The Great Train Robbery (37 page)

Winson Green authorities were unable to account for how the master key had been obtained, and a copy made. Only one member of the prison staff held the keys to open cells at night. The police seem to have been of the view that a prison officer or official had more than likely been induced by bribery to provide a copy of the master key well in advance of the escape.

Detectives also unsuccessfully tested the prison keys for any traces of soap. They also interviewed the governor, all of the 120 prison officers, the civilian staff working at the prison and a number of the 180 inmates and former inmates. Peter Marshall of Hyde Road, Ladywood, who had previously served three sentences at Winson Green and was known as an expert locksmith, was among those interviewed. He expressed the view that a copy of the master key could not have been made by wax impression, because ‘if any part of the key was even a thousandth of an inch out it would not work,’ he said in a statement. This was a view that Dr Ian Holden at Scotland Yard also concurred with.

Mrs Rose Gredden, who lived close to the prison, also made a witness statement in which she said she had noticed three men talking on the prison side of the canal towpath at around 2.35 a.m. shortly after she had been awakened by her baby daughter. ‘They were respectably dressed. Two were rather tall,’ she recalled. ‘Some prison officers must have seen them. Their social club is only a few yards from where the men were standing and I heard officers leaving the club around that time.’

At 3.20 a.m., William Nicholls, the guard who had been bound and gagged, came to and immediately reported the incident to the night orderly officer, although it was a further thirty minutes before the police received a call logged at 3.50 a.m. Ten minutes later they arrived at the main gate, but were unable to enter until a senior prison officer appeared with the keys.

When the prison governor Rundle Harris was woken and told of Wilson’s escape, he immediately phoned the Home Office duty officer, who in turn sent a telegram to Home Secretary Henry Brooke, who at the time was on an official trip to the Channel Islands. Brooke cancelled the rest of his engagements and immediately flew back to London.

A special watch was put on all airports and sea ports, including Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports in the Republic of Ireland, where the police thought Wilson might initially head for. Notices to Interpol, requesting the circulation of Wilson’s description and photograph, were also sent out.

However, DCS Butler also thought that Wilson might visit the house near Boscastle, so he ‘arranged for the local police to search the house but there was no trace of Wilson’.
11

Wilson was, however, heading for London not Ireland. There, he stayed in a safe house for six months, eventually making arrangements to leave the country and start a new life abroad with his family. In December 1964 he obtained a passport in the name of Ronald Alloway and, in March 1965, disguised as a teacher on a backpacking holiday, took a cross-channel ferry to France.

DCS Butler continued to believe, however, that Wilson was still in Britain:

On 9 June 1965 Chief Supt Butler informed me that he had good reason to suppose that Tracey, aged 7 years, and Cheryl, aged 9 years, two of Wilson’s 3 children, were attending school at Ilford and living with Wilson’s sister and her husband, Charles Edward Woollard at 29 Laurel Close, Hainault, Essex. At Chief Supt Butler’s request, a Home Office Warrant was obtained to intercept the telephone Hainault 3478 at the address and for a check of correspondence delivered to the address since it was considered that Wilson may well be communicating with his sister.
12

Interception continued for a month until it became apparent that no one else was living there other than Mr and Mrs Woollard and their young son. No communication of any kind from Wilson was either heard or seen. A year later, in May 1966 (by which time Wilson had settled down in Canada), Butler was still ‘of the opinion that Wilson may now be living in or near London’.
13

The police apparently had suspicions as to who might have been behind Wilson’s escape. The identity of the man they investigated, who was ‘suspected of harbouring and assisting’ Wilson to escape, remains in a file that at the time of writing is closed until 2043.
14

While prison security had apparently been tightened following Wilson’s jailbreak, further embarrassment for the Home Office, and for the new Labour Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice, was not long in coming:

On the 8 July 1965 Ronald Biggs, together with Eric Flowers, CRO 2046/50, Robert Anderson, CRO 41542/55 and Patrick Doyle, CRO 36738/57 escaped over the north wall of Wandsworth Prison into a waiting pantechnicon and two private cars. Biggs and Flowers are still at large but Anderson and Doyle have been returned to prison. The following have been prosecuted to conviction for assisting the escapes:

Paul Seabourne, CRO 37440/44

Henry Holsgrove, CRO 36780/54

George Ronald Leslie, CRO 5563/55

George Albert Gibbs, CRO 20253/61

Ronald Brown, CRO 36394/55

Terrence Mintagh, CRO 70184/62
15

Biggs and Flowers were initially hidden in a series of safe houses in London and Sussex, before being given new passports and taken out of the country by boat from London to Antwerp. Biggs’s new identity was that of writer Terence Furminger. On arrival in Belgium, he and Flowers were sheltered for some weeks before having plastic surgery at a clinic in Paris. They flew out to Australia at the end of December 1965.
16

According to IB officer W.J. Edwards:

Following Biggs’ escape Chief Supt Butler arranged for a further call at the house near Boscastle by the local police. Biggs was not there but Miss Sleep, who was then alone, produced two biscuit tins containing £9,349 in £1 notes which she said her dog had unearthed in the garden besides the garage. She appeared to be distressed because her dog had recently died. The £1 notes and the biscuit tins clearly bore signs of having been buried for some time.

Chief Supt Butler visited Miss Sleep in September, 1965, and in the presence of her solicitor she admitted that she knew that Daly and Black had buried £100,000 in the garden; that Black subsequently took half of it and that Goodwin bricked into a wall in the kitchen the remaining £50,000. She said that following the failure of the hot water system in the house the landlord told her he would install a new oil fired system and she knew this would involve structural alterations in the kitchen so decided to remove the money from the wall. She admitted that she took a few pounds herself, alleged that she burnt the £5 notes because she thought they could be traced and said she buried the remainder in the garden. Chief Supt Butler is of the opinion that Miss Sleep was living alone, became distressed after the death of her dog and was on the point of reporting the facts concerning the money when the local Police visited her.

The £9,349 is held by the Police and the facts have been reported to the Director of Public Prosecutions suggesting Daly be prosecuted for receiving. The DPP has decided not to prosecute at this stage but the case will doubtless be reopened should any new evidence come to light. This may well materialise when Edwards or Reynolds are arrested.
17

W.J. Edwards’s reports also indicate that DSC Butler felt, ‘There is good reason for thinking that Biggs and Flowers, who escaped from prison at the same time, may still be together and in South Africa.’
18

According to DI Frank Williams, Butler:

… became so obsessed that as time went on he even spent his holidays on the beaches touring the South of France, parading up and down with binoculars and photographs, scanning the sunbathing crowds through the glasses in the hope of spotting one of the missing robbers (he particularly favoured the view that they were on the Riviera). He spent considerable time talking to English visitors at these resorts, showing them the photographs and asking if they had seen any of the robbers.
19

In October 1965 information was received by Chief Supt Butler that a man named Chiandano Vittorio had been living in a caravan in a camp at Antibes and that Ann Killoran and Mabel Hume were living in adjacent caravans. It was considered that Vittorio may well be Reynolds but inquiries revealed that this was not the case.

On 24 May 1966, W.J. Edwards of the IB reported that, ‘Chief Supt Butler has good reason for thinking that Reynolds has been living in the South of France but that he may now have returned to this country.’
20

Of course, Reynolds was neither in the South of France nor in England, having flown to Mexico the previous year.

While Biggs, Reynolds and Wilson remained on the run,
21
Jimmy White was finally arrested on 21 April 1966
22
and Buster Edwards eventually gave himself up to DI Frank Williams on 19 September 1966 in a deal brokered between Williams and Freddie Foreman.
23

Their arrests were by no means the beginning of the end, so far as the train robbery story was concerned. In many ways, they were more the end of the beginning.

Notes

  
1
.  MEPO 2/10571 (still closed at time of writing).

  
2
.  
Ibid
.

  
3
.  
Ibid
.

  
4
.  
Ibid
;
when Harry Smith died in 2008, his death certificate recorded his occupation as a Property Consultant (retired); Record of Deaths, London Borough of Redbridge, Entry No 232, 16 October 2008.

  
5
.  HO 287/1496 (opened 1995).

  
6
.  
Ibid
.

  
7
.  
Ibid
.

  
8
.  
Ibid
.

  
9
.  
Ibid
.

10
.  MEPO 2/10581, MEPO 2/11298 (closed until 2045 at time of writing).

11
.  POST 120/95 (originally closed until 2001; opened 2002).

12
.  
Ibid
.

13
.  
Ibid
.

14
.  MEPO 2/11298 (closed until 2045 at time of writing).

15
.  POST 120/95 (originally closed until 2001; opened 2002).

16
.  LO 2/244, MEPO 26/282. See Frederick Foreman,
The Godfather of British Crime
, p. 127
ff
; Ronald Biggs,
Ronnie Biggs: His Own Story
, p. 108
ff
. In his book Biggs refers to Alfred Gerrard and Frederick Foreman as ‘Raymond Macclesfield’ and ‘Kenny Lisle’.

17
.  POST 120/95 (originally closed until 2001; opened 2002).

18
.  
Ibid
.

19
.  Frank Williams,
No Fixed Address
, p. 21.

20
.  POST 120/95 (originally closed until 2001; opened 2002).

21
.  All three were later to be returned to prison; Biggs gave himself up on 7 May 2001, Reynolds was arrested on 8 November 1968 and Wilson on 25 January 1968.

22
.  POST 120/102, POST 120/103 (originally closed until 1996 & 1997; opened 1997 and 1998 respectively).

23
.  POST 120/104 (originally closed until 1996; opened 1997). Frederick Foreman,
The Godfather of British Crime
, p. 131
ff
; Frank Williams,
No Fixed Address
, p. 144
ff
.

T
he saga of the Great Train Robbery has continued unabated for the past five decades. Speculation centred on many of the unanswered aspects of the robbery has been hotly debated by a host of authors and TV documentaries.

One of the principal sources of conjecture has been the identity of the ‘Irishman’ or the ‘Ulsterman’ who allegedly provided the inside information that enabled the robbery to be committed.

There have been a number of views over the years. DCS Butler was always sceptical about the ‘insider’ theory. He believed his view was substantiated when, after Jimmy White’s arrest, he was closely questioned about the robbery and how it had been organised. Without betraying any names or identities, White spoke in some detail about the preparations, which appear in his arrest file. Butler placed particular emphasis on the following quote:

I asked what kind of money could be expected and I was told that after the August Bank Holiday we could expect about £2,000,000 to be on the train, but in any event there would be someone in Glasgow to count the bags when the coach was being loaded and no move would be made unless there was a known large amount in the coach. Later on one of the men left the farm to go to a telephone. He returned with the news that the Scottish Night Mail Train was well and truly loaded and the spy in Glasgow had reported that lots of high value bags had been put aboard.
1

Butler’s view was that the ‘spy in Glasgow’ was not necessarily anyone working for the Post Office, and that the information supplied by this individual was all that was needed to launch the operation to hold up the train.

Bearing in mind that it was supposedly Brian Field who had contact with the insider, the police and IB had hoped that Brian Field or John Wheater, who they saw as the weakest links, might eventually reveal further details in prison. However, once Brian Field’s sentence had been downgraded on appeal, he no longer saw any benefit in the possibility of talking and instead concentrated on his early release. Wheater, however, was a different kettle of fish. In 1966 he divulged that:

I did get the impression that there were some other people involved who were not brought to trial and have not been named by the Police. And one thing I learned pointed back to well before the raid – to a link between the gang and somebody in Post Office security. This somebody made contact through an intermediary with one of the men who stood trial, and it was this man – one of my fellows in the dock – who gave me the information when I was discussing with him how he became involved. The intermediary - a relation, I think, of the Post Office security man – put up the proposition that large sums of money were being moved by train at various times, and that it was there for the taking so to speak. This made my fellow prisoner a lynch pin in the whole thing. I was never able to discover who the intermediary was. I was told that after the robbery money was passed to the intermediary for himself and for the Post Office man. Each was said to have received one full share of the total sum stolen and that would be between £140,000 and £150,000.
2