You know, usually when we talk about the heist
of the century, we're picturing, I don't know,
high tech servers, maybe some mission impossible
lasers, or even a complex crypto wallet hack
involving millions in invisible currency. Right.
Something digital and clean. Exactly. But today
we are going all the way back to 1963, a time
when money was, well, it was heavy. It was physical.
It was real. And it moved around on steam and
diesel trains in the dead of night. We are, of
course, doing a deep dive into the great train
robbery. And I think the first thing we really
need to get our heads around before we even get
to the robbers themselves is the world they were
operating in. That's so true. This was a cash
economy. I mean, fundamentally, there were no
credit cards to speak of, no digital transfers.
If a bank in, say, London needed a massive infusion
of cash. The train had to physically carry it
there. A train had to physically carry it there.
Facts and sacks of it. Which brings us to the
train at the heart of this story, the Up Special.
Now, in all the source material, this train sounds
like it should have been a fortress on wheels.
But was it really? It's surprising, but no, not
at all. The Up Special was a Royal Mail train,
a TPO, a traveling post office, running the regular
route from Glasgow down to London. It was an
institution. A British institution. Absolutely.
But despite carrying what we now know were millions
of pounds, the security was, by our modern standards,
almost non -existent. What do you mean? No armed
guards? No armed guards, no radios in the carriages
to call for help. The staff on board were just
postal workers sorting mail as the train rumbled
through the night. And that's the core insight
right off the bat, isn't it? The security, if
you can even call it that, it relied on obscurity,
not strength. The whole system was based on the
assumption that nobody would ever dare to touch
a royal mail train. Exactly. It was security
by gentleman's agreement. And on the night of
August 8th, 1963, a gang of about 15 men decided
that agreement was over. And they didn't just
break the agreement. They shattered it. They
stole 2 .61 million pound of one. Now, for you
listening, that number might sound almost modest
in an age of billion dollar tech companies and
whatnot. It's easy to dismiss it. But we have
to adjust for inflation. You have to. So what
are we talking about in today's money? Let's
say 2026 terms. In 2026 terms, we are looking
at roughly 69 million pounds. 69 million pounds.
In untraceable used banknotes. It is a staggering
amount of liquid cash. It's the kind of money
that alters not just your life, but your children's
lives. It's generation altering wealth. But.
And this is really the mission for our deep dive
today. We want to look past the romanticized,
you know, the movie version of this story. We
want to analyze the plan versus the actual chaotic
execution. Oh, absolutely. Because as we went
through all the source material, it becomes incredibly
clear that for all their supposed mastermind
planning, they made some incredibly basic, almost
comical errors. They really did. And we also
need to talk about the forensics, the science
that ultimately brought a lot of them down, specifically
a board game. The Monopoly board. It's my favorite
detail in the whole story. I can't wait to get
to that. But we also have to, and this is important,
look at the human cost. Because while the robbers
became these strange folk heroes to some people.
They did. There were real victims here. Working
class men whose lives were effectively destroyed
by that knife. That's right. This was not a victimless
crime, no matter what the tabloids at the time
might have wanted you to believe. So we've got
the architects of the plan, the mechanics of
the heist itself, the getaway, the investigation,
and of course, the long, long aftermath. OK,
let's unpack this. Where do we even start? Let's
start with the people. Who actually pulls off
something of this magnitude? Because this wasn't
just a couple of guys in a van with a crazy idea.
This was, for all intents and purposes, a super
gang. That is the perfect term for it. You have
to understand, the London underworld of the early
60s, it was quite fragmented. You had different
gangs, different territories. This robbery, it
was essentially a merger of two of the most effective
criminal organizations of the day. So who was
at the top? Well, the core group was known as
the firm. or the Southwest Gang. And the central
figure, the man with the vision, was a guy named
Bruce Reynolds. Reynolds is often called the
Napoleon of the whole operation, right? He is.
And he really cultivated that image. He fits
the profile perfectly of that 1960s aspiring
criminal aristocrat. He was the mastermind. He
didn't just want the money. He loved the high
life. He sought adventure. He drove an Aston
Martin, didn't he? He did. He wasn't just in
it for the cash. He was in it for the status,
for the thrill. He had this cinematic vision
of himself as a sophisticated operator, almost
like he was scripting his own movie before the
movie was even made. But a Napoleon, a general,
he needs his marshals. He can't do it alone.
And Reynolds had his. He had Gordon Goody. Goody
was the logistical organizer, the deputy. In
the underworld, Goody was hugely respected. He
was disciplined, he was sharp, and he was the
one who kept the crew in line. The details guy.
The details guy. Then you had Buster Edwards,
who was a former boxer and a nightclub owner.
He's another key organizer, very charismatic,
knew everyone. And then finally, in that core
group, you had Charlie Wilson. Wilson was known
as the treasurer, but also the silent man. That
sounds ominous. He was a very dangerous man,
very disciplined, very quiet. He was the enforcer.
He was the one you went to if you needed something
done, you know. quietly, and if necessary, violently.
He handled the money, and nobody argued with
him about it. So you've got this core team, the
Southwest gang, the brains, the logistics, the
muscle, but they had a massive skills gap, didn't
they? A huge one, a critical one. What was missing?
They were brilliant at robbing things that stood
still, buildings, warehouses, armored trucks
parked on the street. They were smash -and -grab
experts, but they didn't know the first thing
about how to stop a train. Right. I mean, it's
one thing to crack a safe. It's a completely
different discipline to hijack a moving locomotive
in the middle of the night without derailing
it and killing everyone on board. Precisely.
The physics are different. The technology is
different. So they realized they needed to bring
in specialists. They recruited another group
known as the South Coast Raiders. And these were
the heavy lifters? These guys provided the muscle,
yes, but also the specific experience needed
for this kind of heavy transport robbery. Men
like Tommy Wisby, Bob Welch, and Big Jim Hussey.
And they also brought in a very specific kind
of specialist, a man named Roger Corddry. Roger
Corddry. He was the signals guy, wasn't he? He
was absolutely essential. He was their tech expert,
if you like. He was a career criminal, but his
unique specialty was railways. He understood
how the signals worked, how the tracks were laid
out, the difference between a vacuum break and
an air break, or so they thought. He was the
one who knew how to manipulate the trackside
lights. So when you add it all up, the core gang.
the raiders, the specialists, plus a few other
associates who helped out. You have a total gang
size of about 15 or 16 men there on the night
of the raid. It's a small army. It is. But even
with all that muscle, all that planning, and
all that signal expertise, they never, ever would
have pulled this off without one very specific,
very crucial piece of the puzzle. The insider.
The insider. The Ulsterman. It sounds like a
character from a John Le Carre novel. Who was
he? This is genuinely one of the biggest and
most enduring mysteries of the whole affair.
The Ulster man was the source of the critical
intel. He was their man on the inside. He was
introduced to the gang via a solicitor's clerk
named Brian Field. Wait, a solicitor's clerk,
a lawyer's assistant, is working with one of
London's biggest criminal gangs. Brian Field
was their bridge. He was the connection between
the so -called criminal world and the straight
world. He was crooked, but he had a respectable
front. He managed the property purchase for the
hideout later on, but his most important contribution
was bringing the Ulsterman to the table. And
this Ulsterman, he was a postal worker or someone
higher up. The sources suggest he was likely
a senior security officer or a very experienced
postal worker who had intimate, detailed knowledge
of the high value package coach, the HVP, as
they called it. So what did he tell them? What
was the intel that made this robbery even possible?
It was a trifecta of perfect information. First,
the schedule. Not just that the train ran every
night, but the precise timings, the slack in
the schedule, where it would be at certain times.
Okay, that's vital. Second, the amount of cash.
He knew that because of a bank holiday weekend
in Scotland, the usual shipment of cash being
returned to London would be massively inflated
instead of the usual, say, 300 ,000 pounds, which
is still a lot of money. Which is still a huge
score. A huge score. He knew the train that night
would be carrying millions, potentially 10 times
the normal amount. And the third thing, the crucial
piece. This is the golden nugget. This is what
made the whole thing viable. He knew that the
reserve carriage was scheduled to be used that
night for the high -value packages. Why does
that matter? A train carriage is a train carriage,
isn't it? Not in this case. The regular HVP carriage
had recently been upgraded. It had new alarms,
heavy security bars on the windows, reinforced
doors. It was a tough nut to crack. But the reserve
carriage. Is the old model. It was old stock.
It didn't have any of the updated alarms. It
didn't have the bars. It was, for all intents
and purposes, a wooden box on wheels filled with
money. It was a sitting duck. Wow. So the stars
really did align for them. Now, there has been
a lot of debate over the decades about who this
Ulsterman actually was. It wasn't solved for
a long, long time, right? For decades, it was
a total secret. It was one of the great what
-ifs. But much later in life, Gordon Goody, who
we mentioned was Reynolds' deputy, he finally
broke his silence. He claimed it was a man named
Patrick McKenna, a postal worker. Patrick McKenna.
And did McKenna live like a king after the robbery?
Did he retire to the Bahamas on his share? And
that's the fascinating, almost tragic part of
the story. If what Goody said is to be believed,
McKenna never saw a penny of it. Or if he did,
he never clotted the wealth. He allegedly died
completely poor. So what happened to his share?
Well, the speculation is all over the place.
One theory is that he felt so guilty, he donated
his entire share, something like 150 ,000 pounds,
to the Catholic Church. Another is that he was
a quiet man who was simply robbed himself by
other criminals who knew what he had. And his
family had no idea. His family was completely
flabbergasted by the claim when it came out.
They said it was impossible. So it remains one
of those tantalizing loose ends that might never
be fully definitively tied up. So they have the
team, they have the insider intel, and they have
the target. Let's move to the night itself, August
8th, 1963. Take us to the railway tracks. Okay,
so it's about 3 .00 a .m. We're at a desolate
spot on the West Coast main line between Leighton
Buzzard and Cheddington in Buckinghamshire. It
is pitch black. It's quiet. And Roger Corddry,
the signal specialist, goes to work at a signal
gantry at a place called Sears Crossing. And
this is where we see what the sources call the
low -tech genius of the plan. It really was.
I want to dig into this because I think a lot
of us, you know, we'd assume hacking a signal
involves... cutting complex wires and rerouting
power like you see in the movies but it wasn't
that complicated was it not at all and its simplicity
is precisely why it works so well you have to
remember the railway signals of the day were
electric but they were fundamentally simple circuits
the signal at sears crossing was a standard four
aspect color light signal green means go double
amber and amber are warnings and red means stop
right standard stuff Corddry knew that if he
just cut the power to the whole thing, the system
might default into a fail -safe mode, which could
actually turn all the signals in the area red,
or even worse, it could alert the main signal
box miles away that there was a fault in the
line. So he couldn't just turn it off? No. No.
He had to make the system think it was working
normally, but show a different light to the driver
of their specific train. So how on earth do you
do that without tripping an alarm? It's brilliantly
simple. He climbs up the gantry. He takes a glove,
an old leather glove, and he physically stuffs
it over the green lens. He just covers it up.
Just covers it up. That blocks the all clear
light. But the circuit itself is still live.
The bulb is still on behind the glove. So the
main control board down the line doesn't register
a lamp failure. Then he takes a standard 6 -volt
battery, the kind you could buy in any hardware
store, and connects its terminals directly to
the red bulb, illuminating it. So from the signal
box's point of view, everything is green, everything
is normal. But the driver of the train, Jack
Mills, he comes around the corner and sees a
single red light. It's a stop signal in a place
he doesn't expect one. But he's a professional.
He's a 57 -year -old veteran driver. He sees
a red light. He stops the train. And this is
where the trap springs. The second man in the
locomotive, David Whitby, he does exactly what
he's supposed to do. He climbs down from the
cab to use the special line side telephone to
call the signalman and ask why they've been stopped.
But the phone's dead. The cables have been cut.
He turns back towards the train, probably confused,
maybe a little annoyed. And that's when he's
overpowered by the gang members who are hiding
in the thick undergrowth on the embankment. And
then they storm the engine cab. They come at
the engine from both sides at once. Jack Mills,
the driver, he's in the cab. He sees these masked
figures swarming his engine. He realizes what's
happening. He struggles with one of the robbers.
And in that scuffle, he is struck from behind
with a heavy metal barricade. This is such a
pivotal moment. The gang, especially later on,
always made a big deal about the fact that no
guns were used. which is technically true, but
this was an act of brutal, life -altering violence.
It absolutely was. Mill suffered a severe head
injury. He was knocked semi -conscious. And this
act of violence, ironically, it immediately complicates
their own plan. How so? Because they had a very
specific plan for moving the train. They didn't
want to unload all that money right there at
the signal. The embankment was way too steep
and uneven. They needed to move the train about
another half a mile down the track to a place
called Bridego Bridge, where the road passed
underneath the railway. Their trucks were waiting
there. Right. Because unloading two and a half
tons of cash down a steep, dark, gravelly slope.
is a nightmare. You want to be right over the
road, drop it straight down. Yeah. So they had
brought their own driver to handle this short
trip. They did. They had a man who is only referred
to in the history books as Stan Agate or sometimes
just Peter. He was an acquaintance of one of
the gang members, Ronnie Biggs, and was supposedly
a retired train driver. And this is where the
so -called precision of the plan starts to fall
apart in a way that is, honestly, it's just shocking
for a supposed super gang. It falls apart completely.
Stan Agate. climbs into the driver's seat of
this massive, powerful English electric Type
4 diesel locomotive. And he freezes. Wait, he
was brought along for one job? He was supposed
to be a train driver. How do you hire a getaway
driver who can't drive the getaway vehicle? And
this is a real aha moment when you look into
the technology of the time. Stan was a retired
shunter. He used to move carriages around a railway
yard at five miles per hour. Those were simple,
older engines, often steam engines. This English
electric type four was a beast. It was one of
the most modern, complex diesel electric engines
on the line at the time. So it's like hiring
someone who can drive a golf cart to pilot a
jumbo jet. That's a perfect analogy. The braking
systems were different. Vacuum brakes versus
air brakes, the throttle configuration, the controls
on the dash. It was all alien to him. He looked
at the complex array of levers and dials and
essentially said, I don't know what to do. I
can't release the brakes. Can you just imagine
the sheer panic in that moment? You've just violently
assaulted the crew. You've stopped the Royal
Mail train. The clock is ticking on your whole
operation and your designated driver is sitting
there shrugging his shoulders. It was a complete
disaster for them. It could have been the end
of the robbery right there. So they had to resort
to a true. brutal desperate solution they use
jack mills They went back to the bleeding, dazed,
semi -conscious Jack Mills. They dragged him
back into the driver's seat, propped him up,
and they forced him to drive his own train that
final half mile to Bradego Bridge. That is just
horrific. It is, and it shows the absolute ruthlessness
that was hiding underneath that gentleman thief
image they like to project. If they hadn't been
willing to do that, to be that cruel, the whole
robbery would have failed. So Mills, under duress,
gets the train to the bridge. Now the really
hard physical labor begins. They have to uncouple
the high -value package carriage from the rest
of the train. Right. They leave the postal sorters
and all the ordinary mail behind in the other
10 carriages. They only want the first two coaches.
The assault force, another part of the gang,
storms that HVP carriage. The staff inside, a
few men, Dewhurst, Kett, and others, they tried
to block the door with mailbags, but they were
quickly overwhelmed. And again, no police on
board. No police, no security guards, just postal
workers. They were subdued and forced to lie
face down in a corner of the carriage while the
gang got to work. And now... They have to move
the cash. And we're not talking about a neat
briefcase full of diamonds here. This is an immense
amount of physical currency. We're talking about
120 sacks of banknotes. The total weight was
estimated at around two and a half tons. Two
and a half tons. Think about that. That's the
weight of a large SUV, like a Range Rover. They
formed a human chain, a line of men, passing
these heavy, awkward sacks from the door of the
train down the steep embankment to the waiting
vehicles below. And they did this in about 15
to 20 minutes. That is back -breaking, physically
exhausting work. Adrenaline is a powerful thing.
They loaded the sacks into an old Austin Lodestar
truck and two Land Rovers they had brought. And
here's a detail I love, a little bit of classic
criminal tradecraft. The two Land Rovers had
been painted to look like Army vehicles, and
they had matching registration plates. Why the
matching plates? To confuse potential witnesses.
If someone saw a Land Rover with the plate BMG
757A near the bridge, and another witness saw
one with the same plate 10 miles away a few minutes
later, the police might think it was the same
vehicle and get their timeline all mixed up.
It's a clever little bit of misdirection. But
even with all their effort, they didn't get everything,
did they? No. And this speaks to the discipline
of the plan, at least. Bruce Reynolds had set
a very strict time limit, 30 minutes from the
moment the train stopped. That was it. When that
30 minutes was up, they had to leave no matter
what. So they just left money on the train? They
left eight full sacks of cash behind on the floor
of the carriage. Any idea how much was in those
bags? It was later counted. Those eight bags
contained about 131 ,000 towns. But they stuck
to the discipline. Time was up. They piled into
their vehicles and drove off into the night with
over 2 .6 million pounds. Okay, so they have
the money. They've escaped the crime scene clean,
or so they think. Now they need to lay low. But
where on earth do you go with two and a half
tons of stolen cash and 15 wanted men? You go
to your prearranged hideout. They headed for
a place called Leather Slade Farm. This was a
rundown, isolated property about 27 miles from
the crime scene. And they'd had this place lined
up for a while. Oh, yes. They had purchased it
months prior. Brian Field, the solicitor's clerk,
handled the conveyancing, using an associate
named Lenny Field as a front man to buy the property
so it couldn't be traced back to the gang. And
the timing on the night must have been incredibly
tight. Extremely tight. They arrived at the farm
around 4 .40 in the morning. And you have to
realize this is almost the exact same time that
the first garbled reports of the robbery were
starting to hit the police radios. So they're
sitting in this dilapidated farmhouse 27 miles
away, probably completely exhausted, but running
on the highest of high adrenaline. Absolutely.
And they start counting. Can you imagine that
scene? A dirty room in an old farmhouse piled
high with mailbags. They're just dumping. them
out on the floor it's a mix of old crisp one
pound notes and the bigger five pound notes the
old white fibers and the newer blue ones piles
of cash literally reaching the ceiling it must
have felt completely surreal the score of a lifetime
The split was worked out to be roughly £150 ,000
per full share. That was astronomical wealth
in 1963. To put it in perspective for you, a
nice detached family house in the London suburbs
cost about £3 ,000 at the time. So each man got
50 houses worth of money. Pretty much. They also
set aside smaller payments, which they called
drinks, for the various associates. The guy who
arranged the farm, the failed train driver Stan
Agate, and so on. Here's a few grand for... Basically.
But while this celebration is happening, while
they're literally rolling in money, the unraveling
begins. And the instrument of their downfall
is the radio. They were listening to the police
broadcasts. They were. It was standard practice
for a gang like this to monitor the police frequencies
to know what they knew. And what they heard on
that radio absolutely terrified them. What did
they hear? They heard the police deduce and then
broadcast that they were setting up a 30 -mile
radius search zone around the crime scene. scene.
How on earth did the police figure that out so
fast? That's incredible detective work. It was.
And it was all down to a single slip up during
the robbery. One of the robbers had shouted at
the postal staff on the train, don't move for
half an hour. And the police picked up on that.
The lead investigator on the ground, a Buckinghamshire
CID detective named Malcolm Futrell, he heard
that detail and realized it wasn't just a random
number. It was significant. It implied the gang
believed they needed exactly 30 minutes of driving
time to get to their safe house before the alarm
was properly raised and the roads were blocked.
So a 30 -minute drive at speed in a fast car.
It draws a nearly perfect circle on the map.
Right around Leather Slate Farm. Exactly. They
were inside the cert zone. Panic set in immediately.
The original plan was to stay at the farm for
weeks, maybe even a month, to go to ground, let
the initial heat die down. But now they know
the police are closing the net. So the plan changes.
They decide to abandon the farm and split up
early. They decided to leave on Friday, just
a day and a half later, instead of waiting. But
they had to clean up first, surely. You can't
just leave a farmhouse that's been inhabited
by 15 men full of your DNA and fingerprints.
And this. This is the fatal error. This is the
mistake from which everything else unravels.
The plan was to burn the farmhouse to the ground,
destroy everything, every cup, every plate, every
blanket, every fingerprint. But they couldn't
do it themselves, could they? A massive fire
in the middle of a police search zone would be
like sending up a flare. Precisely. So they outsourced
the arson. They did what? They paid an associate,
a man known to history only as Mark, a staggering
10 ,000 pounds to come back to the farm a day
or so after they had all left and torched the
place. 10 ,000 pounds to light a match. That
is a fortune in itself. And what did Mark do?
He took the money and ran. He never went back.
He never lit the fire. Unbelievable. Why? Was
it cowardice? Creed? Probably a pretty rational
mix of both. He likely figured... They're all
scattered. I have the 10 grand. Why on earth
would I risk going back to the biggest crime
scene in the country to commit arson? But that
decision, that one failure to follow through,
it doomed the entire gang. So the farm was just
left standing there, as is. Exactly. A local
herdsman, who knew the farm was supposed to be
empty, eventually tipped off the police because
he'd seen lights and activity there. When the
police finally arrived and cautiously entered
the farmhouse, it was a forensic goldmine. What
did they find? Everything. They found leftover
food, bedding, the empty mailbags, the getaway
vehicles hidden in a shed, and the smoking gun.
The Monopoly board. This is my favorite detail
of the entire case. It's just so perfect. So
past the time while they were hiding out and
counting the money, the robbers had been playing
a game of Monopoly. Okay, a bit of downtime.
But here's the thing. They weren't using the
little colorful fake paper money that comes with
the game. They were playing with the real stolen
cash. bundles of fivers and tenors. That is a
level of sheer, breathtaking arrogance that is
hard to wrap your head around. It is. But from
a forensic standpoint, it was a complete and
utter disaster for them. Think about a Monopoly
board. It's hard. It's smooth. It's got a glossy
cardboard surface. It is the perfect surface
for retaining latent fingerprints. Much better
than, say, the rough canvas of a mailbag or a
wooden table. It's infinitely better. The police
forensic team went over that board and the chance
cards and the community chess cards, and they
found fingerprints all over it. Specifically,
they found clear prints belonging to Bruce Reynolds,
Buster Edwards, and several other key members
of the gang. So the police have the farm, they
have the physical evidence, and now they have
the prints. The hunt begins in earnest. Let's
talk about the investigation. Who were the hunters
in this story? The investigation was massive,
as you can imagine. Initially on the ground,
you had Malcolm Futrell from the Buckinghamshire
CID. But given the scale of the crime, Scotland
Yard was called in almost immediately. You had
commanders like George Hathroll and Ernie Millen
leading the charge. But the one man who really
came to define the pursuit was Detective Chief
Superintendent Tommy Butler. Tommy the Gray Fox
Butler. He sounds like a character straight out
of a noir novel. He really does, and he lived
up to the name. Tommy Butler was the head of
the legendary flying squad, the Sweeney. He was
about 50 years old, and he was completely, utterly
obsessed with his job. What was he like? He was
unmarried. He still lived with his mother. His
entire life was the job. They called him One
Day Tommy because of how quickly he usually caught
the thieves he was after. He sounds intense.
Incredibly so. He was brilliant, but notoriously
difficult to work with. He don't trust the local
police. He barely trusted his own team at the
yard. There's a story that when they found the
farm, the forensic team was working around the
clock. When they finally asked for a break, Butler
threatened to send them all back to walking a
beat in uniform. He was paranoid, he was secretive,
and he was absolutely relentless. He never gave
up. So how did they start putting names to the
faces, or rather to the fingerprints? Was it
just a case of matching the prints from the Monopoly
board to their records? The fingerprints were
the crucial scientific confirmation, the evidence
that would stand up in court. But the initial
leads, the names themselves, they came from old
-fashioned police work. Informants. Snout in
the underworld. Exactly. This is how policing
worked back then. A prisoner who was already
serving time, hoping to get a bit of his sentence
reduced for parole, gave a list of 18 names to
Hathoril and Millen. And was the list any good?
It was remarkably accurate. It contained most
of the core members of the gang. The police then
took that list and made a very controversial
move. They decided to publish the photos of the
main suspects in all the national newspapers.
Now, why was that controversial? You'd think
that standard procedure. But usually in a big
case, you want to keep your cards close to your
chest. Exactly. The conventional wisdom is you
don't want your suspects to know that you know
who they are. It gives them time to dig in deeper
to create better alibis. But the police felt
the gang had too much money and too much of a
head start. So this was a way to put pressure
on them. It was a way to make them radioactive.
By splashing their faces on the front page of
the Daily Mirror and every other paper in the
country, they made it impossible for them to
live a normal life. Ah, I see. So suddenly, no
one will rent you a room, no one will sell you
a car, you can't even go into a pub for a quiet
pint because your face is the most famous in
Britain. Precisely. It turned the entire country
into a surveillance network for the police. It
forced the robbers to move constantly, to hide
in odd places, and crucially, to make mistakes
under pressure. So the heat is on in a massive
way. Let's look at how the dominoes started to
fall. Who was the first of the main gang to get
caught? That was Roger Corddry, the signal expert.
And again, his capture was a direct result of
a stupid mistake born of having too much cash
and nowhere to put it. He was trying to lie low
and he was renting a garage space from a policeman's
widow. Oh, no, you can't make that up. That is
just terrible luck. And he made it so much worse.
He paid her three months rent in advance in a
big bundle of used 10 shilling notes. It's always
the little things. If he had just gone to a bank
and gotten some clean money. Oh wait, he couldn't
do that. He couldn't do that. She thought it
was incredibly suspicious. She tipped off her
local police. They investigated and Roger Corddry
was caught. Then you have Brian Field, the solicitor's
clerk who was the bridge man. He was traced because
of a camel skin bag he dumped in the woods near
his home. What was in the bag? His robbery gear,
but also... incredibly, a receipt for a German
hotel where he and his wife had recently stayed
on a little holiday. That is just sloppy. It's
amateur hour. It really is. And it shows the
difference between being career criminals and
master criminals. These guys were very good at
being thugs. They were good at the violence and
the planning. But under the intense pressure
of a national manhunt, they made basic errors.
Jimmy White was another interesting one. He actually
managed to stay on the run for three whole years.
He lived as a Mr. Nobody, just blending into
the background in a seaside town. But eventually,
the net closed on him, too. Let's fast forward
to the trial, then. Aylesbury, 1964. This was
a media circus, wasn't it? It was the trial of
the century. It was huge. They had to build a
special temporary court building just to accommodate
the enormous press pack from around the world
and the sheer number of defendants in the dock.
It was the O .J. Simpson trial of its day. But
the most dramatic moment of that whole trial
wasn't actually conviction. It was a surprise
acquittal. John Daly. He was Bruce Reynolds'
brother -in -law. And his fingerprints were all
over the Monopoly set. It seemed like an open
and shut case. It did. But his lawyer, a Queens
counsel named Walter Rayburn, he pulled off a
truly brilliant piece of legal defense. He didn't
dispute that the prints were Daley's. Instead,
he argued that Daley could have played that specific
game of Monopoly with Reynolds at his house weeks
or months before the robbery ever took place.
So the prints were old. Exactly. Since the Monopoly
set belonged to the gang and traveled with them,
his lawyer argued that his client's prints could
have been on it completely innocently from a
prior occasion. And the jury bought that. Well,
the judge did. The judge agreed there was no
other hard physical evidence placing Daly at
the crime scene or at the farm. He actually directed
the jury to acquit him. Tommy Butler must have
been absolutely furious. Oh, undoubtedly. He
would have seen it as a lawyer's trick. But for
the rest of the game, the ones who were convicted,
the sentences were incredibly severe. The ringleaders
got 30 years in prison. 30 years. I've read that
was even longer than many murder sentences at
the time. It was. And this is a point of real
serious historical debate. The judge, a man named
Mr. Justice Edmund Davies, he was furious. He
called the robbery a crime of sordid violence
inspired by vast greed. He wanted to make an
example of them to send a message. But did that
message backfire? Many people, including many
criminals at the time, argued that it did. The
lodge went like this. If you're going to get
30 years for a robbery where you don't kill anyone,
you might as well carry a gun next time. If you
shoot a witness or a police officer, the sentence
isn't going to be much worse and you significantly
increase your chances of getting away. It arguably
hardened the criminal underworld and led directly
to the rise of the much more violent armed robberies
of the 70s and 80s. So they're tried. They're
convicted. They're locked up for 30 years. End
of story. But for this gang. Prison was apparently
just a suggestion because we have some of the
most famous escapes in British history. The great
train robbery escapes are almost as famous as
the heist itself. It's like a whole second act
of the drama. First up was Charlie Wilson, The
Silent Man. In 1964, just a few months into his
sentence, a three -man team broke into Winston
Green Prison and broke him out. The whole operation
took less than three minutes. Three minutes?
How is that even possible? It was surgical. It
was a professional job. They knew exactly which
cell he was in. They had keys. They were in and
out before the alarm was fully raised. He ended
up living in Canada for several years before
Tommy Butler relentlessly tracked him down. But
the most famous escape of all, the one everyone
knows, is Ronnie Biggs. Ronnie Biggs. He escaped
from Wandsworth Prison in 1965. How did he do
it? It was classic, almost cinematic. A furniture
van pulled up outside the prison wall during
exercise time. A rope ladder was thrown over.
Biggs and a few others scrambled over the 30
-foot wall and dropped into the van. It was incredibly
daring. Biggs then went on this global journey,
didn't he? Paris, then Australia. And then finally
to Brazil. Rio de Janeiro. And this is where
the story just gets completely bizarre. It really
does. Because the British police, with help from
a tabloid journalist, they tracked him down in
Rio in 1974. They had him. They were ready to
bring him back. But Ronnie Biggs had one last
ace up his sleeve. No, was it? While on the run
in Brazil, he had fathered a child with a Brazilian
woman named Raymunda. And under Brazilian law
at that time, the father of a Brazilian national
could not be extradited. A legal loophole. A
life -saving, freedom -granting loophole. So
he was stuck in Brazil, but he was free. He lived
openly in Rio, and he became a tourist attraction.
You could literally fly to Rio, buy a t -shirt
that said, I went to Rio and met Ronnie Biggs,
and he'd sit and have a beer with you for a fee.
He monetized his own info. Just incredible. What
about the mastermind, Bruce Reynolds? Did he
escape too? No, but he evaded capture for five
long years. He lived that high life he'd always
dreamed of in Mexico and in Canada. He had his
wife and son with him. But life on the run is
incredibly expensive, and the money just ran
out. He eventually had to return to the U .K.,
trying to get back into the criminal game, and
was finally captured in the seaside town of Torquay
in 1968 by Tommy Butler himself, fittingly. It's
amazing how that money, that life -changing generation
-altering amount, it just seemed to evaporate
for so many of them. Which brings us to the part
of the story that often gets lost in the glamour.
The victims. We really need to talk about this
because that romantic Robin Hood narrative just
completely falls apart when you look at what
happened to Jack Mills. We do. It's so important.
Jack Mills, the driver, he never recovered from
that blow to the head he received in the cab.
He suffered from constant debilitating trauma
headaches for the rest of his life. He tried
to go back to work, but he couldn't drive anymore.
He was a proud railway man and he was relegated
to light duties, cleaning carriages. It was a
huge blow to his dignity. And he died quite young,
didn't he? He died of leukemia in 1970, just
seven years after the robbery. His family always
maintained, and it's hard to argue with them,
that the severe head injury and the trauma weakened
him and contributed directly to his early death.
And what about the second man in the cab, David
Whitby? Whitby was only 26 years old at the time.
He wasn't physically beaten as badly as Mills,
but he was deeply traumatized. He was roughed
up. He was threatened. He watched his colleague
get brutally assaulted. He suffered from severe
anxiety and depression. He died of a heart attack
in 1972 at the age of just 34. That is just heartbreaking,
34 years old. And then there's a third almost
forgotten victim, a man named Bill Bull. He was
an associate of Roger Corddry, the signals man.
He was caught with him in that garage. But the
evidence suggests he wasn't one of the robbers.
He was just a friend, maybe helping Corddry hide
some of the money. He was convicted and sentenced
alongside the others, and he died in prison.
An innocent man, arguably, who died serving a
sentence for the crime of the century. When you
hear those stories, it just sobers you up, doesn't
it? This wasn't some fun caper or a victimless
adventure. It destroyed lives. And for what,
ultimately? Let's look at the money again. 2
.6 million stolen. Of that, only about 400 ,000
pounds was ever officially recovered by the police.
So where did the other 2 .2 million pounds go?
It was just bled away, vanished. First, laundering
that much cash costs a fortune. Associates who
cleaned the money by passing it through businesses
took huge cuts, sometimes 50 percent or more.
Then other criminals who knew the robbers were
in prison stole from their hidden stashes. No
honor among thieves then? Absolutely none. They
also spent a fortune on legal fees. It's estimated
each of the main gang spent about 30 ,000 pounds
on their defense. And as we said, life on the
run is incredibly expensive. You have to pay
for silence, for fake passports, for constant
traffic. In the end, most of robbers died with
very little or nothing to show for it. There
is one weird story about the recovered money,
though. The money in the phone box. Ah, yes.
The great GPO telephone box mystery. A sum of
47 ,245 blends was found stuffed into a phone
box in South London. The prevailing theory, though
never proven, is that this was part of a quiet
deal. Danny Pembroke, one of the gang members,
likely made a deal with a police officer. possibly
a detective named Frank Williams, to return a
chunk of his share in exchange for not being
charged. And indeed, Danny Pembroke was never
charged with the robbery. That's the murky side
of the investigation that never makes it into
the movies. Right. So as we wrap up here, what
is the ultimate legacy of this event? What did
it change? I think it marked a real transition
in British crime. It was really the end of that
old era of the gentleman criminal, the distinct
firms, the unwritten no -guns rule. The sheer
scale of it and the severity of the sentences,
it changed the game. It paved the way for the
harder, more ruthless, and more violent armed
robbery gangs of the 1970s and 80s. And culturally
just immortal, isn't it? The movies like Buster,
the countless books and documentaries, it's become
embedded in the British national psyche. Absolutely.
But even after all these years, there are still
tantalizing mysteries left unsolved. And here's
where it gets really interesting for all you
amateur detectives listening. The mystery of
the third man. The man who actually hit Jack
Mills with the kosh? For decades, none of the
gang would say who it was. It was a point of
honor or shame. On his deathbed, Big Jim Hussey
finally confessed to it, but many insiders and
researchers believe he was just taking the blame,
covering for someone else. That code of silence
held for more than 50 years. And the other great
vanishing act, the replacement driver, Stan Agate
or Peter. The man who couldn't drive the train,
who was never caught, who was never identified
by the police, he just vanished completely into
history. He didn't get a full share, just a small
payout for his failure, and he disappeared off
the face of the earth. Yeah, he was probably
the smartest one of the bunch in the end. I think
you might be right. So as you go about your day,
think about that. Think about the huge difference
between the myth of the great train robbery,
the glamour, the cleverness, the anti -establishment
thrill, and the gritty reality of a dirty farmhouse
covered in fingerprints, a train driver who never
recovered, and a vast fortune that just slipped
through their fingers like sand. It's the ultimate
reminder that even the most perfect plans, the
crimes of the century, they all rely on human
beings. And human beings are messy, they're greedy,
they get scared, and sometimes they're prone
to playing Monopoly when they should be cleaning
up their tracks. Exactly. Thanks for diving deep
with us on this one. We'll see you on the next
one. See you then.