The Great Train Robbery

One of the most notorious robberies in English history took place on 8, August, 1963, when a gang of men stole over two million pounds (US$53 million in 2018) from a night mail train in the countryside outside London. The daring audacity of the raid and its meticulous planning have given the heist iconic status.

The story began months earlier when the gang received a tip-off from a post office worker that a mail train would be carrying bags of old banknotes to London for recycling, an irresistible prize for criminals as they would be untraceable.

After careful research, they chose a lonely spot 50 kilometres north of London and stopped the train in the early hours by making a false red signal.

They then swarmed onto the locomotive, hitting the driver over the head in the struggle that followed. After uncoupling the front two coaches containing the money, they drove the train to a bridge 800 metres ahead where the rest of the gang were waiting.

Here they unloaded the 128 mailbags weighing 2.5 tons onto trucks parked in the lane below. These were disguised as military vehicles taking part in a night exercise. The whole operation took just 30 minutes.

Driving slowly through back lanes to avoid detection, they arrived forty-five minutes later at a remote farmhouse which they had bought six weeks earlier. When they counted the money, they found it was far more than they had expected and amid noisy celebrations, they shared out the loot.

By listening in on police radio messages, they soon learned the police had guessed they were still in the area. Concerned that the farmhouse would soon be discovered, they decided to leave immediately and over the next 24 hours went their separate ways. Each man had about £150,000 (nearly US$4 million in 2018). The police found the farm four days later.

It was at this point that things started to go wrong. They had paid a man to clean up the farmhouse to remove all evidence but he never turned up, which meant that fingerprints remained at the farm. These would later lead to the arrest of some of the gang.

Meanwhile, as the story hit the headlines, public reaction was surprisingly sympathetic. People wished the robbers good luck rather than deplore their lawless behaviour, never mind that the driver had been brutally beaten.

The gang were eventually to become victims of their own success. The media frenzy put the police under intense pressure to make arrests, and as leading professional criminals, they were prime suspects. A few weeks later, an unknown informer who was in jail for another crime revealed most of their names, possibly in return for early release. By Christmas, most of the robbers had been caught.

When their trial came early in 1964, the sentences shocked the nation: the defendants were given a total of over 300 years in prison. The government had clearly been embarrassed by the raid - the train had neither security guards nor an alarm system – and was determined to make an example of the men.

Many criticised the harsh sentences, including the detective in charge of the investigation. But as it turned out, none of the gang served more than fifteen years, while a number escaped and four were never caught.

As for the money, to this day only a fraction of it has ever been recovered.

It is sobering to reflect that the train driver, who had bravely defended the state's millions, received a mere £250 (US$6,700 in 2018) in compensation. Yet some of the robbers' wives were later paid thousands of pounds for their stories by the newspapers.