Campaign to save Jimmy Savile’s Highland retreat grows

A CAMPAIGN to put Jimmy Savile’s Highland home to good use, is being mounted in Glencoe.

Members of the close-knit community are rebelling against suggestions that the cottage should be demolished, despite it now being tainted by its link to the serial child rapist.

Drew McFarlane-Slack, a former Highland councillor who represented Glencoe for 15 years and met Savile several times, said: “He was a serial offender, who was very clever in engineering his ability to get close to young children without being discredited when he was alive.

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“The fact is that all the good work he has been doing over the years seems to have been done so he could engineer his way in, he did these things in a planned way, it’s absolutely dreadful and it is awful that he is not alive to face these charges.

“All of that anger, that has now been heaped upon him, is well deserved.”

But Mr McFarlane-Slack is just one of many who do not want to see Savile’s former Highland home in Glencoe demolished.

He said: “My view is that the house is part of the heritage in Glencoe and I would be very sorry to see it go.

“The house, while tainted in some way, can be put to good use. While demolishing it might solve the problems in the short term, for PR reasons, I think it would be a loss for the local area to do that.

“We can’t go round demolishing houses because people have done bad things in them, the house should be preserved if we can preserve it.”

George Grant, 76, who has lived in Glencoe all his life, just as his forebears did for hundreds of years before him, said: “I think the house should stay because there are many happy families who lived in that house before, all through the years, who were brought up there, for whom it was a happy home.”

Mountaineer Hamish MacInnes, 82, who sold the cottage to Savile, said at the weekend that he would like to see it retained as a bothy.

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Simon Ingram, who lives in the nearby village of Ballachulish, said he could not see any point in demolishing the house and thought it should be donated to the National Trust, for use as a field centre.

And Stuart Price, 31, of Glencoe, said: “The house should be renovated and turned into a small museum, turned into something for Hamish MacInnes, who deserves to be remembered.”

Paul Moores, 60, a mountain guide, who once lived in the cottage latterly occupied by Savile, said: “I think the house should be sold on to somebody else. I used to live there and it is a kind of special place.”

Mike Hall, 65, who was joint caretaker and gardener of the house when Savile owned it and who was left £1,000 in the celebrity’s will, was also against demolition.

Speaking at his home in Glencoe village, he said: “We don’t want it demolished, just put it on the market and sell it on, somebody would be happy in the house.”

But Kevin Williams, 51, of Ballachulish, said: “They should raze it to the ground and then build something else from scratch.”

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