 You
are an excellent provider of catchwords,
Mr, Rhodes, in this case for one of the
most widely published criminals of all
time, known for his role in the Great
Train Robbery of 1963, for his escape
from prison in 1965, for living as a
fugitive for 36 years and for his various
publicity stunts while in exile. His
name: Mr. Ronald Arthur Biggs … His
hour came just after 3 a.m. in the night
from 7th to 8th August, 1963 …
—
tazara — tazaaaaaara —
tazaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ... stoppp
Please,
look through the windows and become a
witness of a historic enterprise!
We are in Ledburn near Mentmore in
Buckinghamshire, England. To be more
precise: at a place known as 'Sears
Crossing' between Leighton Buzzard in
Bedfordshire and Cheddington in
Buckinghamshire.
We observe the scene from our train
parked at a rail siding … This hour
is for the man who is going to report
live for us a turn-around in his
otherwise not very much eventful life as
a family man and as a part time-crook
…
 … „And since
three hours it is my
thirty-fourth birthday! Thank you very
much for the flowers! … Now, this is
the task of my buddy Rogers Cordrey: to
climb up to that gallery over there; it
is like a tiny bridge that crosses the
rails, looks like the one in that movie
LADYKILLERS, do you know it? From such a
gallery one dead body after the other is
being disposed onto coal-trains that pass
underneath.“ ...
We did
not intend to watch still another movie
…
„But every railway-fan has to know
it! It’s only eight years back when
it came into our local cinema, and what
did we laugh … If you don‘t
show it I‘ll tell the storyline
…
Alec Guinness spielte
You see, Mrs. Louisa Wilberforce is an
eccentric old widow who lives alone with
her parrots in a gradually subsiding
lopsided house in King’s Cross. With
nothing to occupy her time and an active
imagination, she is a frequent visitor at
the local police station, where she
reports fanciful suspicions regarding
various people she has come into contact
with. Because of the wild-goose-chases
she has led them on in the past, the
officers in the station humour her, but
give her absolutely no credence.
She is approached by a comically sinister
criminal, 'Professor' Marcus — and I
remember this one, he was played by Alec
Guinness. He wants to rent rooms in her
house. Unbeknownst to her, he has put
together a gang for a sophisticated
security van robbery at the railway
station: the gentlemanly con-man 'Major'
Courtney, the Cockney spiv Harry Robinson
— wasn’t that Peter Sellers?
— the slow-witted ex-boxer
'One-Round' Lawson and the vicious
continental gangster Louis Harvey.
However, the Professor convinces Mrs.
Wilberforce that they are an amateur
string quintet using the room for
rehearsal space. To maintain the
deception, the gang members carry musical
instruments and play a recording of a
classical music piece during their
planning sessions.“ ...
Boccherini's
Minuet 3rd movement from String Quintet
in E, Op. 11 No. 5 …
„Ah, you know it then! But let me
just finish: After the successful theft,
the real conflict begins. As the gang
leaves her house, 'One-Round'
accidentally gets his cello case full of
banknotes trapped in the front door as it
is closed by Mrs. Wilberforce. As he
pulls the case free the banknotes spill
out in front of Mrs. Wilberforce. She
realises the truth and informs Marcus
that she is going to report them to the
police.
The gangsters, unaware of her reputation,
decide they have no choice but to do away
with her. No one wants to do it, so they
draw matchsticks. The Major loses, but
tries to make a run for it with the cash
in hand. In quick succession, the
criminals double-cross and kill one
another, with the bodies ending up dumped
into railway wagons passing behind the
house under the said gallery. Throughout
all this, the oblivious Mrs. Wilberforce
remains asleep … The gang members
are dead, with Alec Guinness as the last
one hit by the lowering signal, and Mrs.
Wilberforce is left with the money. She
goes to the police to return it, but they
do not believe her and jokingly tell her
to keep it — using the same
explanation given her earlier by
Professor Marcus, that because the money
was insured, any effort on their part to
return it would only confuse things. She
is puzzled, but decides to follow their
advice and goes home.
Now … wasn’t that fun? What did
we laugh.“ ...
Fascination
bank-robbery — as a thriller, as a
tragedy, as a comedy!
When you laughed in 1955 about Alec
Guinness and his gang, Mr. Biggs, you
could not have imagined that you and your
gang would once become model for actors
in at least three movies; one of it was
even produced after a script you wrote.
Today is the 8th August 1963, you still
have no clue … let’s go ahead,
it is almost 3 a.m.! You were describing
what your buddy Roger Cordrey intended to
do up there on that gallery …
„Also, er zieht
jetzt einen alten Handschuh
„Alright, he pulls an old glove over
the shining green light of the
rail-signal and connects a six-volt Ever
Ready battery to power the red signal
light.
All this was supposed to have happened
twenty-four hours earlier. We were all
assembled at Leatherslade Farm between
Oakley and Brill in Buckinghamshire,
which was a run down farm twenty-seven
miles from the scene that our boss had
bought two months earlier as our hideout.
But the bad news was that the special
train would carry that evening much less
money than expected.
Tonight it will be different.
Yesterday, at 6:50 p.m. the travelling
post office "Up Special" train
set off from Glasgow Central Station,
Scotland en-route to Euston Station in
London. The train is hauled by a
diesel-electric locomotive. It consists
of twelve carriages and carries
seventy-two Post Office staff who are
sorting mail. The mail was loaded on the
train at Glasgow and also during station
stops en-route, as well as from line side
collection points where local post office
staff would hang mail sacks on elevated
trackside hooks which are caught by nets
deployed by the onboard staff. Sorted
mail on the train can also be dropped-off
at the same time. You see, this clever
process of exchange allows mail to be
distributed locally without delaying the
train with more frequent station stops.
The second carriage behind the engine is
known as the HVP, that means High Value
Package coach where registered mail is
sorted and this contains valuables
including large quantities of money,
registered parcels and packages. Usually
the value of these items is in the region
of £300,000, but because there has been
a Bank Holiday weekend in Scotland, we
calculate with a total of £2.6 million
…
…
worth a little over £40 million in these
days!
„Would it? Anyway, it’s now
3:05 a.m.! Watch! As anticipated, the
train has stopped at the fake red signal.
But … why is someone jumping down?
The driver Jack Mills has on board a
‚Firemen‘ although the engine
does not need to be fired anymore. But,
you see, the unions made it clear that
‚Firemen‘ can’t simply be
fired only because there are no more
steam engines!
And this is now our problem: Fireman
David Whitby has obviously got a rather
good eyesight. He has noticed that the
next signal in great distance shows green
again. He has climbed down from the cab
to call the signalman from a railway
trackside telephone, only to find the
cables have been cut. Upon returning to
the train, he is now thrown down the
embankment of the railway track by one of
our buddies. In the meantime, the five
postal workers in the HVP carriage were
tied up and detained in a corner of the
carriage.
But now, we encounter another problem. We
need to move the train to a location
where we can load our ex-army dropside
truck with the money. It was decided to
do so at bridge No.127, known as 'Bridego
Bridge', approximately half a mile
further along the track. One of our
buddies has spent months befriending
railway staff and familiarising himself
with the layout and operation, but it was
decided instead to use an experienced
train driver to move the train from the
signals to the bridge after uncoupling
the unnecessary carriages. However, the
person we selected seems to be unable to
operate this English Electric Class 40
mainline diesel-electric locomotive,
because, as he now tells us, he was only
experienced with shunting type
locomotives on the Southern Region …
Alright … It was quickly decided
that the original locomotive driver Jack
Mills should move the train to the
stopping point near the bridge which is
indicated by a white sheet stretched
between poles on the track …
Now I can tell you, Mills was initially
reluctant to move the train so one of us
struck him on the head. I was definitely
not present since my task was to
supervise the participation of our
original driver; when it became obvious
that he was of no use, he and I were
banished to the waiting truck to help
load the mail bags.
… If you want to see what happens
next you have to roll parallel to us for
some twelve hundred metres … but on
this side. On the other is the road, and
parallel with us is rolling there a Land
Rover with our boss, Bruce Reynolds, and
his brother-in-law, John Daly.
You see, when the engine arrives now with
the two remaining wagons at the bridge we
remove about one hundred and twenty-four
sacks which we transfer quickly from the
HVP down to the truck by forming a human
chain.
Now, thirty minutes after the job had
begun and in an effort to mislead any
potential witnesses, in addition to our
Austin Loadstar truck, we use two Land
Rover vehicles both of which have the
registration plates BMG 757 A.
We now head along back roads listening
for police broadcasts on a VHF radio and
arrive at Leatherslade Farm. It‘s
now 4:30 a.m., and when we just enter the
gate we hear the message by an officer:
‚You won’t believe it, but they
have just robbed a train!‘
We had cut all the telephone lines in the
vicinity, but one of the trainmen caught
a slow train to Cheddington, which he
reached at 4:30 a.m. to raise the alarm.
…
Alright, what else?“
At the
end, it did not work out for any of your
buddies, all were caught, eleven were
sentenced in early 1964. Two escaped from
prison; one were you!
„In July 1965,
I escaped from Wandsworth Prison, only
fifteen months into my sentence. A
furniture van was parking alongside the
prison walls with a ladder dropped over
the thirty foot wall into the prison
during outside exercise time, to allow
four prisoners to escape, including
myself. The escape was planned by
recently released prisoner Paul Seaborne,
with the assistance of two other
ex-convicts Ronnie Leslie and Ronnie
Black. Don‘t ask me what I had to
pay for it. Our helpers were caught later
and sentenced.
I fled to Paris, where I acquired new
identity papers and underwent plastic
surgery, another lot of money spent.
In 1966, I took a BOAC flight to Sydney,
where I lived for several months before
moving to the seaside suburb of Glenelg
in Adelaide, South Australia. I was soon
joined by my wife and two children. In
1967, just after our third child was
born, I received an anonymous letter from
England telling me that Interpol
suspected that I was in Australia and
that I should relocate.
In May 1967, the family moved to
Melbourne, Victoria where I rented a
house in the suburb of Blackburn North.
In Melbourne, I had a number of jobs
before undertaking set construction work
at the Channel 9 TV studios.
In October 1969, a newspaper report by a
Reuters correspondent claimed that I was
living in Melbourne and that police were
closing in on me. The story then led the
6 o‘clock news at Channel 9, so I
immediately fled my home, staying with
family friends in the outer eastern
suburbs of Melbourne.
Five months later, I fled on a passenger
liner from the Port of Melbourne using
the doctored passport of a friend. My
wife and sons stayed behind in Australia.
Twenty days later, the ship berthed in
Panama. I disembarked and within two
weeks flew to Brazil.“ …
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