The men behind the Great Train Robbery

England in the 1960s was fascinated by the boldness of the great train robbers and the scale of stolen money. However, when the accused came to trial in April 1964, the judge decided to send a message that such a crime would not be tolerated. Fourteen years later, some of the prisoners spoke to the BBC.

On April 16, 1964, Robert Welch was one of 12 men who committed the infamous robbery charges at Crown Court in Elsbury. Fourteen years later, in 1978, he joined the BBC documentary and current affairs program Man Alive, recalls hearing the verdict of local officials in court after seeing Jostle. “This was something they all came to see. The climax of the play, the drama,” Welch said. “And the medieval environment where we were sentenced to prison, it was a bit chilly.”

Welch and his fellow prisoners have come a long way since pulling away the great train robber, one of the boldest and lucrative thefts Britain has ever seen.

Welch and his co-defendants were part of the band that raised the Royal Mail Night Train, which traveled from Glasgow to London. The robbers had earned £2.6 million in used banknotes, record distance at the time, and more than £50 million ($65.8 million) today. At the time of Welch’s trial, police were still hunting three people suspected of being involved in the crime.

To carry out this carefully organized robbery, 15 members Of two of London’s biggest crime gangs, each had a specific role in the plot. “They were considered elites in the crime world,” said Reginald Abbis, who covered BBC crimes as a young reporter. He spoke to the Witness History Podcast 2023.

Bold robber It was held on August 8th, 1963, just after 3:00am. The first step that the criminal took was to disconnect the phone line and stop the alarm rising. They then equipped the train’s light and left it red. “They placed their gloves on top of the green light and wired cheap batteries to a red light, which of course meant that the driver had to slow up,” Abbis said.

Train driver Jack Mills turned off the engine and his co-driver David Whitby climbed up using a trackside cell phone to find out what the problem was. That’s when Whitby discovers that the line has been cut and he is set by a masked man wearing a boiler suit. In the meantime, masked robbers rushed into train taxis to control the driver. As Mills was about to fight, another gang member hit him over his head.

“One glitch was the fact that the train driver tried to resist, if necessary,” Abbis said. “One of the robbers hit him on his head with Kosh. A lot of blood and he went.”

The gang had been given inside information that cash and high value packages were held by two coaches in front of the train. And it was a bank holiday weekend so it would carry more money than usual.

There were no onboard police, but there were more than 70 post office employees, mostly on the rear carriage. The criminal, already used to the operation and layout of the train, quickly dismantled the carriage containing two monies. The plan was to remove them and move them away from the steep levees to a pre-determined rendezvous that would make it easier to unload cash bags.

It hit them with the problem. “They had a driver to drive the train. He couldn’t run the train. They had to pull the former driver, Jack Mills, off the floor, and threaten him and say, ‘I’m going to drive the train,'” Abbis said. “He managed to manage to get the train to where most of the gangs were waiting, and he was willing to sort the salters into the other eight or nine coaches, and had no idea that the main parts of the train had moved on.”

Still bleeding heavily, Mills is told to stop two front carriages at Bride Bridge. There, the remaining gangs break into the carriage, overwhelmed the post office staff working within them, and forced them to lie down towards the floor. They also brought in Mills and Whitby, handcuffed together.

The gang had decided to take down the booty and give them just 15 minutes to leave the remaining money. They formed human chains and quickly removed 120 bags containing 2 and a half tonnes of money into a parked Land Rover. Fifteen hours later, the crew called time, stayed still with the horrifying post office staff and ordered them not to contact police for 30 minutes. Then the robber I drove it at night.

The boldness of the theft and the enormous amounts involved captured the imagination of the British people. In the weeks that followed, the country was grabbed by sensational headlines detailing police hunts against perpetrators. However, despite the meticulous nature of the robbery and its clever execution, within a year the majority of the criminal gang had been rounded up and faced trial.

“Well, the first look, the job was a very well planned job,” Malcolm Supt of Malcolm Malcolm, who led the investigation into the robbery, told BBC News in 1964. “But it was a disaster at the event.

The judges at their trial did not see the robber’s actions in a “romantic” way that some people see, It is said to be “actively evil.” If he shows similarity of tolerance to a convicted man.

“I remember the shockwave passing through the courtroom. A man called Judge Edmund Davis, who passed 307 years between 307 years,” Abbis told BBC Witness History in 2023. At the time, the punishment received for robbery was the most severe in the UK’s criminal history.

“I was just paralyzed, I couldn’t think of anything except for 30 years. When are we going out? We’re never going to go outside,” one of the robbers, Tommy Withbay, told Man Alive in 1978.

“I don’t think it really hits you until a few days later, and you realised you have,” fellow gang member Gordon Goody told the BBC. “It was a little banter downstairs, grabbing the people around, and everything about that. But deep down, I think you were sick.”

The reason the judge gave due to the strictness of the prison conditions was an attack on the factories. “Anyone who sees an engine driver with a nerve shattered can doubt the horrific impact on citizens who comply with the laws of coordinated attacks by armed robbers,” Judge Davis said at the trial. Mills never worked again and died of leukemia in 1970. His co-driver Whitby died of a heart attack the following year at the age of 34.

However, there was also a sense that they were being punished disproportionately, at least among the robbers themselves, as the robbers were embarrassed by the British facilities. One of them, Roy James, told the BBC in 1978, “At that moment, all the shame that was with me during the trial was lifted, and Mr. Edmund Davis used his position as a judge in the High Court and used state support for vengeance.

“Judge Davis felt he fell particularly hard for two reasons,” Abbis said. “One was violence against train drivers, and the other was the facilities, the government, the post office, the British railways, the way they became like they were knocking down their pants.

The infamous criminals only grew following their sentences when two gangs made a dramatic escape from prison. Charles Wilson, the group’s treasurer, escaped from prison just four months after his trial. He was recaptured in Canada four years after his escape and served another 10 years behind the bar. Ronnie Biggs Using a makeshift rope ladder, he fled from Wandsworth Prison in London 15 months after his sentence. He underwent plastic surgery and sometimes lives in Spain, Australia and Brazil, avoiding arrests for nearly 40 years. In 2001 he voluntarily returned to the UK for treatment and served the remaining prison term.

The law will ultimately catch up with three gang members who were not to trial that day. Bruce Reynolds, considered the mastermind behind the robbery, ran five years before returning to England and being arrested. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, but eventually served 10 people. His son Nick had been running alongside his Mexican and Canadian father, but when the song of his band Alabama 3 woke up this morning, he had his own outlaw lifestyle and his own links when he became the opening theme for the Sopranos TV series.

Ronald “Buster” Edwards fled to Mexico following the robbery of Genesis singer Phil Collins in the 1988 film “Buster.” He gave up himself in 1966 and was released after nine years of service. James White, who served as the quartermaster of the robbery, was caught up in Kent and sent to prison three years later. He was released in 1975.

All men convicted of great train robbery will be released early despite the long prison time. No one had worked for more than 13 years for crimes, but many of them returned to prison for different crimes over the next few years.

With regard to the massive hauls stolen during the robbery, the majority of the money was never recovered, despite police providing a 10% share of the information leading them in 1964.

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