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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