Trainspotting the Fortune

0:00 Speaker 1: The Crime of the Century. A true story of the

0:03 Speaker 1: Great Train Robbery nineteen sixty three, a farmhouse in Buckinghamshire,

0:08 Speaker 1: Six days after the biggest cash robbery in British history,

0:11 Speaker 1: a police officer walked into a farmhouse called leather Slade

0:15 Speaker 1: and found half eaten meals still sitting on the kitchen table.

0:18 Speaker 1: There were sleeping bags scattered across the floors, Monopoly boards

0:22 Speaker 1: left midgame with real banknotes, it was said, tucked in

0:25 Speaker 1: for extra fun, and everywhere fingerprints dozens of them, on

0:30 Speaker 1: beer bottles, on a ketchup bottle, on a monopoly board itself,

0:33 Speaker 1: on a getaway truck parked in the barn. The gang

0:36 Speaker 1: who had pulled off the robbery of the Century had

0:38 Speaker 1: planned the raid itself with almost military precision. What they

0:42 Speaker 1: had not planned for was what to do afterward. That

0:45 Speaker 1: gap between genius and carelessness, between the perfect heist and

0:49 Speaker 1: the mundane business of disappearing, is where this story really lives.

0:53 Speaker 1: This is the story of the Great Train Robbery. How

0:56 Speaker 1: fifteen men stopped a mail train in the English countryside

0:59 Speaker 1: in the middle of the night, escaped with the modern

1:02 Speaker 1: equivalent of tens of millions of pounds, and then one

1:05 Speaker 1: by one were undone by the very ordinariness of being human.

1:09 Speaker 1: The set up a certain kind of Englishman in the

1:12 Speaker 1: London underworld of the early nineteen sixties. Bruce Reynolds was

1:16 Speaker 1: known as a cut above. He read Raymond Chandler novels,

1:19 Speaker 1: wore Seville Row suits, and talked about crime the way

1:22 Speaker 1: other men talked about chess. He had already pulled off

1:25 Speaker 1: a string of profitable jobs, a bookmaker's payroll here, a

1:29 Speaker 1: warehouse there. But Reynolds wanted something bigger. He wanted, in

1:33 Speaker 1: his own words later in life, to do something that

1:36 Speaker 1: would be remembered. Reynolds assembled what would become the Southern Gang.

1:40 Speaker 1: Gordon Goody, a hairdresser turned thief with a taste for theatrics,

1:45 Speaker 1: Charlie Wilson, a market trader with ice in his veins,

1:48 Speaker 1: and a rotating cast of associates who trusted Reynolds's instinct

1:52 Speaker 1: for a job worth doing. But none of them had

1:54 Speaker 1: ever robbed a train. For that kind of expertise, they

1:58 Speaker 1: needed help the Tip and the South Coast Raiders. The

2:01 Speaker 1: idea reportedly originated with an insider Tip, a source inside

2:05 Speaker 1: the Royal Mail, said to be a disgruntled or simply

2:08 Speaker 1: money hungry postal employee understood in detail how the overnight

2:12 Speaker 1: traveling post office trains worked, and more importantly, how much

2:15 Speaker 1: cash they sometimes carried. That source was introduced to Goody

2:19 Speaker 1: and Wilson's circle by Brian Field, a solicitor's clerk with

2:22 Speaker 1: underworld connections who would later become one of the case's

2:25 Speaker 1: more tragic figures, convicted despite what he always insisted was

2:29 Speaker 1: a lesser role. The tip was specific and startling. The

2:32 Speaker 1: Glasgow to London mail train sometimes carried enormous quantities of

2:36 Speaker 1: used banknotes being retired from circulation in Scotland, money that

2:40 Speaker 1: once it reached the incinerators in London would cease to

2:43 Speaker 1: exist and therefore couldn't be traced. Because of an August

2:47 Speaker 1: Bank holiday weekend in Scotland, one particular run promised an

2:50 Speaker 1: unusually large hall. Postal deliveries had backed up over the holiday,

2:55 Speaker 1: and the overnight train leaving Glasgow on the night of

2:57 Speaker 1: August seventh, nineteen sixty three would be carrying millions. The

3:01 Speaker 1: insider himself became one of the great unsolved mysteries of

3:05 Speaker 1: the entire case. Investigators and writers who dug into the

3:09 Speaker 1: robbery afterward gave him a nickname the ulster Man, based

3:13 Speaker 1: on his apparent Northern Irish accent, but his true identity

3:16 Speaker 1: was never conclusively established and it never came out at trial.

3:20 Speaker 1: Whoever he was, he had precise current knowledge of the

3:23 Speaker 1: train schedule and of exactly which knights carried the heaviest loads,

3:27 Speaker 1: the kind of detail that could only have come from

3:29 Speaker 1: deep inside the postal system. He took a cut of

3:32 Speaker 1: the proceeds, and, unlike almost everyone else connected to the robbery,

3:36 Speaker 1: was never caught, never named in open court, and by

3:39 Speaker 1: most accounts, never spent a day in prison for his

3:41 Speaker 1: role in the biggest cash theft in British history. Reynolds's crew,

3:45 Speaker 1: ambitious but inexperienced with trains, brought in specialists from a

3:49 Speaker 1: separate gang nicknamed the South Coast Raiders, Tommy Wisby, Jim

3:53 Speaker 1: Hussey and Bob Welch, among them, men who had actually

3:56 Speaker 1: robbed trains before. They also recruited Roger Cordrey, a soft

4:00 Speaker 1: spoken florist from Bournemouth whose real talent was rigging trackside

4:04 Speaker 1: signal lights, and who would turn out to be one

4:06 Speaker 1: of the most important men on the job. The plan

4:09 Speaker 1: The plan was elegant in its simplicity, which is often

4:13 Speaker 1: the mark of a good criminal scheme. Cordry would tamper

4:16 Speaker 1: with the signals near a rural crossing called Sears Crossing,

4:19 Speaker 1: just outside the village of Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, forcing the

4:23 Speaker 1: mail train to stop in open countryside rather than at

4:25 Speaker 1: a station where there would be witnesses and support. Once stopped,

4:29 Speaker 1: the gang from fifteen to eighteen men by the time

4:32 Speaker 1: the roster was finalized, would uncouple the locomotive and the

4:35 Speaker 1: first two carriages from the rest of the train, drive

4:38 Speaker 1: them a short distance up the track to Brdego Bridge

4:41 Speaker 1: and unload the high value mail bags into waiting vehicles

4:44 Speaker 1: under cover of darkness. They needed a hide out close

4:47 Speaker 1: enough to reach quickly, but remote enough to avoid notice.

4:50 Speaker 1: They found it in leather Slade Farm, a secluded property

4:53 Speaker 1: near the village of Oakley, bought through an intermediary under

4:57 Speaker 1: a false story about a family wanting privacy. The plan

5:00 Speaker 1: was for the gang to lie low there for a

5:02 Speaker 1: period after the robbery, waiting for the initial manhunt to

5:06 Speaker 1: cool before dispersing separately. It was on paper close to perfect.

5:11 Speaker 1: What nobody accounted for was how difficult it would be

5:13 Speaker 1: to get fifteen adrenaline soaked men to behave with discipline

5:17 Speaker 1: once the money was actually in their hands. Meet the

5:19 Speaker 1: gang before the story moves to the night of the

5:22 Speaker 1: robbery itself. It's worth slowing down to properly meet the

5:25 Speaker 1: people who pulled it off, because one of the strangest

5:27 Speaker 1: things about the Great Train Robbery is just how ordinary

5:30 Speaker 1: and in some cases, how talented and completely unrelated fields

5:33 Speaker 1: most of its participants were. Bruce Reynolds was the closest

5:36 Speaker 1: thing the gang had to a leader, A well read,

5:39 Speaker 1: well dressed career criminal in his early thirties who saw

5:42 Speaker 1: himself less as a thug than as a kind of

5:44 Speaker 1: connoisseur of crime. He had a fondness for antiques, jazz,

5:47 Speaker 1: and French existentialist novels, and friends later described him as

5:51 Speaker 1: someone who talked about a heist the way other men

5:54 Speaker 1: talked about art. It was Reynolds who pushed the group

5:57 Speaker 1: to think bigger than their usual peril jobs and warehouse

6:00 Speaker 1: break ins. Gordon Goody was Reynolds's closest deputy, a former

6:04 Speaker 1: hairdresser from Putney who, by his own later account, had

6:07 Speaker 1: decided as a young man that honest work simply wasn't

6:10 Speaker 1: for him. Goody had a reputation inside the underworld as sharp, careful,

6:15 Speaker 1: and almost impossible to convict. Having beaten several earlier charges.

6:20 Speaker 1: Of everyone connected to the case, Goody would turn out

6:23 Speaker 1: to be one of the two or three who kept

6:25 Speaker 1: the tightest lid on what really happened that night for

6:27 Speaker 1: the rest of his life. Charlie Wilson ran a fruit

6:30 Speaker 1: and vegetable stall in Suwock as a legitimate front, and

6:33 Speaker 1: had a reputation even among criminals for being unusually silent

6:38 Speaker 1: under police questioning. Associates nicknamed him the silent man of

6:42 Speaker 1: the entire gang. Wilson would go on to have one

6:45 Speaker 1: of the story's most dramatic escapes and eventually its most

6:49 Speaker 1: violent ending. Roy James, nicknamed the Weasel for his small

6:53 Speaker 1: frame and nimble driving, was by a wide margin the

6:57 Speaker 1: gang member with the most unusual double life. Away from crime.

7:01 Speaker 1: James was a genuinely promising amateur racing driver, competing in

7:05 Speaker 1: Formula Junior and Formula three events against future world champions.

7:09 Speaker 1: By some accounts, he had actually beaten a young Jackie

7:12 Speaker 1: Stewart in at least one race James saw the robbery

7:15 Speaker 1: as a short cut enough money to buy his way

7:18 Speaker 1: into a serious Formula one drive. He worked as a silversmith,

7:22 Speaker 1: had trialed for a professional football club as a teenager,

7:25 Speaker 1: and was by every account a strikingly good getaway driver,

7:28 Speaker 1: skills that made him indispensable on the night and that

7:31 Speaker 1: later left him spending prison years wondering what might have been.

7:34 Speaker 1: While Stuart went on to win three World championships. Buster

7:37 Speaker 1: Edwards was a former boxer and small time nightclub owner,

7:40 Speaker 1: well liked within the gang for his sense of humor,

7:43 Speaker 1: who would go on to have arguably the most publicly

7:46 Speaker 1: sympathetic post robbery life of anyone involved. Ronnie Biggs, at

7:49 Speaker 1: the time, a small time carpenter and petty thief with

7:52 Speaker 1: a fairly minor criminal record, was brought into the plan

7:55 Speaker 1: chiefly because he knew a retired train driver who it

7:58 Speaker 1: was hoped, would be needed to move the locomotive. If

8:00 Speaker 1: the regular driver refused to cooperate, that plan would misfire

8:04 Speaker 1: badly on the night itself, but Biggs's modest, almost accidental

8:08 Speaker 1: role in the actual crime would end up bearing no

8:11 Speaker 1: relationship at all to the outsized fame he later achieved

8:14 Speaker 1: as its most notorious face. Roger Cordrey, the Bournemouth florist

8:18 Speaker 1: with a gift for tampering with railway signals, was the

8:21 Speaker 1: quietest and least flamboyant member of the gang, and fittingly

8:25 Speaker 1: the first one caught. Rounding out the crew were Tommy Wisby,

8:28 Speaker 1: Jim Hussey and Bob Welch of the South Coast Raiders,

8:32 Speaker 1: brought in specifically for their prior experience robbing trains, John

8:35 Speaker 1: Daley and Jimmy White, longtime associates of Reynolds. Brian Field,

8:40 Speaker 1: the young solicitor's clerk who had brokered the deal with

8:42 Speaker 1: the mysterious Ulster Man and helped arrange the purchase of

8:45 Speaker 1: Leatherslade Farm, his employer, solicitor John Wheeder, drawn in on

8:49 Speaker 1: the periphery of the farm purchase. And two more men

8:52 Speaker 1: who took part in the robbery itself but were never

8:55 Speaker 1: definitively identified in court, known in the case files only

8:59 Speaker 1: as numbers one and two. A sixteenth man, a retired

9:03 Speaker 1: train driver brought along in case Jack Mills couldn't be

9:06 Speaker 1: forced to cooperate, sat in the getaway vehicle the entire night.

9:10 Speaker 1: Never used the substitute driver who, when the moment actually came,

9:14 Speaker 1: couldn't work the unfamiliar controls of an electric diesel locomotive.

9:17 Speaker 1: One more name matters to the story, even though he

9:20 Speaker 1: wasn't part of the underworld at all. William Bill Bowle,

9:23 Speaker 1: a middle aged engineer who was, by nearly every account

9:26 Speaker 1: gathered in the decades since, not actually a member of

9:28 Speaker 1: the gang at all. Bowle's crime, in the most generous reading,

9:32 Speaker 1: was friendship. He knew Roger Quadrey and made the mistake

9:35 Speaker 1: of being present when a large quantity of stolen money

9:38 Speaker 1: was discovered. That association would cost him Dearly the night Thursday,

9:44 Speaker 1: August seventh, nineteen sixty three, at six point fifty in

9:47 Speaker 1: the evening, the up Special Postal train pulled out of

9:50 Speaker 1: Glasgow's Central Station, bound for London's Euston Station, exactly as

9:55 Speaker 1: it did most nights inside seventy seven. Royal mail staff

9:59 Speaker 1: sorted in letters and parcels as the train rattled south

10:02 Speaker 1: through the darkening Scottish countryside and into England. The second

10:06 Speaker 1: carriage back from the engine was the high value package coach,

10:09 Speaker 1: normally reinforced with alarms, bars and reinforced doors, but on

10:13 Speaker 1: this particular night, the fully secured h VP carriages were

10:17 Speaker 1: out of service for other duties, and an older, far

10:20 Speaker 1: less secure reserve carriage had been substituted in their place

10:24 Speaker 1: because of the bank holiday backlog. The load inside the

10:27 Speaker 1: carriage was extraordinary and estimated two point six million pounds

10:31 Speaker 1: in cash worth roughly fifty million pounds in today's money,

10:36 Speaker 1: A some so large it filled one hundred twenty mail

10:38 Speaker 1: bags sears Crossing just after three am. Just past three

10:43 Speaker 1: in the morning on Friday August eighth, as the train

10:46 Speaker 1: rolled through Buckinghamshire near a rural signal box at sears Crossing,

10:49 Speaker 1: the driver, a man named Jack Mills, saw red light

10:53 Speaker 1: ahead and brought the train to a halt, as any

10:55 Speaker 1: responsible engineer would. It was a scene that played out

10:59 Speaker 1: on this stretch of track most nights without incident. This

11:02 Speaker 1: time it was a trap. Roger Cordrey had rigged the

11:05 Speaker 1: signal himself, covering the green light with a glove and

11:08 Speaker 1: wiring in a battery to power a false red a small,

11:12 Speaker 1: almost domestic piece of sabotage that stopped a two hundred

11:15 Speaker 1: ton train dead in the dark countryside. The co driver,

11:18 Speaker 1: David Whitby, climbed down to use the trackside phone and

11:22 Speaker 1: investigate the hold up, as procedure required. Instead, he found

11:26 Speaker 1: the phone line cut and was quickly overpowered by masked

11:29 Speaker 1: men waiting in the darkness. Within moments, more of the

11:33 Speaker 1: gang swarmed the engine. Jack Mills was struck on the head.

11:37 Speaker 1: Accounts differ on exactly how many times and how severely,

11:41 Speaker 1: but he was left bleeding and disoriented, and the injury

11:44 Speaker 1: would trouble him for the rest of his life. He

11:46 Speaker 1: was the only person physically hurt in the entire robbery,

11:49 Speaker 1: and his beating would become the moral center of the

11:52 Speaker 1: outrage that followed. A robbery of pure precision marred by

11:56 Speaker 1: one act of real violence against an ordinary working man

11:58 Speaker 1: just doing his job. With the crew subdued, the gang

12:02 Speaker 1: discovered a problem. The substitute driver they had brought along

12:05 Speaker 1: to move the train in case Mills refused to cooperate

12:09 Speaker 1: didn't know how to operate this particular locomotive's older controls

12:13 Speaker 1: they needed. Mills, bleeding, frightened but alive, he was forced

12:17 Speaker 1: back into the cab and made to drive the train

12:20 Speaker 1: the half mile to Birdago Bridge, where the rest of

12:22 Speaker 1: the gang and the getaway vehicles waited Birdago Bridge. At

12:26 Speaker 1: the bridge, the gang uncoupled the engine and the first

12:29 Speaker 1: two carriages from the rest of the train, leaving the

12:32 Speaker 1: postal workers in the remaining cars mostly unaware anything had

12:35 Speaker 1: happened at all, and formed a human chain down the

12:38 Speaker 1: embankment for roughly twenty minutes. Mail Bag after mail bag

12:42 Speaker 1: was past hand to hand down to a waiting land

12:44 Speaker 1: rover and an army truck bought specifically for the job,

12:47 Speaker 1: its markings deliberately chosen to look unremarkable to anyone who

12:50 Speaker 1: might glimpse it on a country road at night. They

12:53 Speaker 1: took one hundred twenty sacks. They left roughly seventy behind,

12:57 Speaker 1: either out of caution about time or because they're sims

13:00 Speaker 1: wasn't room. Before driving off, one of the gang told

13:03 Speaker 1: the postal workers and the train crew, according to accounts

13:06 Speaker 1: given afterward, not to move for at least half an

13:09 Speaker 1: hour to buy the getaway time they needed. Then they

13:13 Speaker 1: vanished into the dark toward leather Slade Farm. The entire

13:16 Speaker 1: operation from the false signal to the getaway had taken

13:20 Speaker 1: well under an hour. The unraveling leather Slade Farm, the

13:24 Speaker 1: plan called for the gang to hole up at the

13:26 Speaker 1: farm for a period of days, letting the initial storm

13:30 Speaker 1: of police activity pass before slipping away individually and quietly. Instead,

13:34 Speaker 1: discipline collapsed almost immediately. Men played cards, They ate meals.

13:40 Speaker 1: They listened to the radio for news of their own crime,

13:43 Speaker 1: with what witnesses would later describe as open glee, at

13:46 Speaker 1: one point apparently cheering when a report exaggerated the hall.

13:50 Speaker 1: Fingers touched surfaces that should have been wiped down, catch

13:53 Speaker 1: a bottles, cans, a monopoly board that, in one of

13:55 Speaker 1: the stories most enduring and almost absurd details some accounts say,

13:59 Speaker 1: was used to pass the time, with real stolen money

14:01 Speaker 1: mixed in as play money. Local rumor and a tip

14:04 Speaker 1: from a farm worker who'd noticed suspicious activity around the

14:07 Speaker 1: property soon reached the police, who were already combing the

14:11 Speaker 1: countryside for any lead. When officers finally entered leather Slade

14:15 Speaker 1: Farm less than a week after the robbery, the gang

14:18 Speaker 1: was long gone, but the farmhouse told the whole story anyway.

14:22 Speaker 1: Technicians lifted print after print. The most meticulously planned robbery

14:26 Speaker 1: in British history had been undone by nothing more exotic

14:30 Speaker 1: than men who forgot to clean up after themselves. The

14:33 Speaker 1: man hunt detective work moved quickly once the fingerprints came back.

14:38 Speaker 1: Roger Cordrey, the signal specialist, was the first arrested, caught

14:43 Speaker 1: after his landlady grew suspicious of an unusual amount of

14:46 Speaker 1: rent paid far in advance and alerted police. From Cordrey,

14:50 Speaker 1: investigators pulled at threads that led, one by one to

14:53 Speaker 1: nearly the entire gang, Gordon Goody, Charlie Wilson, Jim Hussey,

14:57 Speaker 1: Tommy Wisby, Roy James, John Daley, Bryan Field, his father

15:01 Speaker 1: in law, Leonard Field, solicitor John Wheer, Ronnie Biggs, and

15:04 Speaker 1: William Bowle, among others. By January nineteen sixty four, twelve

15:08 Speaker 1: men stood trial at Aylesbury Crown Court before Mister Justice

15:12 Speaker 1: Edmund Davies. The proceedings became a national spectacle. Jack Mills,

15:17 Speaker 1: the injured train driver, testified about the attack and the

15:20 Speaker 1: lasting effects of his injuries, testimony that hardened public opinion

15:24 Speaker 1: against the robbers, even as parts of the country oddly

15:28 Speaker 1: found something to admire in the sheer audacity of the

15:30 Speaker 1: crime itself. The sentences. In April nineteen sixty four, the

15:35 Speaker 1: verdicts came down, and they were severe. Some of the

15:38 Speaker 1: harshest sentences in modern British criminal history for a crime that,

15:41 Speaker 1: whatever its violence toward Mills, had not been a premeditated

15:45 Speaker 1: act of murder. Seven of the men, Goody, Wilson, Wisby, Welch, Hussey, James,

15:50 Speaker 1: and Biggs each received thirty years. Roger Cowdrey, who had

15:54 Speaker 1: pleaded guilty, received twenty. Brian Field was sentenced to twenty

15:59 Speaker 1: five years for conspiracy, and his employer, John Wheeder, received three.

16:04 Speaker 1: Bill Bowle, the engineer whose only real connection to the

16:06 Speaker 1: gang was his friendship with Cordrey, was sentenced to twenty

16:10 Speaker 1: four years, a term the judge handed down, according to

16:13 Speaker 1: reporting at the time, partly because Bowle had refused to

16:16 Speaker 1: stop protesting his innocence, which the court seemed to interpret

16:19 Speaker 1: as a lack of remorse. Taken together, the eleven convicted

16:23 Speaker 1: men were sentenced to a combined total of more than

16:26 Speaker 1: three hundred years in prison. The severity sparked genuine public debate.

16:30 Speaker 1: Newspapers and members of parliament alike pointed out that thirty

16:33 Speaker 1: years was longer than many convicted murderers served for a

16:37 Speaker 1: crime in which technically only one person had been physically hurt.

16:41 Speaker 1: Even some of the judges and detectives involved in the

16:43 Speaker 1: case would later say privately that the sentences were meant

16:46 Speaker 1: less as ordinary justice than as a message, a warning

16:49 Speaker 1: to the underworld that this particular kind of audacity would

16:52 Speaker 1: be punished without mercy. For Bill Bowle, that message came

16:55 Speaker 1: at an especially cruel cost. He died in prison in

16:59 Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight cancer, still insisting he had never been

17:02 Speaker 1: part of the robbery at all. Years later, his family

17:06 Speaker 1: pushed to have his name formally cleared, armed with an

17:09 Speaker 1: argument that gained real weight over time. Both Ronnie Biggs

17:12 Speaker 1: and Gordon Goody, two of the actual robbers, gave sworn

17:16 Speaker 1: statements asserting that Bowle had nothing to do with the

17:18 Speaker 1: crime and had, in their words, been stitched up by

17:22 Speaker 1: police eager to close out every loose end in a

17:24 Speaker 1: case that had embarrassed them publicly. Leonard Field, a more

17:28 Speaker 1: minor figure entangled through his son in law Brian Field,

17:31 Speaker 1: was likewise later found not guilty on appeal cold comfort

17:35 Speaker 1: for time he could never get back. For a moment,

17:38 Speaker 1: it looked as though the story of the Great Train

17:40 Speaker 1: Robbery might simply end there a spectacular crime, a swift capture,

17:45 Speaker 1: an era of long prison sentences to follow. It did

17:48 Speaker 1: not end there, it was only getting started. The escapes.

17:53 Speaker 1: Charlie Wilson vanishes just four months into his thirty year sentence.

17:57 Speaker 1: In August nineteen sixty four, Charlie Wilson became the first

18:01 Speaker 1: of the robbers to escape. A team of three men

18:04 Speaker 1: infiltrated Winson Green Prison in Birmingham and sprang him in

18:07 Speaker 1: a matter of minutes, an operation almost as audacious in

18:11 Speaker 1: its way as the robbery itself. Wilson fled first to

18:14 Speaker 1: Mexico City, then eventually to Canada, settling under a false

18:19 Speaker 1: identity in a secluded house outside Montreal. For years, he

18:22 Speaker 1: lived quietly in the wooded hills of Regaud undetected, until,

18:27 Speaker 1: in one of the story's small ironies, his wife made

18:30 Speaker 1: an ordinary phone call home to relatives in England. Scotland

18:34 Speaker 1: Yard traced the call, and in January nineteen sixty eight,

18:37 Speaker 1: more than three years after his escape, Wilson was captured

18:40 Speaker 1: and returned to England to serve out his sentence. Ronnie

18:44 Speaker 1: Biggs and the Wall of all the Great Train Robbers,

18:47 Speaker 1: one name would eclipse the rest in the public imagination.

18:51 Speaker 1: Ronnie Biggs in Truth Biggs was one of the more

18:54 Speaker 1: minor figures in the planning and execution of the robbery itself.

18:57 Speaker 1: By several accounts, his main country aabution, was helping recruit

19:01 Speaker 1: the substitute train driver, who ultimately proved useless. But what

19:05 Speaker 1: Biggs lacked in criminal importance he more than made up

19:08 Speaker 1: for in sheer staying power as a fugitive. In July

19:11 Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, less than fifteen months into his own

19:14 Speaker 1: thirty year sentence, Biggs escaped from Wandsworth Prison in London,

19:19 Speaker 1: scaling a wall with outside help in a plan nearly

19:21 Speaker 1: as daring as Wilson's. He fled to Paris, where he

19:25 Speaker 1: underwent plastic surgery to alter his appearance and acquired false

19:28 Speaker 1: identification papers. From there, his journey took him to Australia,

19:33 Speaker 1: where he lived under an assumed name with his family

19:35 Speaker 1: for several years before a tip to authorities forced him

19:38 Speaker 1: to move on once again, this time to Brazil. Rio

19:41 Speaker 1: de Gennaro, Brazil would become Biggs's home for more than

19:45 Speaker 1: three decades. Crucially, Brazil had no extradition treaty with the

19:49 Speaker 1: United Kingdom, and when Scotland Yard detectives finally tracked him

19:53 Speaker 1: down in Rio in nineteen seventy four. There was little

19:56 Speaker 1: they could legally do. The situation grew even more complicated

20:00 Speaker 1: when Biggs, already in his mid forties, fathered a son

20:03 Speaker 1: with a Brazilian girlfriend under Brazilian law at the time.

20:07 Speaker 1: Being the parent of a Brazilian miner provided him further

20:10 Speaker 1: protection from deportation. What followed was one of the stranger

20:14 Speaker 1: second acts in criminal history. Rather than hiding, Biggs leaned

20:18 Speaker 1: into his own celebrity. He gave interviews to British tabloids,

20:22 Speaker 1: charged tourists and entrance fee to attend barbecues at his home,

20:26 Speaker 1: and sold branded T shirts to visitors. He even recorded

20:30 Speaker 1: a song with the punk band The sex Pistols, no

20:32 Speaker 1: One Is Innocent, on which he sang lead vocals an outlaws,

20:37 Speaker 1: wink at the country that still wanted him behind bars.

20:40 Speaker 1: For much of the British public, Biggs became something close

20:43 Speaker 1: to a folk antihero, the cheeky rogue who'd beaten the system,

20:47 Speaker 1: sipping drinks on a hillside in Rio while detectives fumed

20:50 Speaker 1: a nocean away the kidnapping in nineteen eighty one, a

20:54 Speaker 1: group of British ex soldiers attempted to solve the extradition

20:58 Speaker 1: problem themselves. They lure Bigs onto a yacht under false pretenses,

21:02 Speaker 1: reportedly telling him he was being considered for a small

21:05 Speaker 1: role connected to a James Bond film production, and sailed

21:08 Speaker 1: him toward Barbados, where they believed British authorities could successfully

21:12 Speaker 1: extradite him from a jurisdiction that did have a treaty

21:14 Speaker 1: with the UK. The plan fell apart when the yacht's

21:17 Speaker 1: engine failed in Barbadian waters. Local police intervened, Two of

21:22 Speaker 1: the kidnappers were arrested, and Barbados's High Court ultimately ruled

21:26 Speaker 1: there was no valid basis to extradite Biggs at all.

21:29 Speaker 1: At his own request, he was returned to Brazil. Buster

21:33 Speaker 1: Edwards and Charlie Wilson's endings not every robber's later life

21:37 Speaker 1: made for such colorful headlines. Buster Edwards, another central figure

21:42 Speaker 1: in the gang, fled to Mexico for three years before

21:46 Speaker 1: eventually returning to Britain and surrendering After serving his sentence,

21:50 Speaker 1: He tried to rebuild an ordinary existence, running a flower

21:54 Speaker 1: stall outside London's Waterloo station for years. His story later

21:58 Speaker 1: dramatized in the nineteen eighty eight eight film buster The

22:01 Speaker 1: Ordinary Life Didn't Hold. In nineteen ninety four, Edwards took

22:06 Speaker 1: his own life. Charlie Wilson's story ended even more violently.

22:10 Speaker 1: After completing his sentence and settling on Spain's Costa del Sol,

22:15 Speaker 1: Wilson became entangled by most accounts in the drug trade.

22:18 Speaker 1: In April nineteen ninety he was shot dead by a

22:21 Speaker 1: hit man as he relaxed beside his own swimming pool.

22:24 Speaker 1: One of the few unsolved footnotes in a case that

22:27 Speaker 1: otherwise eventually resolved almost every one of its loose ends,

22:31 Speaker 1: The Long Way Home Biggs Comes Back. For thirty six years,

22:36 Speaker 1: Ronnie Biggs lived largely in the open in Brazil, untouchable

22:39 Speaker 1: by British law but never truly free of his own notoriety.

22:43 Speaker 1: Age and illness eventually did what Scotland Yard could not.

22:47 Speaker 1: In two thousand and one, Weakened by a series of

22:49 Speaker 1: strokes and in failing health, Biggs made the extraordinary decision

22:53 Speaker 1: to return voluntarily to the United Kingdom, reportedly saying he

22:57 Speaker 1: wanted to come home and perhaps share a pint of

22:59 Speaker 1: beer with the day detective who had spent years chasing him.

23:02 Speaker 1: He was immediately arrested and returned to prison to complete

23:05 Speaker 1: his original sentence. In two thousand and nine, citing his

23:08 Speaker 1: deteriorating health he had lost the ability to speak and

23:12 Speaker 1: could barely walk, the British government granted Biggs a compassionate release.

23:16 Speaker 1: He died in a London care home in December twenty

23:19 Speaker 1: thirteen at the age of eighty four, just months after

23:23 Speaker 1: Bruce Reynolds, the original mastermind of the robbery, had died

23:27 Speaker 1: at eighty one. What the money never became of the

23:30 Speaker 1: roughly two point six million pounds taken that August night

23:33 Speaker 1: worth tens of millions of pounds in today's terms. The

23:37 Speaker 1: overwhelming majority was never recovered. Some was seized from gang

23:41 Speaker 1: members during the initial arrests. Some, by most accounts, was spent, laundered,

23:46 Speaker 1: or simply lost to time, hidden in places its owners

23:49 Speaker 1: could never safely retrieve it from prison cells or foreign exile.

23:53 Speaker 1: To this day, no one has ever offered a full

23:56 Speaker 1: accounting of where it all went loose ends who actually

24:00 Speaker 1: hit Jack Mills. For nearly fifty years, one question about

24:03 Speaker 1: the robbery remained stubbornly unanswered, even among people who knew

24:07 Speaker 1: every other detail of the case. Which of the gang

24:10 Speaker 1: members actually struck the blow that injured Jack Mills. At trial,

24:14 Speaker 1: no single individual was ever pinned to the act, and

24:16 Speaker 1: the men who'd been their closed ranks around the question

24:19 Speaker 1: for decades the way career criminals of that era generally did. Then,

24:23 Speaker 1: in twenty twelve, Jim Hussey, one of the South Coast

24:26 Speaker 1: Raiders brought in for his train experience, reportedly made a

24:30 Speaker 1: deathbed confession claiming that he was the one who struck Mills.

24:34 Speaker 1: Gordon Goody, one of the last surviving members of the

24:37 Speaker 1: gang at the time, publicly disputed the claim in interviews,

24:40 Speaker 1: but pointedly declined to say who he believed had actually

24:43 Speaker 1: done it, keeping a fifty year silence intact even in

24:45 Speaker 1: his final years. It remains one of the only genuine

24:48 Speaker 1: mysteries left in a case where police in truth identified

24:53 Speaker 1: nearly the entire gang within about three weeks of the robbery.

24:56 Speaker 1: Roy James, the getaway Driver's long fall of everyone involved,

25:02 Speaker 1: Roy James's later life might be the most quietly tragic.

25:06 Speaker 1: He served twelve years of his thirty year sentence, and

25:09 Speaker 1: upon release, tried to rebuild himself as a silversmith, eventually

25:13 Speaker 1: becoming skilled enough to have his work associated with high

25:16 Speaker 1: end jewelry commissions, but the old instincts didn't fully disappear.

25:20 Speaker 1: In the early nineteen eighties, he was tried in connection

25:23 Speaker 1: with a gold smuggling and bullioned dealing scheme and was

25:26 Speaker 1: acquitted in nineteen eighty four. Then in nineteen ninety three,

25:30 Speaker 1: in a moment that shocked even people who thought they'd

25:32 Speaker 1: stopped being surprised by this case, James shot and wounded

25:35 Speaker 1: his own father in law and assaulted his ex wife

25:37 Speaker 1: during a dispute after a family visit, an act that

25:40 Speaker 1: sent him back to prison for six years. He underwent

25:43 Speaker 1: major heart surgery in nineteen ninety six, was released from

25:46 Speaker 1: prison in nineteen ninety seven, and died of a heart

25:48 Speaker 1: attack almost immediately afterward. The getaway driver, who once dreamed

25:52 Speaker 1: of Formula one and who briefly outraced a future three

25:55 Speaker 1: time world champion on a British circuit gone at sixty two,

25:59 Speaker 1: the fifth member of the gang to die, despite being

26:01 Speaker 1: one of the youngest. Gordon Goody the quiet life in Mojicar.

26:06 Speaker 1: Goody served roughly twelve years before his release in the

26:09 Speaker 1: mid nineteen seventies, and eventually settled in the small whitewashed

26:12 Speaker 1: Spanish village of Mojicar, where he ran a bar called

26:15 Speaker 1: the Kantiki for the rest of his life. For decades,

26:18 Speaker 1: he was famous mainly for saying almost nothing at all

26:21 Speaker 1: about the robbery. The quiet man of the gang, in

26:24 Speaker 1: contrast to Reynolds's storytelling and Biggs's showmanship, he broke his

26:28 Speaker 1: silence only occasionally in his final years, once telling an

26:32 Speaker 1: interviewer with a kind of unrepentant honesty that crime had

26:36 Speaker 1: simply never felt like hard work to him. He died

26:39 Speaker 1: in Spain in January twenty sixteen, one of the last

26:42 Speaker 1: surviving members of the gang, Brian Field, John Wheer, and

26:46 Speaker 1: the others. Brian Field's conviction was later overturned on appeal,

26:51 Speaker 1: but his life after the robbery never fully stabilized. He

26:54 Speaker 1: was killed in a car crash in nineteen seventy nine

26:57 Speaker 1: at just forty four years old. His employer, the solicitor

27:01 Speaker 1: John Wheeder, served his shorter sentence and largely disappeared from

27:05 Speaker 1: public life afterward. Tommy Wisby, Jim Hussey, and Bob Welch

27:10 Speaker 1: all served lengthy terms, and, following their releases, mostly avoided

27:14 Speaker 1: the spotlight that followed men like Biggs and Reynolds. Wisby

27:18 Speaker 1: later spoke publicly a handful of times about his regrets,

27:21 Speaker 1: particularly around the toll the case took on his family.

27:24 Speaker 1: John Day tried separately from the main group, was acquitted

27:28 Speaker 1: after arguing that a fingerprint found at the farm did

27:30 Speaker 1: not prove guilt of the robbery itself. Jimmy White evaded

27:34 Speaker 1: capture for roughly three years by hiding in plain sight

27:37 Speaker 1: around England with his family, before being turned in and

27:39 Speaker 1: arrested in nineteen sixty six. He served nine years of

27:43 Speaker 1: an eighteen year sentence. Bruce Reynolds The Mastermind's Return. Reynolds himself,

27:49 Speaker 1: the man who had first dreamed the whole thing up,

27:51 Speaker 1: fled abroad after the robbery and lived for a time

27:54 Speaker 1: in Mexico and Canada before returning to Britain, where he

27:57 Speaker 1: was finally arrested in nineteen sixty eight, years years after

28:00 Speaker 1: the crime, while reportedly still scheming new jobs. He served

28:04 Speaker 1: roughly ten years of a twenty five year sentence. In

28:07 Speaker 1: his later decades, Reynolds became something like the robbery's unofficial

28:11 Speaker 1: historian and elder statesman, writing a memoir and giving interviews

28:15 Speaker 1: that shaped much of the public narrative around the case.

28:19 Speaker 1: He died in February twenty thirteen at the age of

28:21 Speaker 1: eighty one, just ten months before Ronnie Biggs. The legend

28:26 Speaker 1: grows almost from the moment the last arrests were made,

28:29 Speaker 1: the Great Train Robbery began turning into something bigger than

28:32 Speaker 1: a police case. It became a genuine piece of British folklore,

28:36 Speaker 1: retold and reshaped by books, films, and songs for the

28:39 Speaker 1: rest of the century. In nineteen seventy eight, several of

28:42 Speaker 1: the surviving robbers reportedly cooperated with the author Peers Paul

28:46 Speaker 1: Read on a book about their side of events, in

28:48 Speaker 1: exchange for a substantial fee, one of the earliest examples

28:51 Speaker 1: of former criminals directly monetizing their own notoriety. In this way,

28:55 Speaker 1: Ronnie Biggs, always the Showman, went further than any of them.

28:59 Speaker 1: From his home in Reas, he recorded lead vocals on

29:01 Speaker 1: a song with the punk band the Sex Pistols in

29:03 Speaker 1: the late nineteen seventies, a collaboration almost impossible to picture

29:07 Speaker 1: happening with any other group of convicted armed robbers in

29:10 Speaker 1: any other country at any other time. Buster Edwards's story

29:13 Speaker 1: became the subject of a nineteen eighty eight feature film

29:16 Speaker 1: that dramatized his years on the run and his eventual

29:19 Speaker 1: return to an ordinary life running a market stall, a

29:22 Speaker 1: portrayal that helped cement the gang's public image as lovable

29:25 Speaker 1: rogues rather than violent criminals, even though that image sat

29:28 Speaker 1: uneasily beside what had actually happened to Jack Mills on

29:31 Speaker 1: the night of the robbery. Decades of documentaries, retrospectives, and

29:36 Speaker 1: newspaper anniversary features followed, most of them wrestling with the

29:40 Speaker 1: same tension, how to tell a story this colorful, this cinematic,

29:44 Speaker 1: without losing sight of the ordinary man who never fully

29:47 Speaker 1: recovered from it. Why it still matters more than sixty

29:51 Speaker 1: years later, The Great Train Robbery endures in British popular

29:54 Speaker 1: memory in a way few other crimes do. Part of

29:57 Speaker 1: it is scale, the sheer audacity of s stopping a

30:00 Speaker 1: moving train with a rig traffic signal and a cut

30:03 Speaker 1: phone line. Part of it is the cast of characters,

30:06 Speaker 1: men who seem to have wandered out of a heist

30:08 Speaker 1: film and into real life, complete with plastic surgery, tropical exile,

30:12 Speaker 1: and a sex pistols cameo. But underneath the caper mythology

30:16 Speaker 1: sits something harder and more sobering. Jack Mills, an ordinary

30:20 Speaker 1: working man doing his job in the middle of the night,

30:22 Speaker 1: beaten and left with injuries that stayed with him the

30:25 Speaker 1: rest of his life, dying nine years after the robbery,

30:28 Speaker 1: and poor health that his family always believed was connected

30:30 Speaker 1: to the attack. The line between crime of the century

30:33 Speaker 1: and simple violence against an innocent person is a thin one,

30:37 Speaker 1: and the story of the Great Train Robbery sits directly

30:39 Speaker 1: on top of it, equal parts audacious legend and cautionary

30:43 Speaker 1: tale about what happens when meticulous planning meets ordinary human carelessness,

30:47 Speaker 1: and what a single moment of violence can cost long

30:50 Speaker 1: after the money itself has disappeared. This podcast draws on

30:54 Speaker 1: the historical record as documented by British Transport Police, the

30:57 Speaker 1: UK National Archives, and decade of contemporary reporting, obituaries and

31:02 Speaker 1: biography on the case and the people involved in it.