The Great Train Robbery (7 page)

On the mail robbery and the coincidence that all 3 high value vans were off the road on 7 August for the first time ever, do you know whether any of the authorities

(a)  Have investigated this detail, since it is very doubtful if the robbery would have been attempted or been successful had one of the 3 vans been in commission;

(b)  Know who,
among rail and PO workers
, was aware that on that particular night and indeed on earlier nights a van without a bandit alarm would be in use on the down run, ie who knew that 2 or 3 were out of use?

My information about these 3 vans is –

The more I think about this the more strongly I feel that gang must have known the situation. The question is who could have co-operated with them and also informed them. If the authorities could get an answer to this the rest would not be difficult.

PMG
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While keeping a civil servant’s sense of perspective, Bevins’s private secretary was clearly concerned:

Postmaster General

On the point which you raise in the attached note, your information about the three vans is correct as regards the dates of withdrawal from services and the nature of the defects. In each case however repairs were carried out at Swindon.

Your suspicions about the three vans being out of commission on the night of the 7/8 August are shared by all of us and the Railway Police have been enquiring diligently into this aspect of the case. Mr Osmond is satisfied from what he knows of their investigations that the technical grounds on which the vans were withdrawn from service were in each case unchallengeable and there is confirmation for this in the fact that the vans were taken out of service by responsible people working in three different places, ie Carlisle, Wigan and Euston. It remains a question whether the defects in the vans were brought on deliberately, or their return to service delayed so that the vehicles should be out of commission on the day of the robbery but the Railway Police have so far found no evidence to support this but intensive enquires are continuing.

The possibility of collusion between railway or Post Office staff and the criminals has all along been very much in the minds of both the Railway Police and the Investigation Branch. A considerable number of railway and Post Office people could have been aware of the withdrawal of the vehicles, including the TPO staff and railway staffs at terminal and intermediate stations on the Euston-Glasgow run as well as at the sidings where the TPO vehicles are parked. Enquiries have so far failed to produce any evidence that the gang obtained information about the HVP coaches from Post Office and/or railway staff but this aspect is also the subject of intensive enquiry by the Railway Police and the IB.
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The issue of possible sabotage was to become a key part of both the IB and the British Transport Police investigations over the following two months and again put British Railways procedures under critical gaze. Having already blotted their copybook for removing the locomotive before further forensic work could be carried out in the cab, it finally arrived back at Cheddington on the morning of Saturday 10 August. DC Keith Milner was again on hand to accompany Scotland Yard’s Dr Holden in examining the interior. It is noteworthy that Milner made the following comments in his report:

On 10 August, 1963, I was present at Cheddington Station when Dr Holden removed blood samples from the engine cab window and from a ledge in the engine. I took possession of these samples, but on 17 August I handed them to Dr Holden.
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While the removing of such a vital piece of evidence as the engine and transporting it to Crewe was nothing less than a major blunder on the part of the railway authorities in disturbing a crime scene, it would appear that the crucial blood traces were not unduly harmed or erased. In fact, Milner’s remark that blood was found on a ledge in the cab gives some credence to the view that while Mills was indeed struck from behind, he could well have hit his head on the instrumental panel when he fell to the floor, which may or may not have been responsible for accentuating his injuries.
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On that same Saturday morning, the first solid information about those thought to have taken part in the robbery reached DS Cummings and Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Walker of Scotland Yard’s C11 Department. They immediately drove over to Aylesbury to discuss the breakthrough with DS McArthur and told him that:

Bobby Welch (identical with Robert Alfred Welch, CRO No 61730/58), was one of the gang responsible for the robbery. They said that Welch was missing from home and that his wife had received a message that he would be home in two or three days’ time. In addition, their information was that the thieves anticipated having twenty minutes in which to leave the scene of the robbery and get safely to their hideout before the alarm was raised. The hideout was believed to be a farm and was somewhere on the outskirts of Aylesbury.

McArthur, Cummings and Walker decided that observation should be placed on Welch’s home at 30a Benyon Road, Islington, London N1, and on the addresses of two of his associates.
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This was not the only key piece of information that came in by way of an informant on that Saturday morning. Bernard Makowski,
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who described himself as a London antiques dealer, related a detailed and intriguing story to Chief Inspector Peattie of the Post Office Investigation Branch, which Controller Clifford Osmond wrote up himself in the following memo:

The informant is typical of his kind. He often talks in riddles; he leaves much unsaid and he either forgets or does not know the full names of the persons he mentions so that he is forced to refer to them by nickname. The sum total of the information which he gave is described in the paragraphs below.

He said that in January 1963, he was asked to become a member of a team whose job it was to scout a train job which offered a prize, if successful, of about £7m. He described the train as one which was due to run between Scotland and Kings Cross; that the attack was first planned to take place at York and that his part was to watch the unloading of the valuables at Kings Cross and to note the procedure. He said that, in fact, he had watched the unloading arrangements at Kings Cross and that he had counted the boxes as they came off. When asked about the size of the boxes he demonstrated with his hands that they were about 2 feet long and perhaps 1½ feet deep. He said that he thought the boxes were due to be taken to the Bank of England. He pinpointed the particular time of the day and a particular date on which his observation took place – i.e. the 17 April 1963, early afternoon, just after lunch. It was pointed out to him that this could not have been a plan to attack the mails but he said that he was under the impression it was a mail job as the boxes were being unloaded from a train which was standing at the platform which he described as a mail train. On further questioning, however he said that it was not a passenger train but a goods type of coach. He agreed that he did not know what a mail train looked like and he finally said that, although the attack which he had been talking about was due to take place at York on or about the 17 April, the arrangements went wrong – tip-off or something like that occurred – and so the plan was shelved and thereafter he himself was eased out of the team because he was a suspected informer.

The informant went on to say that, although he could not prove it, he felt sure that the same team concerned in what he now found to have been a plan for a bullion attack had carried out the big mail train robbery which occurred on the 8 August. In those circumstances I asked him to name and to describe all the men who might form the team concerned with that bullion plan.

He said that he himself had been invited to become a member of the team by a man whom he knew as Benny Stewart (or Stuart) whose address he does not know but whom he met in the Pubs and Clubs of Soho. He described Stewart as about 40 years of age, a Scot, and a gentlemanly type of crook. He was particularly explicit about his gentlemanly attitude and made it clear that he was not a rough bandit type of man. When questioned, the informant said that Stewart had, he understood, flown to Germany recently and that he has not been seen in London since the attack on the train on the 8 August. He explained that he knew Benny Stewart extremely well and that they had both done some work together at Kings Cross Station in the proposed bullion case. He said that Benny Stewart had, in fact, worked for Billy Hill at one time but that, in his view, Billy Hill was not behind this current mail train robbery. The informant mentioned that on one occasion an ‘important’ man visited Benny Stewart and himself at Kings Cross Station. He was driving a cream Ford consul and his name sounded something like Falcon, Falcon Faloor. The informant said that he was known to him also as ‘Pat’, and he has a brother who is also a crook. It was put to the informant that the name might be ‘Falco’, a criminal who is known to be interested in Post Office crime and who at one time lived in the Angel, Islington, area.

A photograph of Tommy Falco, CRO No 19772/38 was then shown to the informant who alleged, however, that this was not the man he was talking about. He described the man as having a broken nose, slim build, dark hair. On the question of his importance, the informant said that in the bullion case he was what could be called ‘an organiser’ – i.e. the man who was responsible for establishing train times and Station organisation. The informant maintained that he did not know where Pat Falcon lived but he suggested that he could be found in Hatton Garden as he often worked with (or worked over the shop of) Mansfield of Hatton Garden and that he dealt specially in smuggled watches there. The informant did say, however, that Pat Falcon had a blemish on his cheek and it would appear that Tommy Falcon also has a blemish on his cheek.

Patsy: The informant said that another member of a Kings Cross team was someone he knew as ‘Patsy’ who was also from the Angel, a man who received a sum of about £6,000 out of the Brighton mail bag theft which occurred from a train. The informant said that he knew Patsy extremely well but he could not give his address although he knew he was another Scot and a school chum of Benny Stewart. The informant described this Patsy as dark, slim and about 38 years of age. Concerning his whereabouts, the informant professed that he would be able to find him very shortly and would eventually give us Patsy’s telephone number.

Freddie, the Fox: The informant was particularly anxious to mention Freddie the Fox as a member of the Kings Cross team who were concerned with the proposed bullion case. He said that he knew very little about him but that he would recognise him if ever he were shown a photo of him; that he frequented Clubs in Soho and that he also frequented a pub in the Elephant & Castle area.

O’Leary: The informant said that in the Kings Cross case Mike O’Leary keeps a stall in Leather Lane and has his own vehicle or vehicles and that, in those circumstances, he would suggest that O’Leary would have driven the money away from Cheddington.

Albert Millbank: The informant regarded Albert Millbank as an important man behind the scenes and suggested that he might be organising this particular mail bag offence. In particular, he lived with a woman who is also very important whom he referred to as the ‘Julian woman’ but it is understood that her real name is De Guillio [sic] who is said to be a Scottish dancer, who lives at Brighton and has a gambling house or club in the Gerrard Street area.

In summing up this information it is clear that the informant regards the people mentioned as some of those who perpetrated the mail bag offence. He stated that, in fact, in his view, there were three separate teams recruited, specially picked for the job – one from the Angel, one from the Elephant & Castle and the third from Soho and that, in his view, O’Leary would have driven the van containing the money to the Leather Lane area. I suggested to the informant that the money might have been held much nearer the scene of the crime but he said that it would have been brought to London definitely, although he could not, or would not, enlarge on that. As an afterthought, the informant said that a Railway employee had given information about the Kings Cross bullion job and that it came particularly from a negro Railway guard whose name he did not know. He was questioned closely about any informant who might be inside the Post Office but he said that, so far as he knew, no inside information had come from that source, although he understood that the fireman on the attacked engine had been involved with the criminals.
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The fact that Osmond wrote up the interview and personally passed on the report to Scotland Yard the following day indicates that it was indeed taken seriously. Whether or not Osmond believed that the gang mentioned by Makowski was responsible for the 8 August train robbery, he knew the names mentioned by reputation. He also knew that at least one of them was a known quantity to the IB in terms of mail offences.

Over in Aylesbury, McArthur, Fewtrell and DSgts Pritchard and Fairweather were studying maps and deciding which particular farms and smallholdings should be visited and searched. This was not a particularly easy task as Buckinghamshire has literally hundreds of farms and smallholdings.

At 9 a.m. on Sunday 11 August, about eighty uniformed and CID personnel drawn from Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire constabularies reported at Bucks Headquarters in Aylesbury where they were briefed. A total of thirteen likely premises had been selected as possible hideouts for the thieves. By midday the searches had been completed with no success reported.
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