Jimmy Savile's Real Name: James Wilson Vincent Savile

Quick answer: Jimmy Savile's real name was James Wilson Vincent Savile. He was born on October 31, 1926, in Leeds, England, and died on October 29, 2011, in Leeds, two days before his 85th birthday. After his death, the Metropolitan Police, the NSPCC, the BBC's Dame Janet Smith review and a series of NHS investigations concluded that he was a prolific serial sexual abuser of children and adults. His offending ran for more than five decades, and the institutions that celebrated him gave him the access he used to commit it.

He was never tried. He died before the full picture came out. But the official record leaves no real doubt. The Met Police and NSPCC said the victims' accounts "paint a compelling picture of widespread sexual abuse by a predatory sex offender," and chose to call the people who came forward victims, not complainants.

Real name and early life: from Leeds dance halls to the BBC

James Wilson Vincent Savile was the youngest of seven children in a Catholic working-class family in Leeds. "Jimmy" was simply the familiar form of James, and Savile was his family surname, so his stage name was close to his birth name. He kept that name through a public career that lasted more than half a century.

During the Second World War he was conscripted as a "Bevin Boy" and worked in coal mines. He has said he was injured underground. After the war he ran dance halls and promoted record nights, and he later claimed to have been among the first people to use twin turntables for continuous record play. That claim came from Savile himself and is hard to verify. He built a persona around it: bleached or dyed hair, tracksuits, gold jewellery, cigars, catchphrases, and a loud, deliberately eccentric manner that made him instantly recognisable.

Through the 1950s he managed Mecca ballrooms in northern England, including in Manchester and Leeds. Police later found that the earliest offence reported to Operation Yewtree took place in Manchester in 1955, during these dance-hall years.

He moved into radio on Radio Luxembourg and then the BBC. On television he presented the first edition of Top of the Pops in January 1964 and fronted the show regularly for years. From 1975 to 1994 he hosted Jim'll Fix It, a BBC One Saturday-evening programme in which he "fixed" children's letters asking for wishes to come true. It made him one of the most trusted faces on British television for a generation of children and parents. He also presented on BBC Radio 1 and appeared in public safety campaigns, including the "Clunk Click" seatbelt adverts.

Quick facts

• Real name: James Wilson Vincent Savile
• Known as: Jimmy Savile; Sir Jimmy Savile after 1990
• Born: October 31, 1926, Leeds, England
• Died: October 29, 2011, Roundhay, Leeds, aged 84
• Known for: DJ; first presenter of Top of the Pops (1964); host of Jim'll Fix It (1975–1994); BBC Radio 1; charity fundraising
• Honours: OBE (1971/72); knighthood (1990); papal knighthood (1990); honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds (1986). The Leeds Teaching Hospitals report lists these honours.
• Police finding: Operation Yewtree (Met Police and NSPCC, January 2013) recorded 214 criminal offences across 28 police force areas with Savile as the suspect, including 34 rape or penetration offences.
• BBC finding: The Dame Janet Smith review (February 2016) identified 72 victims connected with his BBC work, including 8 rapes.
• NHS findings: Investigations covered dozens of NHS hospitals. Leeds General Infirmary found 60 victims aged 5 to 75, Stoke Mandeville found 63 victims aged 8 to 40, and Broadmoor recorded 11 allegations.
• Criminal conviction: None. He died before police investigated the full scale of his offending.

Public image vs access: knighthood, charity, hospitals, BBC

You can't explain what Savile did without explaining what he was allowed to be. Over decades, institutions gave him privileges no ordinary volunteer or employee would have had, and he turned each one into a way to reach victims.

Charity. Savile ran marathons and organised fundraising that raised large sums for hospitals, especially the National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire. His charitable trusts were based there. The fundraising won him gratitude and protection inside the hospitals and made him look untouchable to the public. It also helped bring him a knighthood in 1990, "for charitable services," along with a papal knighthood the same year.

Hospitals. At Leeds General Infirmary he worked for decades as a volunteer porter and hospital-radio figure. At Stoke Mandeville he had a bedroom. At Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital, he had keys, living quarters, and an official role. In 1988 the Department of Health appointed him to lead a taskforce overseeing Broadmoor's management. Investigators later described how he could walk through wards, lifts and corridors with little or no supervision.

The BBC. For roughly 40 years the BBC put him in studios full of teenage audiences. Top of the Pops filled them with young fans, and Jim'll Fix It was built around children writing to him and meeting him. The Smith review found that he abused people "at virtually every one of the BBC premises at which he worked."

Celebrity and connections. Investigators repeatedly found that staff believed Savile had powerful friends and assumed that complaining about him was pointless or dangerous. The Broadmoor report described him as "narcissistic, arrogant and lacking in any empathy," very manipulative, and someone staff were convinced had "close connections in high places."

His public image was eccentric but harmless, charitable, and close to children. That image was itself the cover.

Death and the posthumous revelations: ITV Exposure and Operation Yewtree

Savile died at home in Roundhay, Leeds, on October 29, 2011. In death he got a celebrity's send-off: tributes on the BBC, a funeral in Leeds and a lavish headstone. The headstone was later removed and destroyed after the revelations.

Weeks after his death, BBC Newsnight was investigating abuse claims linked to Duncroft, an approved school for girls in Surrey. The report was dropped in December 2011, while the BBC was broadcasting Christmas tribute programmes to him. The decision was later examined in the BBC's Pollard Review (December 2012). That review found serious failings in how the BBC handled the shelved investigation and the fallout, but it did not find that the story was spiked to protect the tributes.

On October 3, 2012, ITV broadcast Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, in which several women said Savile had sexually abused them as teenagers, including at Duncroft. Hundreds more people came forward after the broadcast.

The Metropolitan Police began Operation Yewtree in October 2012. (The Met's report dates the start to 5 October 2012, and the formal criminal investigation was announced later that month.) Yewtree had three strands: offences by Savile alone, offences by Savile with others, and offences by others unconnected to him. Only the first strand produced the Savile figures below. Other well-known men were investigated under the wider operation. Some were convicted and some were not, and this page does not treat anyone else's case as part of Savile's record.

Scale of offending: the Met Police and NSPCC figures

In January 2013 the Metropolitan Police and the NSPCC published Giving Victims a Voice, the main police account of Savile's offending. These are the key figures:

• About 600 people had come forward to Operation Yewtree. Roughly 450 of them related to Savile, mostly alleging sexual abuse.
• 214 criminal offences were formally recorded with Savile as the suspect, across 28 police force areas.
• These included 34 rape or penetration offences and 126 indecent acts.
• 73% of victims were under 18, and 82% were female.
• The youngest victim was an eight-year-old boy and the oldest was 47. Most victims were aged 13 to 16.
• The earliest reported offence was in 1955 in Manchester and the last was in 2009.
• The peak period of offending was 1966 to 1976, when Savile was aged about 40 to 50.
• Most of the offending was in Leeds and London, his home city and his main place of work.
• Reported offences connected with the BBC ran from 1965 to 2006, ending at the final recording of Top of the Pops. Police also recorded offences linked to Leeds General Infirmary, Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Duncroft School.

The report said most offences were opportunistic sexual assaults, but some involved grooming or planning. It also noted that most victims had never told the authorities before. Some feared they would not be believed, some did not trust official agencies, and some thought the justice system would never prosecute a man like him.

These are minimum figures based on people who came forward decades later. Several of the later inquiries said directly that their own counts were probably underestimates.

Institutions: what the inquiries found

The BBC: the Dame Janet Smith Review (2016)

The BBC commissioned the former High Court judge Dame Janet Smith to investigate Savile's conduct at the corporation. Her report was published on February 25, 2016. She found:

• 72 victims of sexual offences connected with Savile's BBC work: 57 women or girls and 15 boys or men.
• 8 rapes, including attempted rape. Six of the rape victims were female and two were male. The youngest girl raped was 13 and the youngest boy was 10.
• The earliest known incident was the rape of a 13-year-old girl at the BBC's Lime Grove studios in 1959. The last was in 2006, at the final recording of Top of the Pops.
• Abuse happened at virtually every BBC premises where he worked, including Television Centre and studios used for Top of the Pops, Jim'll Fix It and Radio 1.
• Some BBC staff were aware of complaints or rumours about his conduct, but these were not passed on to senior management. Smith did not find that the BBC as a corporate body knew, but she found serious failings in its culture: a deference to stars, a fear of reporting, and an atmosphere of sexual discrimination and harassment.
• Smith concluded that if those failings had been dealt with at the time, Savile's activities could have been curtailed.

The same review dealt separately with the broadcaster Stuart Hall, who was convicted in his own right. That is a separate case.

NHS hospitals: Leeds, Stoke Mandeville, Broadmoor and the Lampard review

The Department of Health oversaw a set of NHS investigations. The first major reports were published in June 2014. The BBC reported that they covered 28 hospitals, and later reports brought the total investigated to more than 40 NHS bodies and hospitals.

Leeds General Infirmary (Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, 2014). The investigation, led by Dr Sue Proctor, found:

• 64 people came forward. 60 of the accounts concerned abuse on premises run by the Trust or its predecessors.
• Victims were aged 5 to 75. Nineteen children and 14 adults were patients when they were abused, and 19 members of staff also reported abusive or inappropriate encounters.
• The cases ran from 1962 to 2009. Most victims were in their late teens or early twenties.
• The behaviour ranged from lewd remarks and inappropriate touching to sexual assault and rape, with three cases of rape recorded.
• Most of the assaults were opportunistic and happened in public areas such as wards, lifts and corridors, but eight cases showed premeditation, including grooming victims and their families over months.
• Only four children and five adults reported what happened at the time. None of the reports led to action that stopped him.
• Organisational failures let someone "as manipulative as Savile to thrive and continue his abusive behaviour unchecked for years."
• The report recorded allegations, which it could not verify, that he interfered with bodies in the hospital mortuary. It found that controls on access to the mortuary were lax.

Stoke Mandeville Hospital (published February 2015). This independent report found:

• 63 victims connected with the hospital, aged 8 to 40, abused between 1968 and 1992.
• Nineteen victims were patients and 10 were under 12. Almost half were under 16, and the offences included rape.
• Savile had full and unsupervised access to the hospital for more than 20 years, including clinical areas.
• His reputation as a "sex pest" was an "open secret" among junior staff and some middle managers.
• One formal complaint, made in 1977 by the father of an 11-year-old girl, should have gone to the police but did not. Several informal complaints were not taken seriously or escalated.

Broadmoor Hospital (2014). The report described an inappropriate culture at the hospital in that period and Savile's unusual power there after his 1988 appointment. It recorded 11 allegations of sexual abuse: six involving patients, two involving staff and three involving children. It also described him watching and commenting while female patients undressed and showered in front of staff, which was common practice at the time. The investigators said the true number of cases was probably higher. They found no evidence that the people who appointed him knew about his abuse.

Kate Lampard's "lessons learned" report (February 2015). The barrister Kate Lampard reviewed the NHS investigations for the government. She found that Savile had been able to exploit hospitals because of his celebrity, his fundraising and his unsupervised access. She warned that "elements of the Savile story could happen again" unless hospitals tightened their rules on volunteers, celebrity access and fundraising. Her report made recommendations covering volunteer checks, celebrity visits, charity governance and how complaints are escalated.

Schools, children's homes and other settings

• Duncroft Approved School (Staines, Surrey) was a residential school for girls in the care system. Yewtree recorded allegations there from 1970 to 1978, when Savile was a regular visitor. Former pupils' accounts were central to the ITV documentary and the abandoned Newsnight report.
• Haut de la Garenne, the children's home in Jersey, was linked to Savile through visits. Jersey's States of Jersey Police and the later independent care inquiry dealt with claims involving him there. Coverage of Jersey was more contested than coverage of the main English cases, so this page treats it as allegations reported and does not rely on it for any conclusion.
• Other schools, children's hospitals and care settings were named in police data and later reviews, including a set of reports published by the Department for Education on children's homes and schools. The pattern was the same each time: he was a celebrity visitor who was given trust and privacy he should never have had.

Patterns of offending as the inquiries described them

Taken together, the official reports describe a consistent method. These are factual summaries, not graphic detail:

• Celebrity as a pass. People assumed a famous, charitable national treasure could be trusted. Staff deferred to him, and victims feared nobody would believe them.
• Unsupervised access. Keys, bedrooms and offices in hospitals; studio passes and dressing rooms at the BBC; regular visiting at schools. Those privileges put him alone with vulnerable people again and again.
• Fundraising as leverage. At Stoke Mandeville and Leeds, the money he raised made managers grateful and reluctant to challenge him. Investigators said his charitable role helped put him beyond scrutiny.
• Opportunism and planning. Most assaults were described as opportunistic and happened quickly, often in semi-public places. Some cases involved grooming over weeks or months, including of victims' families.
• Targeting the vulnerable. His victims included hospital patients, children in care or approved schools, young fans and junior staff: people least likely to be believed or able to complain.
• Complaints that went nowhere. At the BBC, at Stoke Mandeville and at Leeds, complaints or concerns were raised over the years but never reached anyone who acted on them.

Why he was never convicted while alive

Savile was never charged with any sexual offence in his lifetime. Several things explain this:

• Victims did not come forward, or were not heard. Most victims first spoke to police after 2012. The Yewtree report gave fear of not being believed and distrust of the authorities as the main reasons.
• Complaints were not acted on. Hospitals and the BBC failed to escalate complaints, as their own inquiries later found.
• Police and prosecutors did not act on earlier allegations. Allegations were made to police forces including Surrey, Sussex and Jersey. In 2009 Surrey Police interviewed him under caution about claims linked to Duncroft, and the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to prosecute. In January 2013, a review by Alison Levitt QC for the then Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer, concluded that police and prosecutors had treated victims with too much caution. Starmer said that if the victims had been taken seriously, it might have been possible to prosecute Savile in 2009, and he apologised.
• He died in October 2011, a year before ITV's documentary and Operation Yewtree. Under English law a dead person cannot be tried. So the findings against him come from police data and independent inquiries, not a criminal court. Those bodies said plainly what they had found: the Met and NSPCC referred to "victims" and "a predatory sex offender", and Smith, Proctor and the Stoke Mandeville investigators set out findings of rape and sexual assault.

The bottom line is that Savile has no criminal conviction. That is down to the timing of his death, not to any doubt in the official record.

Name notes and search intent

People search "Jimmy Savile real name" for several reasons. Some are checking whether "Jimmy Savile" was a stage name. It mostly was not: his legal name was James Wilson Vincent Savile, and "Jimmy" is the short form of James. The surname is spelt Savile, with one l. Common misspellings include "Saville" and "Jimmy Saville." The family-name connection to the Savile Row street in London is coincidental.

Most people searching his name now want to know what he did. That is why this page puts the inquiry findings at the centre rather than his career. For many people in Britain, the name now stands for institutional failure to protect children, and the cases led to changes in safeguarding across the BBC, the NHS and policing.