The Crime Book

32

A

t the beginning of the

1960s, life for many

Londoners was poverty-

stricken and drab. The austerity

of postwar rationing was a

recent memory, ending only

six years before.

Having acquired the taste for

easy money by taking advantage

of his work in a sausage factory to

sell black-market meat, Ronald

Christopher “Buster” Edwards,

was graduating to robberies with

his friend Gordon Goody. Their

brushes with the law brought them

into contact with Brian Field, a

lawyer’s clerk. His services did not

stop at preparing their defences.

For a cut of the proceeds Field

would pass the duo details of his

firm’s clients as potential targets.

Early in 1963, Field introduced

them to a stranger known only as

“the Ulsterman”. Believed to be

Belfast-born Patrick McKenna, this

corrupt Manchester postal worker

brought intriguing news: large cash

sums were being carried on the

overnight mail trains from Glasgow

to London. A tempting target – if

above Goody’s and Edwards’ pay-

grade. They took the information to

an experienced South London

criminal called Bruce Richard

Reynolds. In the months that

followed, Reynolds started to put

together an adhoc gang.

Best-laid plans

The plan was elegantly simple. The

gang would stop the train in open

countryside in Buckinghamshire at

Sears Crossing, close to the village

of Ledburn, where a signal could be

interfered with. While this was the

perfect place to stop the train, high

embankments made it unsuitable

for unloading the loot. For that, the

train would be moved to nearby

Ronnie Biggs He objected to being dismissed as

the gang’s “teaboy”, but Ronnie

Biggs’s role could hardly be

considered crucial in the Great

Train Robbery. Born in Stockwell,

south London, in 1929, he was a

somewhat hapless burglar and

armed robber when he met Bruce

Reynolds in Wandsworth Prison.

The Great Train Robbery was to

be his first and only major heist.

His main responsibility was the

recruitment of “Stan Agate”, the

gang’s replacement driver, who

was not actually able to move the

train because he was not familiar

with the type of locomotive used.

Biggs’s fingerprints were found

on a ketchup bottle at the gang’s

hideout and he was arrested

three weeks later. He escaped

Wandsworth Prison using a rope

ladder on 8 July 1965. He

travelled to Brussels, then on

to Australia before settling in

Brazil in 1970, which did not

then have an extradition treaty

with the UK. Eventually, Biggs

returned to the UK on a jet paid

for by The Sun newspaper in

exchange for exclusive rights to

his story. Biggs was arrested

minutes after landing at RAF

Northolt on 7 May 2001.

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

IN CONTEXT

LOCATION

Ledburn,

Buckinghamshire, UK

THEME

Train robbery

BEFORE

15 May 1855 Approximately

91 kg (200 lb) of gold is stolen

from safes on board a South

Eastern Railway train running

between London Bridge and

Folkestone, UK.

12 June 1924 The Newton

Gang carry out a postal train

robbery near Rondout, Illinois,

and steal around $3 milllion

(£33 million today), making it

the biggest train robbery in

history at that time.

AFTER

31 March 1976 A train

travelling from Cork to Dublin,

Ireland, is robbed near the

village of Sallins by members

of the Irish Republican

Socialist Party.

Am I one of a minority in

feeling admiration for the skill

and courage behind the Great

Train Robbery?

Graham Greene

030-035_Great_Train_Robbery.indd 32 12/12/2016 17:12

33

Bridego Bridge. The mail train was

typically long, its cars manned by

up to 80 postal workers who spent

the journey sorting letters and

packages. The gang discovered

that High-Value Packages (HVPs)

were stored in the second coach

from the front, so the gang planned

to uncouple just the first two

coaches. Once they reached

Bridego Bridge, they could unload

sacks of registered mail using a

human chain from the high

embankment to a drop-side lorry

waiting on the road below.

Reynolds refused to leave

anything to chance, so in case the

hijacked driver refused to carry out

their demands, one of the gang

would spend months studying

locomotive manuals. Posing as a

schoolteacher, he persuaded a

driver on a suburban line to take

him along for a ride: watching

closely, he picked up certain basics.

Reynolds also recruited a fully

experienced driver to make sure.

Field, meanwhile, negotiated the

purchase of the abandoned

Leatherslade Farm, roughly

50 km (30 miles) from Sears

Crossing, which would be their

hideout after the robbery.

Signal victory

Just before 7pm on Wednesday,

7 August, the train left Glasgow,

with veteran driver Jack Mills at

the controls and his co-driver David

Whitby beside him. The HVP coach

was carrying over £2.6 million

(about £49 million today) in cash

rather than the £300,000 or so the

gang had been expecting because

of the public holiday on the

previous Monday, during which

the banks had been closed.

By the time the train reached

Sears Crossing, gang members

had tampered with the signal

lights; they slipped a glove over the

green light to blot it out and wired

the red “stop” sign to a separate

See also: The James–Younger Gang 24–25 ■ The Wild Bunch 150–51

BANDITS, ROBBERS, AND ARSONISTS

The train was halted just before

Bridego Bridge where the gang formed

a human chain down the embankment.

They loaded the loot onto a lorry where

the black car is in the image.

battery. A surprised Mills brought

the train to a halt and Whitby

went to investigate. When he tried

to report in from the trackside

telephone, he found that the wires

had been cut.

As Whitby made his way back

towards the train, he was hurled

down the steep embankment by

men in motorcycle helmets and ski

masks. Meanwhile, gang members

wearing masks and gloves climbed

into Mills’s cab and knocked him

unconscious with an iron bar;

others uncoupled the coaches from

the rear of the HVP coach, and

overpowered and handcuffed the

postal workers.

It soon became clear that the

replacement driver – a retiree

known as “Stan Agate” to the gang

• was unable to operate the state-
  of-the-art Class 40 diesel-electric
  locomotive. So, having knocked out
  Mills, the robbers had to revive him
  so he could take them up the line to
  Bridego Bridge. Passing the ❯❯

It is the British press that

made the “legend” that you

see before you, so perhaps I

should ask you who I am.

Ronnie Biggs

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