UK - How The Times reported the Great Train Robbery

[John Ashworth]

How The Times reported the Great Train Robbery
Times Online
June 25, 2008
Alan Hamilton

SUMMER 1963 WAS ALREADY pretty newsy. Nelson Mandela had been charged with treason, Martin Luther King had had his dream, General de Gaulle had said “non”, Dr Beeching had proposed to prune the railways, the War Minister had denied sleeping with a classy tart, and the Beatles had released their first LP.

Then, one morning in August, we learnt of a fabulous heist, which in its planning and sheer audacity still captures the imagination 45 years later — not least because the story is not yet over.

But you would not exactly have been blasted from your breakfast chair by the account in The Times the next day. The paper was still under the editorship of the austere and intellectually rigorous Sir William Haley, who never allowed his paper to get too worked up about anything.

At that time, newspapers were beginning to feel the first chill winds of immediacy that television news could bring, and the somewhat pedestrian version of events, “nosed” on the Postmaster-General Reginald Bevins’s reaction, was a slightly desperate attempt to take the story forward.

It still happens in these days of rolling news, although we hope we are better than we were at snatching the sniff of the moment, which in August 1963 was a belter of a tale.

Fifteen men in masks and ski helmets held up the Glasgow to London mail train at dead of night on a remote stretch of the West Coast main line in Buckinghamshire and made off with £2.6 million in used banknotes.

The haul would be worth more than £40 million at today’s prices, putting it firmly in the criminal superleague alongside the £25 million in gold bullion from the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery at Heathrow and the £53 million from the Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, in 2006. Two rival South London gangs had combined resources. But at least they all spoke the same language and had a degree of trust; no dodgy Albanians who might squeal under threat of deportation. This was a crime by home-grown, seasoned villains of the old school.

They did their homework. Knowing that the previous weekend had been a public holiday north of the Border, they figured that the traditionally parsimonious Scots would have been spending like drunken sailors, and that bank branches would be shipping surplus banknotes back to head offices in London. They sent cash by registered post in those days; they know better now.

Nonetheless the robbers were pleasantly surprised when they opened the 120 stolen mailbags in a Buckinghamshire farmhouse and counted the loot; it came to £2,631,784, mostly in easily laundered used £1 and £5 notes. The banks were furious — the maximum compensation for loss of a registered packet in those days was £20. Rewards totalling £260,000 were offered for information.

The crime had a beautiful simplicity. The robbers cut the lineside signal and telephone wires, blocked the green signal with an old glove, and lit up the red signal with a six-volt battery, causing the driver to come to an obliging halt while they overpowered the crew and travelling postal sorters, uncoupled the engine and first two carriages containing the valuable stuff, and drove them to a nearby bridge where they threw the mailbags into a waiting lorry.

It was the first time in 125 years that a British mail train had been successfully waylaid. But what had been planned as the perfect crime soon showed two serious flaws. One assailant, never identified, panicked and hit Jack Mills, the 58-year old train driver, over the head with an iron bar. It was a raid without guns, and nobody was supposed to get hurt. Mills never worked again, and died of leukaemia seven years later.

The second error was to rent the disused farmhouse where they planned to hole up for a week or two. When the radio told them of the huge furore, they panicked and fled, leaving fingerprints on a ketchup bottle and a Monopoly game — which they had been playing with real money. An anonymous tip-off led police to the house, and arrests were made within a week.

At the trial at Aylesbury Assizes Mr Justice Edmund Davies handed down some of the stiffest sentences in British justice. The robbers were sentenced to a total of 307 years, seven getting 30 years each.

A handful escaped justice. Bruce Reynolds, the mastermind, went on the run for five years but was recaptured and served ten years. He now makes a living writing about big crimes for newspapers. Buster Edwards fled to Mexico but gave himself up. After his release he ran a flower stall at Waterloo station, until he was found hanged in a lock-up garage in 1994, the victim of alcohol and depression. Charlie Wilson escaped from his Birmingham prison only to be recaptured, released and shot dead in Spain by a rival drug dealer.

Ronnie Biggs was sprung from Wandsworth jail after only 15 months of his 30-year sentence, and lived openly in Brazil for three decades, safe from extradition having fathered a child by a local woman. But his £147,000 share of the haul had run out long ago, and he returned to Britain in 2001, poor and very sick. Now 79, he is spending his last days in Norwich prison. Appeals for clemency to let him die at home have fallen on deaf ears.

Before his death Edwards told a magazine that part of the appeal of the Great Train Robbery was the thrill of delivering a further kick in the face of a British Establishment already on its knees from the sleaze rapidly eroding the authority of Harold Macmillan’s Tory Government.

“It wasn’t even the money,” he said. “I’ve been on jobs that haven’t netted me a penny but, oh, does the adrenalin flow.” Good job it wasn’t the money, Buster; it never lasts.