died Savile swore he never saw Claire in his life, no-one questioned it |
Indeed, all this week accusations have been appearing in national newspapers about various well-known DJs. How many famous men are sitting at home now terrified that the truth is about to come out?
They may not have been paedophiles (although we know of at least two, namely Jonathan King and former Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning, who were) but they were part of the same culture of permissiveness that allowed the moral boundary surrounding under-age sex to become blurred.
Might this be the real reason for the code of omerta (code of honour and silence) that seems to have prevented many of those who must have known about Jimmy Savile’s predilection for young girls from speaking out?
Even now, almost all the Radio 1 disc jockeys who worked alongside Savile for years have remained silent over the abuse allegations. Only one, Emperor Rosko, real name Mike Pasternak, was more candid when asked about Savile’s sexual misdemeanours.
‘I had heard rumours, but then most of us in the spotlight had rumours to deal with,’ he admitted.
Either way, it is difficult to imagine such a scenario arising in the very changed world of today. Back then, though, Britain was a very different place.
Original copies of Alice Cooper’s 1972 album School’s Out, for example, went on sale with a pair of panties (available in four different colours) wrapped around the record sleeve.
Blind Faith’s debut album (featuring the likes of Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Steve Winwood) was released at around the same time with a topless, pubescent girl on the cover.
One of Eric Clapton’s girlfriends from those days was only 16 when she started going out with him, and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page was accompanying a 14-year-old model around Hollywood. Yet no one epitomised this laissez-faire sexual morality, which, in one way or another, allowed Jimmy Savile’s vile activities to continue for so long, than the late, saintly John Peel.
Peel, awarded the OBE in 1998, is perhaps best remembered for his Saturday morning programme Home Truths on Radio 4 in which he talked about family life to Middle England.
But as a young man, he worked in Texas as a local radio station DJ and self-appointed ‘Beatles expert’.
When he was older, he recalled some of the ‘perks’ of the job in several newspaper interviews in the Seventies and Eighties.
Girls, some as young as 13, he said, used to queue up outside his studio to offer him sexual favours. ‘Well, of course, I didn’t ask for ID,’ he said.
‘All they wanted me to do was to abuse them sexually which, of course I was only too happy to do.
‘It was the glamour of the job . . . but frustratingly, American girls of that period — as they do now, actually — had this strange notion of virginity as a tangible thing which you surrendered to your husband on your wedding night. But then, Texas was largely Christian back then.
Even now, and allowing for Peel’s famously sardonic humour, it is troubling that those words came from Radio 4’s cuddly champion of middle-class values. One of the girls who queued up outside his studio was a girl called Shirley Anne Milburn. She and Peel were married in Texas on September 29, 1965.
Peel was 26 years old. Shirley Anne was just 15.
‘She lied about her age and so did her family,’ he would later declare.
Peel brought his wife to London two years later, but the marriage began to founder almost immediately as his star soared on Radio 1. They were divorced in 1973. Some years later, after returning to the U.S., she committed suicide.
By then, Peel — who married his second wife, Sheila, in 1974, and with whom he had four children — had become a pillar of the community in the village of Great Finborough, Suffolk.
Nevertheless, the DJ — who died in 2004 — kept up a running gag in his column in Sounds (a rock music weekly) in the mid-Seventies about how he preferred the company of fans when they were dressed as schoolgirls.
The column was often illustrated with photos of Peel posing with young girls dressed St Trinian’s-style in short gym skirts, stockings and suspenders. For one series of pictures, he dressed in a schoolgirl uniform himself.
Alan Lewis, a one-time editor of Sounds, says Peel’s regular references to schoolgirls were ‘half joking, half serious’. But he admits: ‘We really did go quite far on occasion.’
Unbelievably, Peel also ran a Schoolgirl of the Year competition on his Radio 1 show.
So, on the one hand, you have John Peel, and his ‘revelations’ about under-age girls queuing up for sex with him outside his studio in Texas, and on the other, Jimmy Savile — ‘Sir Jimmy’ — grooming girls as young as 12 by offering them sweets, cigarettes and tickets to be in the audience of his shows.
 |
| Abuser: Jonathan King leaves Maidstone Prison in 2005 after serving less than half his seven-year sentence for abusing teenage boys |
Chris Denning, a close friend of King’s and member of the original team of DJs hired by Radio 1 (along with the likes of Alan Freeman and Kenny Everett), was also locked up for four years in 2006 for sexually abusing children.
We have been given the names of two more DJs who were sexual predators, according to a victim of one of the stars and an associate of the other.
Seems like an astonishing number of perverts hired as DJs by the BBC.
One of them allegedly tried to rape a girl at a party in Dolphin Square, Pimlico, Central London, back in the Eighties. Many of the big-name DJs and their agents lived in apartments and townhouses in the Dolphin Square area.
‘I was just out of college and working for Capital Radio,’ the girl told the Mail this week. ‘I was probably around 21 at the time but was very petite and looked much younger. The party was being held at an agent’s place.
‘The DJ he represented just caught me by surprise. He was about twice my height and quadruple the weight of me, or so it seemed.
‘Suddenly, I was being yanked into a bedroom off the main reception room, where I was forced backwards onto the bed. I fought him off and managed to get out of the bedroom and left.’
Shows such as Top Of The Pops also became ‘happy hunting grounds’, it seems, for some DJs and other show-business personalities.
Music journalist David Hepworth, a former editor of Smash Hits magazine, offered this explanation: ‘Most of the DJs of the Seventies and Eighties had come up via the ballroom circuit or holiday camps. ‘They thought it part of their job to make sure the prettiest girls in the audience were hauled up on the stage to pose with them during personal appearances or TV spots.
‘This was an era when all any star-struck teenage girl wanted was to be in the audience of Top Of The Pops.
The podiums were high, skirts were short and the camera angles low.’ Pretty young girls, like poor Claire McAlpine were known as ‘Dolly Dancers’, which perhaps tells you all you need to know about the culture that prevailed back then.
Claire was adopted. Her birth name was Claire Ufland. She also used the stage name Samantha Claire and had been chosen to appear on Top Of The Pops on four occasions. But her mother, Vera McAlpine, began to suspect something was amiss after her daughter had stayed out all night following a phone call from a girl who said Claire would spend the night with her.
It was then that she decided to read Claire’s diary for the first time. She told her daughter she must never see the DJs concerned again and ‘grounded’ her for a month.
‘I’d been worried about her for some time,’ Mrs McAlpine said in an interview back then. ‘She was mad about the pop scene and always talking about disc jockeys and pop stars she met and how wonderful they all were. She simply idolised them.
‘I was very disturbed by other references in the diary, which mentioned many names. Some of the passages were so shocking that I would rather not repeat them. But the police know what they said.’
Just one month after Mrs McAlpine opened that diary, Claire was dead.
Jenni Bale knew Claire. She was 22 and also a dancer on Top Of The Pops. She says one of the DJs who abused Claire was Jimmy Savile, who ‘bluffed his way out of it’.
‘Claire’s diary entries were later described as fantasy by the police, a terrible slur against someone who couldn’t defend herself,’ said Jenni.
‘I believe Claire lost her life all those years ago because of what was done to her. She would probably be a mother herself now.’
We now know that Jimmy Savile was almost certainly one of the DJs named in Claire’s diary. The question is: who were the others?
So, where is the diary now?
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