What IS the truth about the DJ and a troubled girl of 15?
ONE day in the early months of 1971, a woman named Vera McAlpine telephoned the duty office of the BBC. She wanted to lodge a serious complaint. It concerned her 15- year- old daughter, Claire, who had recently begun playing truant from a convent school in her home town of Watford, Hertfordshire. On Wednesday afternoons, Claire had fallen into the habit of sneaking away from school two hours early and catching a train to London.
There, she liked to attend live recordings of Top of the Pops at BBC Television Centre.
The previously well-behaved young girl’s four visits were meticulously chronicled in a diary, which Mrs McAlpine had recently discovered and read. Alongside breathless anecdotes about pop stars, fashion trends, and the heady atmosphere of the BBC studio, it contained a disturbing claim: after a recording of the show, Claire said she’d met a celebrity DJ – whom she named in her diary – who then invited her back to his flat in West London and seduced her.
It was this scandalous allegation that had prompted Mrs McAlpine to call the BBC.
‘I told them what I had found in the diary,’ she said at the time. ‘I gave them the man’s name. I asked if they realised [Claire] was a child of 15 and I said something had to be done about it to save other girls from the same sort of thing. I demanded to speak to “the man right at the top”, but they said quite abruptly that this was impossible.’ A few weeks later, the story took a dark twist. On the morning of March 30, 1971, Claire’s body was found on the floor of her bedroom. Alongside it were two empty pill boxes and her red diary, which contained a brief suicide note.
‘Don’t laugh at me for being dramatic, but I just can’t take it any more,’ it read.
As she waited for the police to arrive, the distraught Mrs McAlpine flicked through the preceding pages of the diary.
Their contents were even more disturbing than the last time she had looked at it. Whether they were the product of a febrile teenage imagination or an account of shocking abuse remains unresolved to this day.
But in the days before her death, Claire had written that a string of TV stars, radio DJs and other show-business personalities had used her for their own sexual gratification.
One man had allegedly taken her to his house for the night and given her a pill that made her feel like she was ‘floating on a cloud’. Another, she claimed, had invited her back to his ‘sumptuously furnished’ residence.
Mrs McAlpine promptly passed Claire’s diary on to Scotland Yard.
However, detectives chose not to question, let alone identify, the famous men it named. ‘It would be ridiculous to connect anyone or anything mentioned in her diary with reality,’ a police spokesman said at the time.
An inquest, just days after Claire’s death, also ignored the contents of the red notebook. It concluded that she had committed suicide ‘while her balance of mind was disturbed’ after realising that her ‘day-dreams’ of becoming a pop star would never come true.
To put things another way, the teenager was portrayed, by both the police and a coroner, as a troubled fantasist whose death, however tragic, had nothing to do with a sex scandal.
After an initial flurry of Press coverage, her case was allowed to slide into history.
THAT was then. Today, nearly 45 years after she took her life, the circumstances of Claire McAlpine’s suicide have once more been dragged into the spotlight. This is because of an extraordinary row over the BBC’s decision to sack Tony Blackburn, 73, the veteran DJ and former Top of the Pops host who first joined the corporation in 1967.
Blackburn turns out to be one of the hitherto anonymous celebrity DJs named in Claire’s diary. He also happens to be the alleged predator – and remember, at 15, Claire was under the age of consent – who was complained about during Mrs McAlpine’s initial call to the duty office of the BBC.
Both facts, along with news of his sacking, became public on Wednesday, the day before the publication of Dame Janet Smith’s report into the Jimmy Savile affair.
This vast collection of documents devotes a lengthy and eye- opening section to how Mrs McAlpine’s complaint to the BBC was handled.
At this point, it should be stressed that the report makes no findings as to whether Blackburn, who was 28 at the time of the alleged incident, might have abused Claire.
Dame Janet does not even reach a conclusion on whether the two ever met, although she has uncovered some written evidence that Black-
burn arranged for Claire to be provided with a ticket on one of the four occasions she attended Top of the Pops. Instead, the BBC has decided to fire Blackburn from his Radio 2 show because, according to BBC director-general Tony Hall, he ‘fell short of the standards’ required when giving evidence to the inquiry.
Blackburn gave a formal interview to the Savile investigation in 2013, when he was asked whether he was ever made aware of Mrs McAlpine’s complaint against him in 1971. He replied in the negative.
‘Blackburn denied that he was ever made aware that a complaint had been made against him,’ the report states. ‘He also denied that he was ever interviewed [about a complaint] by [Bill] Cotton and/or [Tony] Preston,’ who were both BBC executives. ‘ He said that this was not a lapse of memory on his part; the interview had not taken place.’
However, Dame Janet writes, there is ample evidence that such a meeting did, in fact, take place.
For example, a memo written by Mr Preston in 1971 records that Blackburn was interviewed by Mr Cotton about ten days after Mrs McAlpine’s complaint, when he ‘flatly denied’ sleeping with the 15-year-old.
The memo also suggests that Blackburn was asked in the 1971 meeting to account for his move- ments on the night of the alleged liaison. Mr Preston was, it records, troubled to discover that Blackburn’s version of events ‘does not agree with the first thoughts of his agent’ about his whereabouts that evening.
What did Blackburn say about that? Dame Janet writes that under cross-examination in 2013, he ‘could offer no explanation’ for the existence of the memo, and said he was mystified by its contents.
‘Later, through his solicitor,’ says Dame Janet, ‘Blackburn accepted that I might well prefer the documentary evidence to his recollection on these issues.’
That admission was, it seems, enough to persuade Lord Hall that Blackburn must leave the BBC, which he has served, on and off, for the best part of six decades. Whether such a move was justified is another matter.
After all, Blackburn has – at the age of 73 – in effect been fired because of what appears to be his failure accurately to recall the detail of a meeting that occurred more than 40 years ago. To many observers, that will surely seem unfair.
In statements yesterday, a devastated Blackburn argued that he was being offered as a scapegoat to ‘take the focus off’ the wider failings of the BBC identified by the report. He says that he intends to sue the corporation.
Perhaps also unjust is the fact that Blackburn will inevitably now be smeared as having carried out the statutory rape of a child, without a single claim against him being tested in court.
As he rightly pointed out, Dame Janet has not even seen, let alone scrutinised, Claire’s diary, which is the main piece of evidence that might help to establish what did, or did not, occur in the last months of her life. Scotland Yard has refused to release a copy in its possession, while the McAlpine family (Vera is now dead) also declined to make the original public.
SInCe Blackburn knows little real detail about the claim that he had sex with Claire, he is not in a position to rebut it. All he has established, he says, is that ‘ the mother told the BBC, a few weeks after her initial complaint, that her daughter had withdrawn her allegation against me’.
Ironically, in the context of the latest developments, Blackburn has long been prone to boasting about his status as an unlikely lothario. In his 1985 autobiography The Living Legend, Blackburn revealed that ‘sex is very important to me; I adore making love’, describing women as ‘lovely creatures; they make the world a brighter place’.
In 2012, he told Radio Times he had slept with around 500 women.
The son of a prosperous doctor, who was educated at Millfield and cut his teeth in broadcasting on the pirate station Radio Caroline, Blackburn achieved fame in 1967 as the first host of the newly launched Radio 1 Breakfast show.
It drew 20million listeners in its heyday and, helped by his regular appearances on Top of the Pops, Blackburn was soon one of the most recognised faces in Britain. Married to actress Tessa Wyatt in the 1970s, he embraced the liberated social mores of an age when many young girls threw themselves at pop stars and DJs, who took full advantage.
‘The opportunities to let this go to your head were manifold,’ he once recalled. ‘ There was an endless stream of record pluggers eager to wine and dine you, invitations galore, flattery from all sides – and a generous supply of women ready to throw themselves at you.’
Yesterday, Blackburn struck a similarly unapologetic tone. Whether it will last, in the face of this sudden adversity, perhaps remains to be seen.