He was a real dear; that's the word that comes to me. For all his oddities and the effects of life in the public eye, Sir Jimmy Savile was a lovely man. Like Spike Milligan, another life-enhancer, you only had to look him to start grinning.
Tomorrow, Tuesday 8 November, we in his native city of Leeds start saying goodbye, which looks like being a homely affair even though the first part of the proceedings has been described as lying in state.
This isn't exactly incorrect, but maybe gives an exaggerated impression. The displaying of Savile's closed, gold-coloured coffin in the Queen's Hotel by the train station – from 9am to 4.30pm - is not the result of an ego-trip or vanity planning.
It has been arranged because a lot of local people want to see him off in a tangible way, as someone who was often around in the city, spreading cheerfulness, doing good. He was handsomely paid for his professional work, but money, time and effort went the other way in heaps through his voluntary work and madcap sponsored events. He raised millions for hospitals and charities.
You can get a good idea of local feeling about him via this piece from the Yorkshire Evening Post. Check out his hairdresser's comment on the thread...
As I've Tweeted, my modest Jimmy moment was when he stopped his pink Rolls Royce at the zebra outside York Minster, so that my schoolgirl sister could walk across. He did the nearest you can in a car to a Walter Ralegh-style, sweeping bow. How's about that then? Like pretty much everyone else in Leeds, my family has also benefited from his help to the Jimmy's and the Infirmary, where he famously kept in touch for years by working a day a week as a porter.
He is the second of his kind that Leeds has lost, after the death last year of Jimmy Heseldon, the self-made manufacturer and lavish philanthropist whose funeral in his Cross Green factory was a striking occasion. Both men started life with few assets beyond a very strong family life and sense of community. Savile's cortege on Wednesday 9 November is expected to pass the modest house in Consort Terrace, Woodhouse, where he started life, as well as the Infirmary.
That will be followed by a requiem mass at St Anne's Catholic cathedral at 2pm, with 300 invited guests and room for 400 others. There will probably be plenty more in Cookridge Street and other roads nearby.
The body of his mother, the 'Duchess' is buried up at Killingbeck off the York Road but Savile chose Scarborough, where he will be buried at 1pm on Thursday 10 November at Woodlands cemetery, overlooking the North Sea. The public are welcome there too. The Queen's Hotel has a book of condolence and there is a second one at the Royal Armouries.
He would have been 85 today.
