Toby’s story about the disgraced journalist Peter Wilby took me back to when I was a teenager in the 1970s.
It’s over 50 years since an incident that remains so vivid in my memory I can recall it in uncomfortable detail. As it happens, I’m a little sceptical about the reliability of memory, but in this instance some of the detail is verifiable and I’m confident that this is what happened.
In the summer of 1972 I was 14 and had a friend at school in Wimbledon. His father was the broadcaster Derek Cooper (1925-2014), whom some people will recall recorded the voiceovers for Tomorrow’s World. He went on to work for Radio 4, devising and presenting The Food Programme. He was a garrulous and domineering figure, not tall but heavily built and with a large moustache as well as a huge ego. He was one of those people who completely dominated others in his vicinity and was clearly accustomed to this.
Cooper invited me to accompany him and his son to Television Centre to watch him recording an item for Tomorrow’s World. Just him. No-one else (such as James Burke about whom I wrote the other day, or Raymond Baxter whom Cooper told us was a “complete c***”). Nothing untoward happened. Indeed, I enjoyed the day.
Cooper had a holiday house near Portree in the Isle of Skye to which he took his wife and dragged his teenage children for the summer holidays. Knowing how resistant his son was to this annual Jacobite Hebridean exile, he invited me to accompany them for a month in August 1972. My parents were doubtless keen to get rid of me for a month too. They were Catholics. Cooper was brought up as a Catholic. I do not know whether that helped them trust him though I don’t recall that he had any faith.
And so it was arranged that I would accompany Cooper on the Inverness sleeper from London, he having been down for work reasons and was then heading back to rejoin his family. We were to share a compartment. Is that ringing alarm bells? At the time, I had not the slightest concern – and nor, obviously, did my parents.
Cooper took me to dinner in the dining car. He had a reputation as a gourmet so it was all rather important to him to show off where the food was concerned. After we had eaten, we returned to the compartment where he had me sit on the bed beside him. He ordered what seemed to me to be astronomical quantities of miniature bottles of whisky. He became drunker and drunker, rambled about all sorts of things, boasted about his military service at the end of the war and told me he was 47 years old. Which indeed, I now see that he indeed was in 1972 and that he had been in the Navy (his Guardian obituaries are here).
And then it happened. He started to force himself on top of me, ramming his hands and arms down under my clothing (top and bottom), stroking my skin, and up round my back before climbing on top of me, with his suffused red walrus-like face right up against mine, reeking of whisky. Being 14 I was just strong enough to push him off, but only with considerable difficulty.
Petrified, I made a dash for the compartment door and ran through the train until I reached the guard’s van at the rear. I do not remember the guard being there, but I sat in a corridor beside the cage that held the mail sacks for some considerable time. Eventually, after a couple of hours and at a loss to know what to do next, I crawled back to the compartment. Cooper was out for the count, snoring deeply and still dressed. I climbed into the top bed and passed a fitful night.
Needless to say, nothing was said of the previous night. He was sober. We had breakfast at a hotel in Inverness and his wife Janet (d. 2010) collected us, driving us back to Skye in their Renault.
The next month in Skye passed with no further incident resembling that on the train. Cooper drank vast amounts, even routinely stopping on days out with us all in the car to visit pubs en route to swig more whisky. I dread to think how at risk we were on the nightmare roads of 1970s Skye. I don’t know if he was an alcoholic but he certainly had an alcohol problem.
The family had a dog called Goodman. Cooper was obsessed with commenting on the animal’s habit of licking its private parts. I do mean obsessed. He was always talking about it, “Go on Goodie”, he’d say, “lick your p****. Poor old Goodie, hasn’t had a **** for years!”
After four weeks I returned to London with his son. The train incident retreated into the past. At the time it was extremely frightening though I had no idea what else could have happened to me. I tried to mention it to my parents (now both deceased) but they did not want to know.
A decade later in 1981 I started working at the BBC. One day, by the lifts in Broadcasting House I saw Cooper. It was the first time since 1972. He looked at me aghast, clearly rattled. He knew. He said nothing and nor did I.
Jump on until early 2013 by when Operation Yewtree was running after the death of Jimmy Savile. I happened to know Meirion Jones, the journalist who broke the Savile story, from my time at the BBC, and told him about my experience at Cooper’s hands. Meirion put me in touch with Yewtree and I was interviewed by the police.
It transpired that no-one else had made a complaint about Cooper. I chose not to pursue the matter. It seemed so very long ago, and what would it achieve? But I was left with the uncomfortable knowledge that a well-known broadcaster and writer who was married and had two children had, when the opportunity presented itself, under the influence of drink, assaulted a minor of the same sex. I’ll never know what would have happened had I not thrown him off and done a runner.
Worse, now looking back, I have to ask myself, was he grooming me? Were the invitations first to Television Centre and then to Skye involving the travel arrangements with the shared compartment all part of a contrivance to create the opportunity? Did he have form? I suspect I will never know that either.
Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Nothing like that happened afterwards whether involving Cooper or any other assailant. Whether Cooper ever assaulted anyone else, I have no idea.
I can’t pretend Cooper’s behaviour caused me any enduring distress or upset. It didn’t. It was certainly bewildering, and the memory lingered, but I really didn’t give it much thought for many years. It was only the mounting revelations about Savile and Glitter, as well as certain others, that brought it back. Mainly I was greatly relieved that I managed to avoid the worst of the indignities suffered by some of their victims.
However, every time I heard Cooper’s voice on the radio I used to wonder if anyone else knew what I knew about him. His rich gravelly voice sounded so good on radio, so authoritative and resonating in homes around the country. Yet my experience of him had been quite different.
Cooper died in 2014, not long after I’d told Yewtree, which (so far as I know) he knew nothing about. Why am I going public now? It’s always lurked in the back of my mind as a disturbing experience, mainly because it seemed so opportunistic and incongruous. That is by far and away the most rattling aspect of the story. Could it have been that impulsive? Is it conceivable he had never done anything like that before?
Should one incident like that colour a man’s reputation, especially when it’s based on the word of only one other person about an incident 51 years ago? De mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est (“nothing unless good is to be said about the dead”) is the saying.
In Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset, Archdeacon Grantly says, “The proverb of De mortuis is founded on humbug”, and I rather think he was right.
Why tell the story now? Cooper belonged to a wider phenomenon of people with a public forum who seek to influence and dominate others, but who on closer examination turn out to be not what they seem, though it would be wrong to suggest he ever lectured anyone on their morality (so far as we know). We are all flawed, but some flaws are beyond the pale.
I had a lucky escape. I am only too mindful that untold numbers of people have not been so fortunate, whoever their attackers were.
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Big respect to the author for speaking up. I’ll bet money that the perv had done it before, probably to his own son, and has most likely done it after the incident described above. He was a paedophile and don’t they say paedos cannot be rehabilitated? It’s not just a passing fancy, get it out of your system and then all deviant impulses disappear. You’re either programmed that way or you aren’t. But back in those days many things went on behind closed doors that were not talked about out in the open, this type of incident being just one example.
Toby, Cooper’s criticism of Raymond Baxter tells us less about Baxter than it does about your would-be molester. I recall Baxter’s authoritative voice introducing ‘Tomorrow’s World’ in the 60s. Added to which he (Baxter) was a decorated Spitfire pilot during the WW2. To be thought a “complete c***” by Cooper was something of a badge of honour.
The BPC.
I’ve asked this question since 2012 and never received an adequate reply.
What is the evidence (excluding allegations) that Jimmy savile committed the crimes he’s accused of?
Yes I’ll get lots of down ticks but, almost certainly, no reply to the actual question.
Maybe they buried all their ( whoever they were/are) dirty washing with Savile
No evidence then?
Savile suffered from mass hysteria as you know.
I see what you did there.
Thanks for the msg BTW..
No evidence then?
Lots of witness statements, plus he was well known by people who knew him and knew of him to be a pervert. It is hard to bring a dead person to trial (I shouldn’t need to say that).
Lots of witness statements that turned out to be false, and “I always knew he was a wrong un (but did nothing)” hearsay allegations by the sort of celebs who on another occasion promoted COVID jabs; perhaps we should believe them about that too. There was a very lengthy and public trawling operation for evidence, with financial incentives from his estate and, for those who went public, from newspaper stories, with no downside for false testimony. The late lawyer Susanne Nundy (the “Anna Raccoon” blogger), who had been a resident at the Duncroft school for girls where the allegations started, took a strong interest in the case and her conclusion was that there was no evidence that was made public that he’d done what he was accused of.
Well I’m confident that either way, had he been alive today, he’d be allowed to keep his bank account.
And remarkably, although the allegations ran into the hundreds, not a single documented police complaint made at the time,
I was sexually abused, by a teacher at a Catholic school, I never complained to the police. So I understand why there was “not a single documented police complaint made at the time”, and you don’t. It was a very different time.
No evidence then?
The evidence is documented in “‘Giving Victims a Voice’ A joint MPS and NSPCC report into allegations of sexual abuse made against Jimmy Savile under Operation Yewtree”
https://library.nspcc.org.uk/HeritageScripts/Hapi.dll/filetransfer/2013GivingVictimsAVoiceSexualAllegationsMadeAgainstJimmySavile.pdf?filename=CC18C70DB7C8C3D49403BB94EB176F95207E5F66235DCA89651F5ED2BA5DA9311A3547010EB1745F9098C8189E66B54F16BBCA4419250DDAE584462476E362622BD259A20D1597309210AC995C99F449C7702D4CF7627CBCEC72291068BFEAFDDC8C9625B71658F22EAD1E815FED12FF6D0DEB5CDBB40AEA4EF5D058E57168353BEB2DA3730B57DF729865CC3271FEE73BB1D434AB645BB5&DataSetName=LIVEDATA
If you think more than 400 people, who don’t know each, making the same type of detailed serious allegations isn’t “evidence” because they could all be lying, then you need to explain why you don’t believe any of them and explain what you would regard as “evidence” for any sexual crimes.
“…more than 400 people, who don’t know each other,”!
I would regard correspondence, video, audio, photographic, forensic evidence, confession, police complaints at the time as evidence.
There is nothing for Jimmy saville.
Toby, well done for putting this on the recors.
What I have found amazing is how meny in the MSM and politics behave like that but are never reported. Why do they congregate there.
In all my year sin business at senior managerial level I only once ever had a similar situation. It eas a 3 something woman trying it on with a 20 year old woman whose mother called in to complain.
Wow, the BBC sure seems to be a really big magnet for creeps and nonces! You may recall one Jimmy Saville, for example.
I wonder if the reason his own son didn’t want to go on holiday to Skye was about a great deal more than boredom?
A very evocative account of the attitudes of the time. I was 14 in 1966, so a bit older, and fortunately do not recall a similar incident but I do remember the lack of questioning of motive, as well as the automatic deference to authority. A lot of people had the capacity to keep secrets, good and bad.
Fascinating story and glad you managed to avoid full-on sexual abuse by the sounds of it. I imagine many people can recount experiences of inappropriate behaviour if not full-on sexual abuse during that era. It does seem prominent people who one might describe as “larger than life” are prone to getting carried away (to use a polite term for such perverts) and taking advantage of vulnerable or impressionable youngsters. I’m not making excuses, just observations and I take the point make by a fellow commentator that evidence of Jimmy Saville’s abuses is thin on the ground. I wonder if anything has changed nowadays. It maybe that would-be abusers are more aware that they may get exposed if not brought to justice.
I also had this instinct to stay silent when similar things happened to me as a 16-17 year old – being driven back from a babysitting assignment or given a lift back to a campsite. I struggled and ran too, suffering little more than ruffled feathers – though it does, as you note, stick in the memory.
It is worth pondering this instinct to stay shtum. I suspect it is an evolutionary adaptation – better survival rates for those who did not tell tales on powerful people. When Trump famously observed that ‘it was amazing what you got away with once you were perceived as rich and powerful,’ I felt he was expressing honest surprise at his happy discovery as much as simply boasting. Better appreciation of this mechanism should help us stamp out the unacceptable exploitation of the young and powerless.
How many avuncular figures turned out to have WHT (wandering Hand Trouble) after drinking? Many women remember being groped by such men when they were young. It was such a surprise/shock (the switch from avuncular to groper) that you didn’t know what to do apart from try to distance yourself from them and keep your distance thereafter.
Groping is a strange thing – being groped so unpleasant, what do the gropers think they are doing apart from hurting their victim? It surely is a power thing.