Adam Worth was a naughty man. He got a taste for being a naughty man as a bounty hunter during the American Civil War mastering the turning up, looking keen, and talking a good game thing, before running off with the bounty. Something he did again, and again. After the war he took to robbing banks and making friends with other crooks, who also liked robbing more banks, before catching a boat to Liverpool where he pitched up sporting a big hat and an attitude to match. He introduced himself as Henry Judson Raymond, who happened to be the late founding editor of the New York Times – something that was lost on many Liverpool Echo reading locals – and started knocking over pawnshops. London soon called, and a tight criminal network followed. Along the way he pinched Thomas Gainsborough’s full bodied painting of Georgina Cavendish, a socialite and style icon of the age; a painting he liked so much he decided to keep. He also sold a lot of stolen diamonds. Worth was eventually locked up in Leven prison in Belgium after being left high-and-dry on a criminally themed city break by a couple of flaky associates. According to the American writer Vincent Starrett, Worth was used as the prototype for Professor Moriarty, the Machiavellian criminal mastermind in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Now Worth was a naughty man, but he is not the naughtiest man to be buried in Highgate Cemetery. The naughtiest man is Bruce Reynolds, one of the cold-fingered puppeteers of the Great Train Robbery.
A little after 3am on the 18th August 1963, Jack Mills, a mild-mannered 53-year old from the train mecca of Crewe, was up front in his cab whistling a tuneless tune and idly wondering why it was that dogs stick their heads out of moving vehicles, when he saw a red light. A signal. Given he was rattling down the West Coast Main Line at great speed, and it was 3am, and they were just through Leighton Buzzard, a red light was not expected. Still, Jack wasn’t one to run red lights, so he eased on the brakes and brought his diesel locomotive, whose twelve carriages were loaded up with gas bills, love letters and a little over £2.5m in used £1 and £5 notes, to a stop. ‘Here Whitters’ he shouted to his 26-year old fireman David Whitby, also from the train mecca of Crewe, ‘go and have a look will yer?’ Mills fumbled for a Dunhill whilst he waited. Whitby climbed down to call the signalman from a track side phone. ‘That’s odd’ he called back, ‘there’s no dial tone’. Whitters didn’t remember much after that. Nor too did Jack.
Bruce Reynolds, along with a gang of sixteen other similarly mischievous types, had been hiding in the bushes track side – coshes to hand – waiting for the train to stop. One or two, you suspect, needing to wee. They had been planning the train job for months. Now there was a lengthy rap sheet of bank jobs among the assorted crooks in Reynolds’ crew, but none had any experience of robbing trains and so they had teamed up with a London gang called The South Coast Raiders, who did. The wily minds of the South Coast gang suggested putting a pillow case over the green signal light, and rigging up the red light to a battery. The train, they whispered to Reynolds over whisky and cigars one misty night in the murky depths of an East End knocking shop, would then stop. Kapow! Cosh away.
After boarding the train, the robbers duly coshed Mills, rendering him semi-conscious. So far so good. It was then they hit a snag. They needed to move the train about a kilometre down the track to where the getaway van was idling in a lay-by. Only the gang’s hired hand, Pop, a retired train driver who had shunted rolling stock around the Southern Region for years, had stood shaking his head at the controls. ‘No good, no good’ he muttered, ‘not like my day, not like my day at all.’ He then shrugged and turned to the ashen-faced Reynolds, ‘not sure I can help you here, guv.’ With options limited, there followed a very apologetic shake of the semi-conscious Mills’ shoulder. ‘I say chap, you wouldn’t mind awfully…’. When Mills had come to and marshalled the train down the tracks, he was trussed up with all the other mail sorters who had got a nasty shock as they sorted their sacks trading gossip and smutty jokes; and Reynolds’ gang then set about lifting the loot. Half an hour later they were fishtailing away with a truck full of cash and, one imagines, a thirst for a cold beer. In today’s money, each mischievous robber, was about £2.5m pounds richer. Not bad for night’s work. And all of it, tax free.
With their investigation soon marooned, the police received a tip off from a well connected barrister in the smoking room of an established West End members club. The barrister had an informant. Another naughty man locked up in some bleak prison somewhere who knew a man who knew a man, who knew the robbers involved. Parole was what he wanted; a stewed cup of tea is, probably, what he got. Anyway Tommy Butler arguably the most famous head of the famous Flying Squad took the information on the volley and went after the gang hard. Butler was known as the Grey Fox on account of being very, very shrewd, and lived with his mother. He also took very little time off and was painfully dogged; all of which combined explains why he will probably remain the most famous head of the Flying Squad. His only obvious weakness: no moustache.
Roger Cordrey, the gang’s electronics expert, was the first one to be caught. He was collared one morning on Bournemouth beach after he and a friend had rashly paid three months’ up-front, rent for a lock up garage, in used ten shilling notes. The lady who owned the garage was the wife of a police officer and sniffed something fishy. Both got nicked. Sadly Cordrey’s friend, a William Boal, who wanted nothing more than someplace to store an old mattress, was sent down for the train robbery, despite being tucked up in bed on the night of the crime. He later died in prison filing one of the Met’s biggest ever air shots. Whilst Boal caught the thick end of the wedge, John Daly, one of the getaway drivers, and brother in law of Bruce Reynolds, later got away scot free. A judge threw his case out for lack of evidence. Life, as we know, is sometimes very cruel.
In the end they all got caught, one way or another, and were generally handed down thirty years, although many served less. In a further delicious twist Charles Wilson, the gang’s Treasurer and notorious hard man, managed to spring himself from a Birmingham prison in under three minutes and disappear to Mexico, Tripadvisor’s #1 rated spot for anyone on the run. Ronnie Biggs also escaped from Wandsworth prison after climbing up a ladder that had been dropped over the wall during break time. Easy peasy. Biggs eventually made it to Brazil via Paris and Adelaide where he lived for many years. Despite the beaches, wiggly-hipped ladies and ice cold caipirinhas, Biggs longed to ‘walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter’. This he tried to do in 2001, but ran into problems at the border kiosk at Terminal 3. He was arrested on the spot and sent back to prison where he found lots of bitterness, but not much bitter. The pub had to wait.
What happened to Jack Mills you wonder? Poor chap suffered headaches for the rest of his life and died in 1970. Whitters was even less fortunate. He was traumatised from the attack and never really recovered. He never went back to work and died of a heart attack eight years later. Sad stuff. And what of the money? Gone. Spent on new noses, fake passports, legal fees, liqueur and keeping the neighbours quiet. Of the £2.6m that was stolen – £55m in today’s money – less than £400k was recovered. Our man Bruce Reynolds was the last of the robbers to be caught after being chased down the High Street in Torquay, of all places, in November 1968. He had been living quietly, under the assumed name of Keith Hiller, but had got bored and hopped on a train up to London to say hello to some old chums. Wrong move. ‘Here boss….’ said the copper watching the comings and goings of an underworld haunt, ‘that one looks just like Bruce Reynolds in a wig….hold on….what the…. we better call this one in.’ And that was that. Reynolds died in 2013, aged 81, and is buried in the East side of Highgate Cemetery.
Naughty man.
Hepburnsays 