The Great Train Robbery (20 page)

“A month, a month … Let’s see, now … casting at a hundred a mold … Yes, well …” The eel-skinner nodded. “Right enough, you shall have five thousand within a month. You’ll be collecting it?”

“I will,” the gentleman said, and then he leaned closer, in a conspiratorial fashion. “It’s for Scotland, you know.”

“Scotland, eh?”

“Yes, Scotland.”

“Oh, well, yes, I see that plain enough,” the eel-skinner said, though the reverse was clearly true. The red-bearded man put down a deposit and departed, leaving the eel-skinner in a state of marked perplexity. He would have been even more perplexed to know that this gentleman had visited skinners in Newcastle-on-Tyne, Birmingham, Liverpool, and London, and placed identical orders with each of them, so that he was ordering a total of two hundred and fifty pounds of lead shot. What use could anyone have for that?

London at the mid-century had six morning newspapers, three evening newspapers, and twenty influential weeklies. This period marked the beginning of an organized press with enough power to mold public opinion and, ultimately, political events. The unpredictability of that power was highlighted in January, 1855.

On the one hand, the first war correspondent in history, William Howard Russell, was in Russia with the Crimean troops, and his dispatches to the
Times
had aroused furious indignation at home. The charge of the Light Brigade, the bungling of the Balaclava campaign, the devastating winter when British troops, lacking food and medical supplies, suffered a 50 percent mortality—these were all reported in the press to an increasingly angry public.

By January, however, the commander of British forces, Lord Raglan, was severely ill, and Lord Cardigan—“haughty, rich, selfish and stupid,” the man who had bravely led his Light Brigade to utter disaster, and then returned to his yacht to drink champagne and sleep—Lord Cardigan had returned home, and the press everywhere hailed him as a great national hero. It was a role he was only too happy to play. Dressed in the uniform he had worn at Balaclava, he was mobbed by crowds in every city; hairs from his horse’s tail were plucked for souvenirs. London shops copied the woolen
jacket he had worn in the Crimea—called a “Cardigan”—and thousands were sold.

The man known to his own troops as “the dangerous ass” went about the country delivering speeches recounting his prowess in leading the charge; and as the months passed, he spoke with more and more emotion, and was often forced to pause and revive himself. The press never ceased to cheer him on; there was no sense of the chastisement that later historians have richly accorded him.

But if the press was fickle, public tastes were even more so. Despite all the provocative news from Russia, the dispatches which most intriged Londoners in January concerned a man-eating leopard that menaced Naini Tal in northern India, not far from the Burmese border. The “Panar man-eater” was said to have killed more than four hundred natives, and accounts were remarkable for their vivid, even lurid, detail. “The vicious Panar beast,” wrote one correspondent, “kills for the sake of killing and not for any food. It rarely eats any portion of the body of its victims, although two weeks past it ate the upper torso of an infant after stealing it from its crib. Indeed, the majority of its victims have been children under the age of ten who are unfortunate enough to stray from the center of the village after nightfall. Adult victims are generally mauled and later die of suppurating wounds; Mr. Redby, a hunter of the region, says these infections are caused by rotten flesh lodged in the beast’s claws. The Panar killer is exceedingly strong, and has been seen to carry off a fully grown female adult in its jaws, while the victim struggles and cries out most piteously.”

These and other stories became the delicious talk of dining rooms among company given to raciness; women colored and tittered and exclaimed, while men—especially Company men who had spent time in India—spoke knowledgeably about the habits of such a
beast, and its nature. An interesting working model of a tiger devouring an Englishman, owned by the East India Company, was visited by fascinated crowds. (The model can still be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.)

And when, on February 17, 1855, a caged, fully grown leopard arrived at London Bridge Terminus, it created a considerable stir—much more than the arrival, a short time previously, of armed guards carrying strongboxes of gold, which were loaded into the
SER
luggage van.

Here was a full-sized, snarling beast, which roared and charged the bars of its cage as it was loaded onto the same luggage van of the London-Folkestone train. The animal’s keeper accompanied the beast, in order to look after the leopard’s welfare, and to protect the luggage-van guard in the event of any unforeseen mishap.

Meanwhile, before the train departed the station, the keeper explained to the crowd of curious onlookers and children that the beast ate raw meat, that it was a female four years old, and that it was destined for the Continent, where it would be a present to a wellborn lady.

The train pulled out of the station shortly after eight o’clock, and the guard on the luggage van closed the sliding side door. There was a short silence while the leopard stalked its cage, and growled intermittently; finally the railway guard said, “What do you feed her?”

The animal’s attendant turned to the guard. “Does your wife sew your uniforms?” he asked.

Burgess laughed. “You mean it’s to be you?”

The attendant did not answer. Instead, he opened a small leather satchel and removed a jar of grease, several keys, and a collection of files of varied shapes and sizes.

He went immediately to the two Chubb safes, coated
the four locks with grease, and began fitting his keys. Burgess watched with only vague interest in the process: he knew that rough-copied wax keys would not work on a finely made safe without polishing and refining. But he was also impressed; he never thought it would be carried off with such boldness.

“Where’d you make the impressions?” he said.

“Here and there,” Agar replied, fitting and filing.

“They keep those keys separate.”

“Do they,” Agar said.

“Aye, they do. How’d you pull them?”

“That’s no matter to you,” Agar said, still working.

Burgess watched him for a time, and then he watched the leopard. “How much does he weigh?”

“Ask him,” Agar said irritably.

“Are you taking the gold today, then?” Burgess asked as Agar managed to get one of the safe doors open. Agar did not answer; he stared transfixed for a moment at the strongboxes inside. “I say, are you taking the gold today?”

Agar shut the door. “No,” he said. “Now stop your voker.”

Burgess fell silent.

For the next hour, while the morning passenger train chugged from London to Folkestone, Agar worked on his keys. Ultimately, he had opened and closed both safes. When he was finished, he wiped the grease from the locks. Then he cleaned the locks with alcohol and dried them with a cloth. Finally he took his four keys, placed them carefully in his pocket, and sat down to await the arrival of the train at the Folkestone station.

Pierce met him at the station and helped to unload the leopard.

“How was it?” he asked.

“The finishing touches are done,” Agar said, and then he grinned. “It’s the gold, isn’t it? The Crimean gold—that’s the flash pull.”

“Yes,” Pierce said.

“When?”

“Next month,” Pierce said.

The leopard snarled.

The robbers originally intended to take the gold during the next Crimean shipment. The plan was extremely simple. Pierce and Agar were to board the train in London, each checking several heavy satchels onto the baggage van. The satchels would be filled with sewn packets of lead shot.

Agar would again ride in the van, and while Burgess looked away Agar would open the safes, remove the gold, and replace it with lead shot. These satchels would be thrown from the train at a predetermined point, and collected by Barlow. Barlow would then drive on to Folkestone, where he would meet Pierce and Agar.

Meanwhile, the gold strongboxes—still convincingly heavy—would be transferred to the steamer going to Ostend, where the theft would be discovered by the French authorities hours later. By then, enough people would have been involved in the transportation process that there would be no particular reason to fix suspicion on Burgess; and in any case, British-French relations were at a low level because of the Crimean War, and it would be natural that the French would assume the English had carried out the theft, and vice versa. The robbers could count on plenty of confusion to muddy the waters for the police.

The plan seemed utterly foolproof, and the robbers
prepared to carry it out on the next gold shipment, scheduled for March 14, 1855.

On March 2nd, “that fiend in human shape,” Czar Nicholas I of Russia, died suddenly. News of his death caused considerable confusion in business and financial circles. For several days the reports were doubted, and when his death was finally confirmed, the stock markets of Paris and London responded with large gains. But as a result of the general uncertainty the gold shipment was delayed until March 27th. By then, Agar, who had sunk into a kind of depression after the fourteenth, was desperately ill with an exacerbation of his chest condition, and so the opportunity was missed.