The Great Train Robbery (32 page)

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By noon, the strongboxes of the Huddelston & Bradford Bank had been transferred, under armed guard, from the Folkestone railway station to the Channel steamer, which made the crossing to Ostend in four hours. Allowing for the Continental time change, it was 5 p.m. when French customs officials signed the requisite forms and took possession of the strongboxes. These were then transported, under armed guard, to the Ostend railway terminus for shipment to Paris by train the following morning.

On the morning of May 23rd, French representatives of the bank of Louis Bonnard et Fils arrived at Ostend to open the strongboxes and verify their contents, prior to placing them aboard the nine-o’clock train to Paris.

Thus, at about 8:15 a.m. on May 23rd, it was discovered that the strongboxes contained a large quantity of lead shot, sewn into individual cloth packets, and no gold at all.

This astounding development was immediately reported to London by telegraph, and the message reached Huddleston & Bradford’s Westminster offices shortly after 10 a.m. Immediately, it provoked the most profound consternation in that firm’s brief but respectable history, and the furor did not abate for months to come.

Predictably, the initial reaction of Huddleston & Bradford was sheer disbelief that anything was amiss. The French cable had been composed in English and read:
GOLD MISSED NOW WHERE IS
, and was signed
VERNIER, OSTEND
.

Confronted by this ambiguous message, Sir William Huddleston announced that there had been, no doubt, some silly delay with the French customs and he predicted the whole business would be unraveled before teatime. Mr. Bradford, who had never made the slightest attempt to conceal his intense and lifelong loathing for all things French, assumed that the filthy Frogs had misplaced the bullion, and were now trying to fix the blame for their own stupidity on the English. Mr. Henry Fowler, who had accompanied the gold shipment to Folkestone and seen it safely onto the Channel steamer, observed that the signature “Vernier” was an unfamiliar name, and speculated that the cable might be some sort of practical joke. This was, after all, a time of increasingly strained relations between the English and their French allies.

Cables requesting—and later demanding—clarification flashed back and forth across the Channel. By noon, it appeared that the steamship crossing from Dover to Ostend had been sunk, and the bullion lost in the mishap. However, by early afternoon it was clear the
steamer had had an uneventful passage, but almost everything else was vastly more confused.

Cables were now being fired off to all conceivable parties by the Paris bank, the French railway, the English steamship line, the British railway, and the British bank, in dizzying profusion. As the day wore on, the tone of the messages became more acrimonious and their content more ludicrous. The whole thing reached a sort of pinnacle when the manager of the South Eastern Railway in Folkestone telegraphed the manager of the Britannic Steam Packer Company, also in Folkestone:
QUI EST M. VERNIER
. To this, the steamship manager shot back
YOUR SCURRILOUS ALLEGATIONS SHALL NOT GO UNCHALLENGED
.

By teatime in London, the desks of the chief officers of Huddleston & Bradford were heaped with telegrams and cables, and office boys were being dispatched to gentlemen’s homes to inform wives that their husbands would not be home for dinner, owing to urgent matters of business. The earlier atmosphere of unruffled calm and disdain for French inefficiency was now fading, replaced by a growing suspicion that something might actually have happened to the gold. And it was increasingly clear that the French were as worried as the English—M. Bonnard himself had taken the afternoon train to the coast, to investigate the situation in Ostend at first hand. M. Bonnard was a notorious recluse, and his decision to travel was viewed as a most significant event.

By seven o’clock in London, when most of the bank’s clerks went home for the day, the mood of the officers was openly pessimistic. Sir William Huddleston was snappish; Mr. Bradford had the smell of gin on his breath; Mr. Fowler was pale as a ghost; and Mr. Trent’s hands trembled. There was a brief moment of elation around 7:30 p.m., when the customs papers from Ostend, signed by the French the previous day, arrived at the bank. They indicated that at 5 p.m. on May
22nd the designated representative of Bonnard et Fils, one Raymond Vernier, had signed for nineteen sealed strongboxes from Huddleston & Bradford containing, according to the declaration, twelve thousand pounds sterling in bullion.

“Here is their bloody death warrant,” Sir William said, waving the paper in the air, “and if there’s been any irregularity, it is wholly upon French heads.” But this was an exaggeration of the legal situation, and he himself knew it.

Soon after, Sir William received a long cable from Ostend:

Sir William’s first reaction to the cable was reported to be “a heated and forceful expletive, provoked by the stresses of the moment and the lateness of the hour.” He is also said to have commented extensively on the French nation, the French culture, and the personal and hygienic habits of the French populace. Mr. Bradford, even more vociferous, expressed his belief in the unnatural French fondness for intimacy with barnyard creatures. Mr. Fowler was obviously intoxicated and Mr. Trent was suffering pains in the chest.

It was nearly ten o’clock at night when the bankers were finally calm enough for Sir William to say to Mr. Bradford: “I shall notify the Minister. You notify Scotland Yard.”

Events of subsequent days followed a certain predictable pattern. The English suspected the French; the French suspected the English; everyone suspected the English railway officials, who in turn suspected the English steamship officials, who in turn suspected the French customs officials.

British police officers in France, and French police officers in England, rubbed shoulders with private detectives hired by the banks, the railways, and the shipping line. Everyone offered some sort of reward for information leading to the arrest of the villains, and informants on both sides of the Channel quickly responded with a dazzling profusion of tips and rumors.

Theories about the lost gold shipment ran the gamut from the most mundane—a couple of French or English hooligans stumbling upon a fortuitous opportunity—to the most grandiose—an elaborate plot by the highest officials of the French or English government, engaged in a Machiavellian scheme intended simultaneously to line their own pockets and to sour relations with their military allies. Lord Cardigan himself, the great war hero,
expressed the opinion that “it must surely be a clever combination of avarice and statecraft.”

Nevertheless, the most widespread belief, on both sides of the Channel, was that it was some kind of inside job. For one thing, that was how most crimes were carried out. And, particularly in this case, the complexity and neatness of the theft surely pointed to inside information and cooperation. Thus every individual who had the slightest relationship to the Crimean gold shipment came under scrutiny, and was interrogated by the authorities. The zeal of the police to gather information led to some unlikely circumstances: the ten-year-old grandson of the Folkestone harbormaster was tailed by a plainclothesman for several days—for reasons that no one could quite recall later on. Such incidents only increased the general confusion, and the process of interrogation dragged on for months, with each new clue and possibility receiving the full attention of an eager and fascinated press.

No significant progress was made until June 17th, nearly a month after the robbery. Then, at the insistence of the French authorities, the safes in Ostend, aboard the English steamship, and on the South Eastern Railway were all returned to their respective manufacturers in Paris, Hamburg, and London for dismantling and examination of the lock mechanisms. The Chubb safes were discovered to contain telltale scratches inside the locks, as well as traces of metal filings, grease, and wax. The other safes showed no signs of tampering.

This discovery focused new attention on the luggage-van guard Burgess, who had been previously questioned and released. On June 19th, Scotland Yard announced a warrant for his arrest, but the same day the man, his wife, and his two children vanished without a trace. In subsequent weeks of searching, Burgess was not found.

It was then recalled that the South Eastern Railway
had suffered another robbery from its luggage van, only a week prior to the bullion theft. The clear implication of generally lax management by railway authorities fed the growing public suspicion that the robbery must have occurred on the London-Folkestone train. And when the South Eastern Railway’s hired detectives came forth with evidence that the robbery had been carried out by French villains—an allegation quickly shown to be groundless—the public suspicion hardened into certainty, and the press began to refer to The Great Train Robbery.

All during July and August, 1855, The Great Train Robbery remained a sensational topic in print and conversation. Although no one could figure out quite how it had been done, its evident complexity and audacity soon led to the unquestioned belief that it must have been carried out by Englishmen. The previously suspect French were now deemed too limited and timid even to conceive such a dashing endeavor, to say nothing of bringing it off.

When, in late August, the police in New York City announced they had captured the robbers, and that they were Americans, the English press reacted with frankly scornful disbelief. And, indeed, some weeks later it was learned that the New York police were in error, and that their robbers had never set foot on English soil, but were, in the words of one correspondent, “of that erratic turn of mind, wherein a man will seize upon a publicized event, even if it be notorious, to gain the attention of the wider public, and this to satisfy his demented craving for a moment in the limelight.”

The English newspapers printed every shred of rumor, hearsay, and speculation about the robbery; other stories were slanted to consider the robbery. Thus when Victoria made a visit to Paris in August, the press wondered in what way the robbery would affect her reception
in that city. (It apparently made no difference at all.)

But the plain fact was that throughout the summer months no single new development occurred, and inevitably interest began to wane. People’s imagination had been captured for four months. During that time, they had progressed from hostility toward the French, who had obviously stolen the gold in some sleazy, underhanded fashion, to suspicion of the English leaders of finance and industry, who were at best guilty of gross incompetence and at worst culpable of the crime itself, and eventually to a sort of admiration for the resourcefulness and daring of the English rogues who had plotted and carried out the escapade—however it was actually done.

But in the absence of fresh developments The Great Train Robbery became tedious, and eventually public opinion turned distinctly sour. Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railways, government, and police. In short, they wanted the culprits caught, and quickly.

But the culprits were not caught. Officials mentioned “possible new developments in the case” with ever less conviction. In late September there was an anonymous story to the effect that Mr. Harranby of Scotland Yard had known of the impending crime but had failed to prevent it; Mr. Harranby vigorously denied these rumors, but there were a few scattered calls for his resignation. The banking firm of Huddleston & Bradford, which had enjoyed a mild increase in business during the summer months, now experienced a mild decline. Newspapers featuring stories of the robbery sold fewer copies.