In the small hours of the 8th of August, 1963, a gang of fifteen men stopped a Royal Mail train on a quiet stretch of track in Buckinghamshire and made off with two and a half million pounds in used banknotes — the equivalent of perhaps sixty million today, and the largest robbery in British history. They did it with no guns, a clever trick of wiring, and a great deal of nerve, and the press immediately christened it “the Crime of the Century.” In the decades since, it has been wrapped in a thick layer of romance: the daring, the cleverness, the loveable rogues, the almost-victimless caper.
That romance is a lie, and the lie has a name: Jack Mills, the train driver, who was beaten over the head with an iron bar that night and never fully recovered. Any honest telling of the Great Train Robbery has to hold both things at once — the genuine audacity of the crime, and the blood on the floor of the cab.
The firm
The robbery was the product of the London criminal underworld of the early 1960s — a world of working-class South London men, sharp and ambitious and contemptuous of the straight life that had little to offer them, who had graduated from smash-and-grab raids into professional armed robbery. They thought of themselves not as thugs but as craftsmen, and they dreamed of the one great job that would let them all retire.
The mastermind was Bruce Reynolds, an antiques dealer turned career thief with the tastes and aspirations of a gentleman and the record of a criminal. Around him gathered a crew whose names would become famous: Gordon Goody, a dominant planner; Charlie Wilson, the gang’s treasurer, nicknamed “the Silent Man” for refusing to utter a single word at his trial, and reckoned the most dangerous of them all; Buster Edwards; the racing driver Roy James; Tommy Wisbey, Jimmy White, and the signals expert Roger Cordrey. And, in a minor role that would nonetheless make him the most famous of all, a small-time crook named Ronnie Biggs.
The opportunity came from an inside source, a shadowy figure the gang knew only as “the Ulsterman,” whose real identity has never been established to this day. He told them about the travelling post office trains that ran overnight from Glasgow to London carrying used banknotes from the Scottish banks down to the capital — sums that swelled enormously after a bank holiday, when several days’ worth of cash piled up. The money rode in a single high-value carriage, sorted by post-office staff as the train moved, and it was guarded by nothing more than those workers. To a gang of professional robbers, it was a lightly-guarded bank vault rolling through the dark.
Stopping the train
The gang set up a base at Leatherslade Farm, an isolated property some twenty-seven miles from the spot they had chosen for the robbery — close enough to reach quickly, remote enough to vanish into while the roadblocks went up.
The method of stopping the train was elegantly low-tech. At a place called Sears Crossing, the gang covered the green signal light with a glove so the driver couldn’t see it, and wired up a red light powered by a simple battery, creating a false “stop.” They cut the trackside telephone cables so no alarm could be raised. Just after three in the morning, the driver — Jack Mills, fifty-eight years old, from Crewe — brought the train to a halt at the false red. His young fireman climbed down to use the trackside phone, found the wires cut, and was seized.
And here the clever caper turned ugly. The gang had brought along a retired train driver to move the train the half-mile to their chosen unloading spot — but the old man couldn’t work the controls of the modern locomotive. So they turned back to Jack Mills, who had been struck over the head with a cosh and left bleeding and semi-conscious, and forced the injured man back to the controls to drive the train himself. This is the fact the legend spent decades softening. It is true that the robbers carried no firearms. It is also true that they beat a fifty-eight-year-old railwayman about the head, and that he carried the consequences for the rest of his life.
At Bridego Bridge the gang formed a human chain and unloaded the mailbags down the embankment into a waiting Land Rover and lorry — a hundred and twenty sacks holding more than six hundred high-value packages. Reynolds had imposed a strict thirty-minute limit; when it ran out, they left the remaining bags behind and fled to the farm. The haul, by the police’s careful reckoning, came to £2,595,997 and ten shillings — almost entirely in used one- and five-pound notes, untraceable. The bulk of it would never be recovered.
Undone by a board game
The robbery itself was very nearly flawless. The undoing was the aftermath, and it is one of the great self-inflicted defeats in the history of crime.
Holed up at Leatherslade Farm waiting for the heat to pass, the gang grew bored, and to pass the time they played Monopoly — using the real stolen banknotes as the play money. The plan had been to clean the farm thoroughly, perhaps burn it, before scattering. It wasn’t done properly. When the police found the farm, they recovered fingerprints the gang had overlooked — on a bottle of tomato ketchup, and on the Monopoly set itself. Those prints, matched against criminal records, led to the arrest of most of the gang. Hardened professionals, having pulled off the heist of the century, were betrayed by a condiment bottle and a board game played with the loot.
The hunt was led by Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, head of Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad — a famously driven, austere bachelor known as “the Grey Fox,” who pursued the robbers with obsessive zeal at the head of a small, hand-picked squad. One of his officers, Jack Slipper, would become famous in his own right through the decades-long pursuit of Ronnie Biggs. One by one, through the autumn of 1963, the gang was brought in.
The establishment’s revenge
The trial began at Aylesbury in January 1964, ran for fifty-one days, and ended on the 15th of April when the judge, Mr Justice Edmund Davies, called the robbery “a crime of sordid violence inspired by vast greed” and handed down sentences of thirty years to seven of the robbers.
Thirty years. The severity stunned the country and has remained controversial ever since — these were sentences longer than many murderers and armed robbers received, for a robbery in which no one was killed. The robbers themselves bitterly resented it, and tellingly, men tried later for the same crime, by different judges, got far less. The widely held reading is that the British establishment had decided to make a brutal example of these men — not only for the violence to Jack Mills, but for the affront: a gang of working-class South London criminals had robbed the Royal Mail of a fortune and made the authorities look like fools. The thirty years was punishment for the humiliation as much as for the crime.
If the robbery made the gang famous, the escapes made two of them legends. In August 1964, after barely four months inside, Charlie Wilson was broken out of Birmingham’s Winson Green prison in under three minutes by a team that had broken into the jail to get him. And in July 1965, fifteen months into his sentence, Ronnie Biggs went over the thirty-foot wall of Wandsworth prison on a rope ladder dropped from a furniture van parked alongside, during the exercise hour, and disappeared.
Biggs, and the man the legend forgot
Ronnie Biggs’s flight became one of the most famous fugitive sagas of the twentieth century. He fled to Brussels, then Paris, where he had plastic surgery and acquired new papers, and eventually settled — by way of Australia — in Brazil, where he lived openly for years, beyond the reach of extradition. In 1974, the Flying Squad veteran Jack Slipper flew to Rio and actually confronted him — the famous “Long time no see, Ronnie” — but Brazil refused to extradite him because he had fathered a Brazilian child, and Slipper returned home empty-handed, mocked in the press as “Slip-up of the Yard,” immortalized in a photograph of him asleep beside the empty airplane seat where his prisoner should have been.
Biggs stayed free for some thirty-six years, taunting the British authorities, selling his story, even recording with the Sex Pistols — the criminal as celebrity. Old and ailing, he finally returned to Britain voluntarily in 2001, his trip paid for by a tabloid, was immediately re-imprisoned with twenty-eight years still to serve, was released on compassionate grounds in 2009, and died in a care home in 2013, aged eighty-four.
Here is the irony at the centre of his fame, and it is worth dwelling on: Ronnie Biggs was, operationally, one of the least important members of the gang. His only real job had been to recruit the relief train driver — and when that man proved unable to drive the locomotive, Biggs and the old driver were effectively sidelined while the others looted the train. His fame had almost nothing to do with the robbery and almost everything to do with the rope ladder, the plastic surgery, and thirty-six years of flamboyant escape. The most famous of the great train robbers was, on the night itself, very nearly a spare part.
And against all the glamour stands Jack Mills. He made only a partial recovery from the beating, returned to light duties, retired in 1967, and suffered headaches for the rest of his life before dying in 1970. The cause was leukaemia, which the doctors said was unrelated to his injuries — but his family, and much of the public, never quite separated the two, and felt that the robbery had broken him. His son put it bitterly: “I deeply resent those, including Biggs, who have made money from my father’s death.” That resentment is the necessary corrective to the whole loveable-rogue legend. While the robbers became folk heroes and sold their memoirs, the railwayman they coshed declined quietly and died, and the men who became rich and famous on the story of that night were the ones who had put him in the cab with a head wound and told him to drive.
The Great Train Robbery was, in its way, a genuinely remarkable crime — audacious, meticulous, almost perfect in execution and gloriously imperfect in everything after. But it was not the bloodless caper of the legend. It was a robbery in which an honest man doing his job at three in the morning was beaten about the head, and the truest measure of the thing is not the two and a half million pounds, most of which vanished, but the headaches Jack Mills carried to his grave.
Power and Pelf 