The Great Train Robbery (Part III)

Post Office Investigation

The Post Office Investigation Branch (IB) was tasked with immediately establishing the amount of money stolen, which they concluded totaled £2,595,997.10s.0d. They also sought to identify what money had been taken so that the relevant banks could be notified. Deficiencies in High Value Package carriage security were reported and secure carriages were immediately brought back into service. The installation of radios was recommended as a priority. The investigation was detailed in a report by Assistant Controller Richard Yates that was issued in May 1964.

Captures

Roger Cordrey

The first gang member to be caught was Roger Cordrey. He was with his friend, William Boal who was helping him lie low in return for the payment of old debts. They were living in a rented, fully furnished flat above a florist's shop in Wimborne Road, Moordown, Bournemouth. The Bournemouth police were tipped off by Ethel Clark, who unfortunately for Boal and Cordrey was the widow of a former police officer, when Boal and Cordrey paid rent for a garage in Tweedale Road, off Castle Lane West, three months in advance, all in used ten-shilling notes.

Boal, who was not involved in the robbery, was sentenced to 24 years and died in prison in 1970. Police later acknowledged that he was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.

Others

Other arrests followed. Eight of the gang members and several associates were caught. The other arrests were made by Sgt Stan Davis and Probationary Constable Gordon 'Charlie' Case.

On Friday 16 August 1963, two people who had decided to take a morning stroll in Dorking Woods discovered a briefcase, a holdall and a camel-skin bag, all containing money. They called police, who also discovered another briefcase full of money in the woods. In total, a sum of £100,900 was found. They also found a camel-skin bag with a receipt inside, from the Cafe Pension restaurant, Sonnenbichel, Hindelang, Prov. Allgäu in Germany. It was made out to Herr and Frau Field. Surrey police delivered the money and the receipt to Fewtrell and McArthur in Aylesbury, who knew by then that Brian Field was a clerk at James and Wheater who had acted in the purchase of Leatherslade Farm. They quickly confirmed through Interpol that Brian and Karin Field had stayed at the Pension Sonnebichel in February that year. In addition, they knew that Field had acted for Gordon Goody and other criminals.

Several weeks later, the police went to Field's house to interview him. He calmly (for someone whose relatives had dumped a large part at least of the loot) provided a cover story that implicated Lennie Field as the purchaser of the farm and his boss John Wheater as the conveyancer. He admitted to visiting the farm on one occasion with Lennie Field, but said he assumed it was an investment of his brother Alexander Field, whom Brian Field had unsuccessfully defended in a recent court case. Field, not knowing the police had found a receipt, readily confirmed that he and his wife had been to Germany on a holiday and gave them the details of the place at which they had stayed. On 15 September 1963 Brian Field was arrested and his boss John Wheater was arrested two days later. Lennie Field had already been arrested on 14 September.

Jack Slipper was involved in the capture of Roy James, Ronald Biggs, Jimmy Hussey and John Daly.

Trial, 1964

The trial of the robbers began at Aylesbury Assizes, Buckinghamshire, on 20 January 1964. Because it would be necessary to accommodate a large number of lawyers and journalists, the existing court was deemed too small and so the offices of Aylesbury Rural District Council were specially converted for the event. The defendants were brought to the court each day from Aylesbury Prison in a compartmentalized van, out of view of the large crowd of spectators. Mr Justice Edmund Davies presided over the trial, which lasted 51 days and included 613 exhibits and 240 witnesses. The jury retired to the Grange Youth Center in Aylesbury to consider its verdict.

On 11 February 1964, there was a sensation when John Daly was found to have no case to answer. His counsel, Walter Raeburn QC, claimed that the evidence against his client was limited to his fingerprints being on the Monopoly set found at Leatherslade Farm and the fact that he went underground after the robbery. Raeburn went on to say that Daly had played the Monopoly game with his brother-in-law Bruce Reynolds earlier in 1963, and that he had gone underground only because he was associated with people publicly sought by the police. This was not proof of involvement in a conspiracy. The judge agreed, and the jury was directed to acquit him.

Detective Inspector Frank Williams was shocked when this occurred because, owing to Tommy Butler's refusal to share information, he had no knowledge of the fact that Daly's prints were only on the Monopoly set. If Williams had known this, he could have asked Daly questions about the Monopoly set and robbed him of his very effective alibi. Daly was clever in avoiding having a photo taken when he was arrested until he could shave his beard. This meant that there was no photo to show the lengths he had gone to in order to change his appearance. No action was taken against Butler for his mistake in not ensuring the case against Daly was more thorough.

On 15 April 1964 the proceedings ended with the judge describing the robbery as "a crime of sordid violence inspired by vast greed" and passing sentences of 30 years' imprisonment on seven of the robbers.

Sentencing

The 11 men sentenced all felt aggrieved at the sentences handed down, particularly Bill Boal (who died in prison) and Lennie Field, who were later found not guilty of the charges against them. The other men (aside from Wheater) resented what they considered to be the excessive length of the sentences, which were longer than those given to many murderers or armed robbers at the time. At that period, there was no parole system in place and prisoners served the full term of the sentence. Train robbers who were sentenced later, and by different judges, received shorter terms.

At the time, the severity of the sentences caused some surprise. When mastermind Bruce Reynolds was arrested in 1968, he allegedly told arresting officer Tommy Butler that those sentences had had a detrimental effect. According to him, they had prompted criminals generally to take guns with them when they set out on robberies.

Appeals, July 1964

On 13 July 1964, the appeals by Lennie Field and Brian Field (no relation) against the charges of conspiracy to rob were allowed. This meant that their sentences were in effect reduced to five years only. On 14 July 1964, the appeals by Roger Cordrey and Bill Boal were allowed, with the convictions for conspiracy to rob quashed, leaving only the receiving charges. Justice Fenton Atkinson concluded that a miscarriage of justice would result if Boal's charges were upheld, given that his age, physique and temperament made him an unlikely train robber. Luckily for him, as the oldest robber, Cordrey was also deemed to be not guilty of the conspiracy because his prints had not been found at Leatherslade Farm.

Brian Field was only reluctantly acquitted of the robbery. Justice Atkinson stated that he would not be surprised if Field were not only part of the conspiracy, but also one of the robbers. The charges against the other men were all upheld. In the end Lennie Field and Bill Boal got some measure of justice, but Boal died in prison in 1970 after a long illness.

Prison escapes

On 12 August 1964, Wilson escaped from Winson Green Prison in Birmingham in less than three minutes, the escape being considered unprecedented in that a three-man team had broken into the prison to extricate him. His escape team was never caught and the leader, nicknamed "Frenchy", had disappeared from the London criminal scene by the late 1960s. Two weeks after his escape Wilson was in Paris for plastic surgery. By November 1965, Wilson was in Mexico City visiting old friends Bruce Reynolds and Buster Edwards.  Wilson's escape was yet another dramatic twist in the train robbery saga.

Eleven months after Wilson's escape, in July 1965, Biggs escaped from Wandsworth Prison, 15 months into his sentence. A furniture van was parked alongside the prison walls and a ladder was dropped over the 30-foot-high wall into the prison during outside exercise time, allowing four prisoners to escape, including Biggs. The escape was planned by recently released prisoner Paul Seaborne, with the assistance of two other ex-convicts, Ronnie Leslie and Ronnie Black, with support from Biggs's wife, Charmian. The plot saw two other prisoners interfere with the warders, and allow Biggs and friend Eric Flower to escape. Seaborne was later caught by Butler and sentenced to four-and-a-half years; Ronnie Leslie received three years for being the getaway driver. The two other prisoners who took advantage of the Biggs escape were captured after three months. Biggs and Flower paid a significant sum of money to be smuggled to Paris for plastic surgery. Biggs said he had to escape because of the length of the sentence and what he alleged to be the severity of the prison conditions.

Wilson and Biggs's escapes meant that five of the known robbers were now on the run, with Tommy Butler in hot pursuit.

Pursuit of fugitives

Jimmy White – With the other robbers on the run and having fled the country, only White was at large in the United Kingdom. White was a renowned locksmith/thief and had already been on the run for 10 years before the robbery. He was said to have "a remarkable ability to be invisible, to merge with his surroundings and become the ultimate Mr Nobody." He was a wartime paratrooper and a veteran of Arnhem.   According to Piers Paul Read in his 1978 book The Train Robbers, he was "a solitary thief, not known to work with either firm, he should have had a good chance of remaining undetected altogether, yet was known to be one of the Train Robbers almost at once—first by other criminals and then by the police". He was unfortunate in that Brian Field's relatives had dumped luggage containing £100,000 only a mile from a site where White had bought a caravan and hidden £30,000 in the paneling. In addition, a group of men purporting to be from the Flying Squad broke into his flat and took a briefcase containing £8,500. Throughout his three years on the run with wife Sheree and baby son Stephen, he was taken advantage of or let down by friends and associates. On 10 April 1966 a new friend recognized him from photos in a newspaper and informed police. They arrested him at Littlestone while he was at home. He only had £8,000 to hand back to them. The rest was long gone. He was tried in June 1966 at Leicester Assizes and Mr Justice Nield sentenced him to 18 years' jail, considerably less than the 30 years given to other principal offenders.

Buster Edwards – Edwards fled to Mexico with his family, to join Bruce Reynolds (and later Charlie Wilson) but returned voluntarily to England in 1966, where he was sentenced to 15 years.

Charlie Wilson – Wilson took up residence outside Montreal, Quebec, Canada, on Rigaud Mountain in an upper-middle-class neighborhood where the large, secluded properties are surrounded by trees. He lived under the name Ronald Alloway, a name borrowed from a Fulham shopkeeper. His wife and three children soon joined him. He joined an exclusive golf club and participated in the activities of the local community. It was only when he invited his brother-in-law over from the UK for Christmas that Scotland Yard was able to track him down and recapture him. They waited three months before making their move, in the hope that Wilson would lead them to Reynolds, the last suspect still to be apprehended. Wilson was arrested on 25 January 1968 by Tommy Butler. Many in Rigaud petitioned that his wife and three daughters be allowed to stay in the Montreal area.

Bruce Reynolds – On 6 June 1964, Reynolds arrived in Mexico, with his wife Angela and son Nick joining him a few months later, after they evaded the obvious police surveillance. A year later in July 1965, Buster Edwards and his family arrived, although unlike the Reynolds family they planned to return to England at some stage, and did not like Mexico. Charlie Wilson, on the run with his family still back in England visited them for six weeks, so three of the train robbers were together in exile for a time. After the Edwards family returned to England, the Reynoldses also decided to leave Mexico and go to Canada to potentially join up with the Wilson family, leaving on 6 December 1966. They had spent much of their share of the robbery by this point – living far more extravagantly than the Edwardses had. After realizing the danger in settling near the Wilsons in Montreal, they went to live in Vancouver, and then went to Nice, France. Reynolds did not want to go to Australia where Biggs was, and needing money decided to go back to England, settling briefly in Torquay before being captured by Tommy Butler.

Ronnie Biggs – Biggs fled to Paris, where he acquired new identity papers and underwent plastic surgery. In 1970, he moved to Adelaide, Australia, where he worked as a builder and he and his wife had a third son. Tipped off that Interpol was showing interest, he moved to Melbourne working as a set constructor for Channel 9, later escaping to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after police had discovered his Melbourne address. Biggs could not be extradited because there was no extradition treaty between Britain and Brazil, and additionally he became father to a Brazilian son, which afforded him legal immunity. As a result, he lived openly in Rio for many years, safe from the British authorities. In 1981, Biggs' Brazilian son became a member of a successful band Turma do Balão Mágico, but the band quickly faded into obscurity and dissolved.

In May 2001, aged 71 and having suffered three strokes, Biggs voluntarily returned to England. Accepting that he could be arrested, his stated desire was to "walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter".  Arrested on landing, after detention and a short court hearing he was sent back to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. On 2 July 2009, Biggs was denied parole by Justice Secretary Jack Straw, who considered Biggs to be still "wholly unrepentant", but was released from custody on 6 August, two days before his 80th birthday, on 'compassionate grounds'. He died on 18 December 2013, aged 84.