October 16, 2014 • 42 mins
In 1963, 15 men got together in England to pull off one of the most daring heists in history. The Great Train Robbery was the crime of the century, capturing the public's attention and leaving them torn on who to root for - the cops or the robbers. Learn all about England's greatest heist in today's episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to you stuff you should know from House Stuff
Works dot Com to too and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bright, there's Jerry Uh.
And you put all of us together with a couple
of microphones, a crummy ikea lamb and uh you will,
(00:25):
and a headful of nose juice, you get stuff you
should know. That's right, stuff you should knows juice. Oh girl,
how's it going, buddy? Besides the obvious under the weather
and nests of you, I predict this is the last one. Great.
I'm gonna be back to good as new by the
next time we record. Yeah, we're going to Vancouver and
you'll get some of that good Canadian air air in
(00:48):
your body, and the pine air it's healing. Yeah. Properties,
I'll get pine and flannel and ocean like in my
in my faith and and moose yeah, moose hair. Yeah.
That's so if you wal wadded all into a ball
and sniff it, it takes care of everything. That's right.
(01:10):
What the world are we talking about? I don't know. Uh,
we're talking about trains, It's right. We're talking about a
specific train, Chuck. We're talking about a specific train at
a specific moment in place and time that all came
together to become known as the Great Train Robbery. Right,
(01:31):
did you know? Did you commission this article? I did not.
Did you know about it already? Some? Or yeah? I
mean I a little bit, but um not as like
obviously as much. After I researched and I watched a
couple of documentaries, and uh was looking for a great
awesome movie. But I don't think there really is a
great awesome movie about this yet, which is surprising. I
think they did, like BBC did one, and I think
(01:53):
Sean Connery did one that was loosely I think other
things were loosely based, but like the Taking of Pelham one,
two three, Yes, exactly, that's a good movie. Did you
the original? Of course? Yeah? Did you watch The Tale
of Two Thieves? Is that one of the documentaries you watched? No?
I don't think that's out to the public yet unless
I just haven't seen it. I think it's new this year. Yeah,
(02:15):
it seems like it's two thousand fourteen. Yeah, I want
to see it. But there are no shortage of YouTube
BBC docks because they love it, and I learned a
lot of new words watching them. Yeah, like um what
oh like, um, instead of crooked, someone has bent, like
a bent solicitor, I figured out was a crooked solicitor.
And a cosh is a like a like a billy
(02:38):
club and you can cash somebody like the train conductor
was cosht. Yeah. Yeah, there were just a bunch of
cool terms that I had to kind of figure out
what they meant an American in my English. Yeah, so, um,
I had I heard the words great train and robbery together,
but I didn't know anything about. I think there was
(03:00):
another one, an older great train robbery from the hundreds.
There's one in eighteen fifty five where a train traveling
from London to Paris or vice versa had a bunch
of gold bullion on it and it got hit. That
was legendary. But apparently this was the biggest train highest
since then, more than a hundred years later. Yeah, it
(03:22):
was a big deal and it was sort of Jesse
James style. That's why it became uh one of the
crimes of the century. Um in England for sure. I
mean it was huge in the press, and these guys
that knocked off this train became these kind of weird
working class heroes. Well, one of them became the symbol
for the anti establishment, which one, uh what was his name? Um,
(03:48):
the the the one who made off for years and
years Yeah, he Um, he was on the lamb for
like thirty years, so he was super famous. Yeah, and
they knew where he was and they couldn't get to him,
which we'll talk about. But he, you know, became like
the this folk hero of the anti establishment, saying vocals
on lots of like punk records. Yeah. Yeah. I saw
(04:11):
in both documentaries that had a bunch of interviews, like
on the street interviews from the time, like with regular
upstanding citizens like who side are you on? And a
lot of them were like, well, I feel ashamed to
admit this, but I kind of think these guys really
took it to the cops on this one, and they
thought they were ingenious and um even though the plan,
as we'll get to really was pretty uncomplicated. Yeah, it
(04:34):
wasn't nearly as clever as it was made out to be. Well,
let's talk about the plan. So there was this idea
who had who had the idea, the original idea. I
believe his last name was Fields. He was the guy
who originally had the idea and approached several people criminals
for partnership, and they all turned him down except for
(04:56):
this a safe cracker by the name of Goody. Okay,
So Goody had a friend who was His name was
Bruce Reynolds and I guess he Um, he originally funded
the whole thing. Yeah. Well, they were in a gang
called the Bowler Hat Gang in London. No, right, I
don't think we've said this. We've made reference to like
the Wild West and train robberts and everything. This is
(05:18):
the nineteen sixties, Yeah, like the early nineteen sixties that
this is going on. Yeah, and the Bowler Hat Gang
was Um, they dressed in bowler hats and suits and
they had done some crimes and they were mainly career
criminals and they actually even uh, they had to press
his attention and they actually tried to rob a train
at first, but it didn't work so well and they
(05:40):
got away, and but that they had sort of a
not a trial room, but they legitimately tried to knock
off another train. So is that when they realized that
they needed to expand their rank and file. Yeah, they
realized that we don't know trains and we don't know
how to stop them, So we need to get some
train guys, right, So the Bowler Coast Gang, who is
(06:00):
guests led by Bruce Reynolds, right yeah, Bowler Hat the
Bowler Hat Gang they got with the South Coast Gang
I think, yeah, the South Coast Raiders. So they and
this is I mean, those are some great gang names,
by the way, but the Bowler Hat Gang and the
South Coast Raiders, who were led by a dude named
Buster Edwards, right yeah, and Tom Wisby he was one
(06:21):
of the main guys. Whitney. Sorry. So those guys all
got together and they said, we got this great idea.
We need your people together to come help us. We're
gonna rob a train. And they're not just any train.
There was one specific train that this gang targeted, and
for good reason. It was called the Up Special. And
the Up Special had been running since the thirties between Glasgow,
(06:44):
Scotland and London, right and uh. It would run every
night and it was basically like a mail sorting facility
on wheels like it was pretty clever. They thought, well,
we'll take all the mail from Glasgow that's going to
London and we'll sort it along the way. So there
was twelve cars in the Glasgow Special or the up
(07:06):
Special UM and a diesel engine. So it's a pretty
simple train. Uh. And it didn't run for years and
years without incident, for for like a hundred and fifty
almost a hundred and fifty years. Yeah. And and and it
wasn't loaded with guards and cops. I mean, it was
a bunch of postmen basically, which is a really it's
really weird then that the banks would trust their money
(07:31):
that we're moving from Glasgow to London to this postal
train that we had like no security, no armed guards,
no no alarms until the early sixties, um on the
train cars themselves. But yet every night the banks would
empty their um their accounts into this train and say,
(07:55):
good luck, get into London. Like here's a bunch of
huge sacks of money. We're gonna put it on the
train and you're going to sort it along the way.
They had an inside man who and this is one
of those weird stuff you should know things, you know,
how there's all these weird correlations in the news. I
picked out this article two days ago, and two days
(08:15):
ago it was announced who the identity of the inside
man was. Yeah, the last great mystery of this thing
from the sixties. Yeah, was just unraveled like two days ago.
And I didn't even know it at the time. I
found out afterwards. But the code name was ulster Man,
and it was always believed to be someone on the
inside of the of the train and post industry to
(08:40):
give him information like you know, the train is superloaded
on this particular night because of a bank holiday. And
uh he was named by Gordon Goody as Patrick McKenna. Yeah.
In the documentary A Tale of Two Thieves, they hand
a picture of Patrick McKenna too. Goody and says that
Ulsterman and apparently he like kind of like gets visibly
(09:01):
uncomfortable because he's kept this guy's identity secret. He was
the last person alive for fifty years to to know
who this person was. There were two other people who knew.
They both died before good Patrick McKenna died years back,
and there was just this one man who swore he
would take the secret whose grave and he he named
(09:22):
them he had fingered him. These guys were really good
at keeping secrets over the years. They wore bowler hats
for goodness thing. Uh So McKenna's family was super surprised
to hear all this. Police never suspected him, and um,
they basically think that this guy felt bad afterward and
never even spent the money and gave it to the
Catholic Church like slowly over the years his cut is
(09:44):
what the family is saying. But um, it sounds like
an ulsterman kind of thing to do. Yeah, you know,
he's a good guy. Well before he had his change
of heart, he was the inside man that helped the
gang figure this out. Yeah, he actually recommended change the
day to get a bigger take and it was then
it worked. Can you can you explain this to me?
(10:06):
So a bank holiday and it's the same thing here
in the US. It's like a like a day the
banks are closed. They have official bank holidays. There's a
banking Act in the UK from the nineteenth century that
designated certain days as bank holidays. Um, what I don't
understand is why is there so much more money the
(10:26):
day after bank holiday. It's like everybody waited to do
their banking business that they would have done on Monday
on Tuesday, Like there's so many more people, are so
many more transactions that didn't get to be done on
that Monday that were carried out on the Tuesday. That
that that's why there's so much more money. I don't know.
Maybe it's that the because of the holiday, they didn't
(10:50):
uh do their deposits and and like make the money
leave the bank like they normally would, so it was compounded.
I guess. So that is like double the amount of
money as usual because they didn't do their drop on
the holiday or something. Yeah, but they didn't conduct any
business on the holiday, so there wouldn't have been more
money to accumulate than usual, you know what I'm saying. Well,
(11:11):
if it came after a weekend, though, maybe it was
like all of that weekend's deposits had gathered up. I
don't know. That's a good question, Okay. The point is
is that a lot more money than usual, a lot
more usually this um. This train car, the Up Special,
carried about three hundred thousand pounds UM between Glasgow and
London each each night. On this particular night, the night
(11:33):
of August eighth, nineteen sixty three, which was Thursday early
wee hours of a Thursday, UM, it was carrying something
like two point six million pounds, which today in dollars
would be worth about fifty million. I think it's I
looked it up and it was like doubled that million. Well, yeah,
(11:54):
because you're going from nineteen and from pounds to dollars,
I might be off, but I got sixty nine million
pounds today or a hundred and eleven million dollars US,
let's kill with that. That's way better either way. Two
point six million pounds was a ton of money for
a high speck. Then it was like really really a
(12:16):
lot of dough even splitting it among fifteen guys. Yeah,
and they didn't even necessarily split it evenly. There were
the core gang who were carrying this thing out and
they all got even split. But they're also accomplices. In
addition to Ulsterman, there's Mr One, Mr Two, and Mr Three. Yeah,
and those are the their names. So because they were
(12:36):
never brought to justice, there were three that just got
away with it even though they knew who they were. Supposedly,
they didn't have evidence to go pick them up. So
like the identities of the three guys that got away,
they they think they knew who they were the whole time.
Really can, I mean one of them is named John Weeder,
he got away. I'm not sure. Was he one of
the one, two or three he was, Yeah, he was
(12:56):
the one who got the safe house for the gang. Yeah,
well he worked with Fields to get the safe house.
Uh well, let's let's back up here. Okay, we're so excited,
we're getting happen. So he mentioned that they recruited another
gang that knew how to work with trains, knew how
to stop trains, and um, what they did was they
brought this guy on board who had a this elderly
(13:17):
man who was a train driver. His name was Peter,
and Peter's job once they stopped the train was to
get it to where the drop point the exchange point
was in case, you know, because the train stops at
the red light, which they very awkwardly wired the red
light to turn on and they just covered the green
light with gloves. But it worked. They stopped the train
(13:38):
and still needed to get it down the track to
the exchange point. And this old man gets on board
and he's like, I don't know how to undo this
new handbrake. So he was useless. And so the guy
Bigs who became this criminal legend for evading the law
for so many years. Apparently his only job was to
find somebody who could drive the train, and he screwed
(14:00):
it up. So the guy who was supposed to drive
the train got thrown off the train, and they got
the original train engineer, the one whose job it was
to actually drive the train under normal circumstances, and made
him drive another mile and a half to this bridge. Yeah,
and that was Jack Mills. And this is a very
important detail. He was, like you said, the conductor and
(14:21):
two guys jumped on the train at the very front
there and uh coshed him, which is smacked him on
the head a bunch with this billy club. I thought
it was a crowbar Wells and iron cash, which is
English for crow bar, I guess. And this was a
big point because, um, for a lot of reasons. One
and that it was why the justice ended up coming
(14:44):
down so harshly on them, because they were apparently way
more violent than they needed to be with this guy.
And the public perception of these guys is working class
heroes doesn't jibe with the violence because they weren't. You know,
the English still aren't really into violence as a whole. No,
especially if you're the bowler hat gang. Yeah, like you do.
You dressed nicely and you conducted your business, your criminal business,
(15:06):
like gentleman. Uh. And you didn't need to beat this
old guy up. He was elderly, nearing retirement. And his
family says that the robbers still say today that like,
he wasn't beating up nearly as bad as they say.
And the family is like, no, he never fully recovered
and died of cancer. But um, about seven years later,
I think he died of leukemia. Yeah, but they they
(15:27):
say he he had headaches for the rest of his
life and he was just not the same man. Yeah.
You can't do that to somebody. You can't do that
someone and and like you said, that changed absolutely everything.
Um good. He uh. The the guy who's really the
brains behind this whole operation, he uh. He wrote a
book a few years back before he died, and he
named he said it was either Buster Edwards or a
(15:47):
guy named James Hussey who was the one who coshed
the poor conductor. Yeah, and supposedly Hussy who was brought
in as a heavy as some muscle. Supposedly at his
deathbed he said that it was him who cashed the guy.
And uh, but there are other people that say, including
Jack Mills's son, who said, no, my father told me
(16:08):
who it was and it wasn't him. This guy is
just doing that that robber thing where you still cover
for your people, so like on his deathbed, he was
still trying to cover for the real guy. And I
don't know if we'll ever know for real if it
was him or the other dude while lying on your deathbed.
Yeah that's not okay, No, that never happens. Yeah, that's
where you're supposed to be the most troops. Like, yeah,
(16:29):
they I mean they take deathbed confessions like as like
completely legitimate in courts. Yeah, that's where you're supposed to
look at your wife and say, I never really loved you. Wow,
that's terrible. Could you imagine? I think that was in
a movie. Once you thought it was gonna be some
tender moment and he was like, I never really loved you.
I think I know what you're talking about. The War
(16:51):
of the Roses where like they're both laying there dying
and Michael Douglas goes to like put his arms around
That's when I it's a great movie. Um No, I
don't think anybody's done that. Okay, So Roger Cordry is
the guy's name who came up with the idea to
fix these train signals. Uh. And he was an associate
(17:14):
of Buster Edwards. And if you had ever seen a
movie Buster with Phil Collins, I was that who it's about.
That's who it's about. Sort of like a working class criminal,
like criminals back then. We're kind of revered in certain
circles in England's weird two Hearts beaten in. Just was
that from that movie? Okay, alright, so after this break, uh,
(17:41):
we were going to talk a little bit more about
how it went down and what happened right after. So Chuck,
we've got the Bowler Hat Kang and the South Coast
Raiders coming together for one huge heights that's worth about
a hundred million dollars in today's money, or or how
that they're hitting the up special. Just this crotchety old
(18:03):
twelve car train moving along through the night from Scotland
to London. Right, And so the the gang messes with
the lights. They put a glove around the green light
and managed to turn on the red lights. So the
train comes to the stop, they all board the train.
They hit the conductor over the head, huge mistake. Uh.
(18:27):
They bring on the guy who's supposed to drive the train,
find out he can't drive the train, throw him off,
stand the conductor back up, probably give him a handkerchief
for his head, and say we need you to drive
this another mile and a half to the drop point,
which is called the Brittigo Bridge. Yeah, it was it
like a bridge overpass. Uh and uh. The guy does
(18:48):
that and they start offloading the loot. Yeah. They got
hundred and twenty of the hundred and eight sacks of
cash money onto Um. They had this big and a
couple of land rovers. Yeah, could could have been? Could
this be any more stylish? They had land rovers a
getaway cars. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Um. You see why
(19:09):
people bought into all this stuff and thought it was cool,
because I think it's cool right now. Um. And so
what they did they had prearranged a hideout and this
was fields His job as well, was he bought this
farm and farmhouse leather Slade farm, right, yeah, two And
it was sort of ingenious but ended up screwing them
in the end because the idea was within thirty minutes
(19:31):
of this robbery, they have effectively disappeared off the face
of the earth. Well, they stopped the train and got
it to the bridge and offloaded more than a ton
of money. Yeah, two tons of two and a half
tons of money in fifteen minutes. Yeah. And they were
back in their hideout in another fifteen So by the
time this thing was reported, they were gone and in
(19:55):
this farmhouse like with the windows shut and the shades drawn.
But that also kind of screwed them because before they
left the train, they said, all right, no one moves
for thirty minutes. And so the cops here this and
they went, oh, well that they're probably within a thirty
mile radius. And then and so they put this out
on the news. We know that they're within a thirty
(20:16):
mile radius, and we're gonna start camvasing the area. They
get word of this there within twenty eight miles and
they go, well, crap, they're gonna find us. And they
also said it was sort of a city boys move
to think you can hide out in the country like that. Um,
And this one guy in the documentary was like, no,
out in the country, you get noticed if you're fifteen
(20:37):
guys in a farmhouse. That was their undoing. A neighbor said,
there's a lot more people at this old rambling old
farm and they're all wearing bowler hats for some reason,
at least half of them are. Um, there's something fishy
going on. So when the when the word got out
that this train had been hit, this guy came forward
and said, you guys should go check this farm out. Well,
(20:59):
the guys weren't only at this farm for the half
hour after the heist. They've been there for like eight days,
waiting for the day to come, getting ready, um, eating
things that required catchup. Playing Monopoly. Yeah, uh, played a
lot of Monopoly with their real money. Yes, they they
thought that was just a fun thing to do. Hilarious. Um.
(21:21):
And they did go to the trouble of like wiping
down a lot of the stuff, but they left a
lot of stuff behind, including the Monopoly game, including the
catchup bottle, and a lot of other stuff that had
prints on it. Well, yes, because Fields was supposed to
get a guy to go torch the place. Yeah, that's
what I thought, was like, why wouldn't you just burn
the place down? That was the plan And apparently the
guy never did it, and um, they ended up getting
(21:43):
out of there a few days early. They left five
days into it because they obviously heard the news that
they were canvasing the area, so they left quicker than
they wanted to. And um, like you said, left a
lot of stuff behind because they thought it was gonna
be torched. Their plan was to lay low there for
a few days. Yeah, to keep laying low. But um,
when they found out they were basically making their way
(22:05):
to them, little by little they got the heck out
of Dodge. Well that probably kept them from getting caught sooner.
But in so the public is being treated to this
incredibly daring train heist. These people got away without a
trace for at least the first week. Finally within a week, Um,
(22:25):
this leather Slade Farms has been identified as the place
where these guys were hiding out and they found the trucks. Uh,
and they got at least one person within eight days
of the of the heist. Yeah, and all of a
sudden people start falling. There's fifteen people, um, and on
the case is called the Flying Squad, who are like
(22:47):
the best of the best that Scotland yard has to
offer to combat these some of the best of the
best criminals that that Great Britain has had to offer
at the time. Yeah, Chief Superintendent Detective Tommy Butler was
the head of the Flying Squad. And like you said,
this was so sensational because it was the top robbers
and the top cop. It was. I guess it's sort
(23:08):
of like the elliott Ness of the day going after
al Capone. It was just a huge story. Um. And
like you said, they started getting nicked one by one,
and UM, it came out later that there was an
informant by the name of Mickey Keiho. Supposedly, Scotland Yard said,
this guy, Mickey Keiho, was telling us all about it
(23:28):
because it was well known within the criminal underground, like
what was going on, and started naming names. Although the
robbers to this day, UH still say, nah, I wasn't
Mickey Kiho. We know that guy. He didn't even notice
that well, he wasn't giving up names, but um, I
don't know Scotland Yard says he was. So I don't
see why they make that up. I could see them
making it up to protect somebody else, especially if they
(23:51):
didn't like Mickey Keiho and the way he looked. That's true,
but they You're right, they started to go down one
by one. Uh. There was a pretty short list of
people they thought it was. It wasn't like some great mystery. Plus,
once they started peeling away one and canting one here
or there, others started falling. Others did did Did anyone
who was caught name names? Did you get that impression? No?
(24:13):
They were Most of them were pretty tight lipped. Uh.
In fact, one guy, Charlie Wilson, he was the treasurer
of the gang. He uh. They called him the silent
Man because he literally said nothing and he didn't didn't
speak at all during the trial. He went on to
become a U. S. Congressman who waged the proxy war
against Russia and Afghanistan. I don't think so. I think
(24:35):
that's a different different Tom Hanks. Yeah right, Um, so
consider this from the public's point of view. There's a
staring robbery, right words getting out within a week he
got your first guy caught. But there's still tons more
people on lamb, which gave the press tons of fodder.
They had so much to write about. Um. There was
(24:55):
a capture of one of the guys that involved roofed ops,
Like the guy was running and jumping from roof to
roof with police and chase you know, and the and
finally by August, all these guys are rounded up twelve
or the fifteen, I think we're rounded up. Uh, And
they started to stand trial. Um in January, they were caught.
(25:18):
They're being quiet. The public is just totally in awe.
And finally this trial starts, and right out of the gate,
the judge found out that Biggs had a criminal past,
so he he shouldn't be tried with the rest of
him because it contained the jury against all these other
guys un fairly. So Biggs gets spun off to his
own trial. And these guys uh stood trial. The other
(25:41):
four or the other elevens, no, ten of them stood trial.
One of them managed to have a lawyer. He was
there because his prints were on the no, the monopoly game. Yeah,
they were prints on Ketchup and Monopoly and pots and pans.
And some of the guys were gloves the entire time,
and they smart, smart ones. Yeah, but Biggs was the one.
Remember biggs one job was to bring the train engineer
(26:03):
and uh, he screwed that up. His princes were on
the catchup bottle, so he screwed that up too. But um,
there was another guy who's prints round the Monopoly game
and his lawyers managed to show that that those could
have gotten there long before the crime, and that it
didn't necessarily need anything to do with it. He got set.
(26:24):
He was acquitted. During this trial, he was the only
lucky one. Everybody else had the book thrown at them. Yeah. Um,
I mean there was a lot of them were saying
that they cooked up a bunch of evidence because they
knew it was them, but they just didn't have the evidence.
So um, the big lor truck they had painted hastily
painted yellow and uh, the Goody, one of the main
(26:48):
you know, two guys, was supposedly some of his evidence
was that they found yellow paint on a shoe and
he was like, I didn't paint in those shoes. And
it was funny because years later he's like, oh did it,
And yeah, I painted that truck yellow, but I wasn't
wearing those shoes they planted. That's evidence. Yeah, And and
apparently there was false confessions. There was another great British
(27:10):
word for that. I can't remember what they called it,
but chopper dabba, choder dobbing. They false confessions were big
at the time in England and there was a lot
of reports from these robbers that they were using false
confessions and planning evidence. And again, even though they did it,
they were like, yeah, but if you don't have evidence,
you can't convict this. So I don't think we'll ever
(27:32):
know if they cooked up some of this evidence or not.
Well there's one guy named Bowl William Bull. Poor guy.
He apparently had nothing to do with it. Well, he
received money in payment from a debt. Yeah, I think
that good. He owed him. Now it was it was Bigs,
a big big again. He was a friend of Biggs
(27:53):
and when he got out, helped him kind of lay low.
But he had nothing to do with the robbery. And um,
fourteen years No, I'm sorry. It was Cordrey. It wasn't Biggs, Okay, Cordrey, Um,
I know, I feel bad for Biggs. We're just dragging
his name through the mud. Yeah, but it was Rob Cordrey.
It wasn't Rob Cordrey, but um, it was his dad.
(28:15):
It was his great grandfather of Cordrey, and he was
Bull's friend. He helped him lay low and he wanted
Quardrey was actually the first one to get to get
pinched because he and Bull helped him inn a garage
and they paid and like the same bank note bills
for like three months in advance in cash, and the
lady said, hey, this is a little suspicious, turned him in.
(28:37):
Ball got wrapped up, and because all these guys were
saying we're innocent, they couldn't come out and say, well,
he really is innocent, so they kind of had to
take this guilt with them to prison. So Bowl got
fourteen years for doing nothing really, yeah, and for just
basically knowing the wrong guys and hanging out with the
wrong guys. He died in prison. I'm not laughing because
(29:01):
it's just tragic. It is tragic. So his family's like
trying to mount a campaign now Um to get a
posthumous pardon at least. But he, uh, he and the
guy who got hit over the head the conductor are
really the two big victims and all of this. Yeah,
and one of them, there was only one guy that
Um turned in his cut of the money and actually
(29:23):
pleaded guilty out of the rest. That was Cordrey. I think, yeah,
that was Cordry. So even he he says, yes, I
did it, here's my eighty grand the guy who he
associated with still got fourteen years in jail. Yeah, that's
so sad um. So you'll notice that we were talking
(29:43):
about twelve of the fifteen Bigs by the way, after
he stood trial separately, was also found guilty and got
things like, uh, these guys were getting like twenty years,
thirty years since it's enormous sentences for this this train robbery,
generally thirty which was double the harshest penalties for robbery
(30:03):
that they've ever seen, right, which is really strange because
the judge in the case, um, he had actually reduced
another robber in a completely separate robbery, um where a
man had been shot and killed during the commission of
the robbery. Someone who was involved in that robbery had
(30:24):
his sentence reduced from fifteen years to ten years because
that judge thought it was excessive. That same judge was
handing out thirty years sentences to these guys where no
one got killed. Yeah, that was justice, Edmund Davies. I
think because it was such a high profile case, he
felt he could make his name had to be you know,
so um he was making his name though against public sentiment,
(30:45):
because a lot of people were very much I saw
these guys as folk heroes, none more though than Biggs.
And the reason why Biggs is a folk hero was
because he evaded capture so long, and we'll talk about
that right after this. Alright, so, uh, some really interesting
(31:11):
things happened after they were sentenced. Um, Charlie Wilson escaped prison,
which was pretty cool. A couple of them escape prison. Um,
and the way that it was very cute how you
could escape prison back then, like let's put a ladder
by the fence and climb up and jump over into
a truck and speed away. It turns out that Benny
Hills show was basically a docu drama at the time.
(31:34):
Another one escaped when he I think he had some
guys and filtrate the prison and help him escape. Yeah,
in the furniture truck. Yeah, that was Bigs. I think
it has a lot easier to escape prison back then.
And some of these were maximum security for what it's worth,
you know, yeah, well yeah, one of them was Britain's
version of Alcatraz, they say, Wandsworth Prison and um that
(31:55):
big escape from there. Um when he escaped and when
on the lamb Uh. He went to Australia and then
eventually moved on to Brazil, but first he stopped off
at um one of the worst human beings to ever
walk the planet's office. This very same cosmetic surgeon who
redid the faces of Nazis fleeing Europe at the end
(32:18):
of World War Two. Really that's who was plastic surgeon
was yes, um, yeah he uh he So Bigg's got
his face redone a little bit, went to Australia, made
it to Brazil and um he had a family in
Australia which he left behind there, uh, and then went
on to Brazil, got a girl friend and um, she
(32:38):
was pregnant with their child when the the authorities, the
British authorities found him in Brazil and he said, oh,
turns out under Brazilian law you can't extradite the parent
of a Brazilian citizen. So for many, many years Ronald
Biggs lived openly as this felon escape e in Brazil. Uh.
(33:03):
And there are things that he couldn't do Brazil. Apparently,
he couldn't go to bars, he couldn't be out after
ten pm, he couldn't associate with, um, you know, anybody
with a criminal record or anything like that. But he
wasn't imprisoned by the Brazilian authorities, and he couldn't be
extradited to Great Britain, which drove Great Britain crazy. And
there was this one very famous detective who was on
(33:25):
this case who made his own name. His name was
Jack Slipper. Yeah. I get the feeling that he and
Uh and Biggs it was sort of like the lay
Misser rob like Jean Valjean. You know, they had this
lifelong pursuit smoking in the band. Sure, yeah, it's a
very old story. Uh and Biggs and Jack Slipper, we're
(33:47):
playing it out in real life, so much so that
Jack Slipper in four showed up on Bigg's doorstep, I
guess just to rattle him, just to say I I
know where you are and I can get to you.
And Big said, yeah, but you really can't do anything
to me. Yeah. And some of the other guys evaded
police for a little while for a number of years,
(34:08):
but I think by nineteen sixty nine they were all caught,
except for the three that they couldn't finger with good evidence.
But um, even the main mastermind was able to evade
the police for four or five years. I think he
went down to Mexico buster he turned himself in after
living on the lamb for three years. Yeah, and Bruce
Reynolds I think he was on the LAMB for a
(34:29):
while too. Yeah, he got caught in Canada. I think,
um one of the guys, well, I guess it was
Bruce Reynolds when he changed his name when he went
on the Lamb. He changed his family's last name to Firth,
and he had a wife and son, Colin. He changed
his son Nick's name to Colin Firth. Shut up, no, no, oh,
(34:53):
totally coincidental. Okay, I thought you were gonna say it.
Wouldn't that be amazing that Colin Firth was the son
of Bruce Reynolds and it was all in alias that
he turned into a stage name. That would be awesome actually.
Um So. One of the fun things that the the
Prime Minister tried to do because he was so upset
about this was uh he tried to at one point,
(35:13):
or he didn't try to. He had the idea to
reissue every bank note in England so their money would
no longer be good. So from what I understand, they
were like, yeah, you can't do that. From what I understand,
most of the money was never recovered. Fo grand out
of the two point six million was recovered right, So
there was a lot of that out there still, but
(35:36):
apparently England went to a different type of decimal currency
by like nineteen seventy I think, and that means that
that money that was out there automatically became worthless. Well
apparently they laundered it pretty quickly afterwards, so I don't
know how much that affected them, Like through bookies I
(35:57):
got of stuff like that, they made it new money. However,
all of the robbers ended up saying like even if
they got their cut, like it was a curse and
they didn't live this rich lifestyle in Mexico and Spain,
like a bunch of a move to these places and
serve shorter sentences because I think parole was brought in
(36:18):
after they were sentenced. It wasn't even like a thing
in England until then. But retroactively they were able to
get out and like you know, ten or fourteen years
and then you know, supposedly had some of this money
still hidden away. But most of them ended up like
one guy committed suicide, one guy died in a medical
trial that he signed up for um. One guy was murdered,
(36:43):
uh yeah by a hit man on a bike in Spain. Yeah,
so like most of them have these awful sort of
ending stories and they didn't live out like sexy Beast
like Ray Winstone on the Spanish era. I think some
of that might have been influenced by some of that movie.
Might a lot of Great Britain's love of gangsters was
(37:05):
influenced by these guys. Yeah, they were definitely looked up to,
and it's pretty interesting. I got a little more on
Biggs the ballot of Biggs, so he I mean, he
really is like a folk hero in in against anti
with anti establishment types in the UK um in part
(37:26):
because he was, you know, living openly in the face
of you know, British authority, and it irked the British
enough that a group of ex British military kidnapped him
from Brazil and put him on a boat and got
as far as Barbados, where they had boat trouble and
(37:46):
they were picked up by the Barbadoon and authorities. And
it turns out Barbados as an event extradition treaty with
the UK either so he got sent back to Brazil
and supposedly these ex military were saying that they play
and on I guess getting some sort of reward from
the British crown for bringing this guy back. But it's
also been supposed that that was actually a plausible and
(38:10):
deniability cover, that it was actually like the British really
tried to have it, wouldn't surprise me. He Yeah, he
finally turned himself in and died in two thousand nine.
But he turned himself in in like two thousand he
started having like, um, failing health. So he's like, I
guess I'll go live out my life in jail for
some reason. And I think he went to like an
old man's hospital jail back in the UK. Uh. And
(38:33):
not all of them at you know, gross untimely demises.
You know, several of them just kind of retired and
went back to their work as florists and uh sort
of retired with her family in Sussex or London or
sort of around England and um, but apparently none of
them like got Rich off this or they're not talking
if they did. Yeah. Still, well, good good, Yeah, Goods
(38:56):
wrote a book. So there you go. There you have it.
If you want to know more about the Great Train Robbery.
A great place to start is the search part how
stuff works dot Com. And since I said search parts
time for listener mail. I'm gonna call the horse milk.
In our Animal Domestication podcast, we talked about horse milk
(39:17):
and I can't remember what I said. A price said
it was gross or something. Well, I think we said like,
we want to hear from people who've had it, and
I figured we'd hear from a couple of people. By
I'm blown away by how many people have had a
brush with horse milk. A lot of people liked it too,
this is not one of them. Hey, guys, just listen
to the podcast on Animal domestication. Wanted to tell you
about the revolting drink called kumas from Kazakhstan. That's k
(39:41):
u m I s Mila kumas, Mila kumas. It is
similar to the more familiar product keefer. Uh what you
we talked about that and something else, right, Yeah, it's
like or something. It's like Balky's version of sour milk. Think. Yeah,
he said it's made from horse milk because horse milk
has more natural sugars than couch eap for goat milk.
Kumas ends up being mildly alcoholic after fermentation. Imagine the
(40:05):
sourness of raw yogurt mixed with the bite of a
shot of vodka and round it all out with the
disgusting tang of horse milk. And you've got kumas well.
I don't understand that last part, like I don't have
anything to equate that with horse milk vodka check sour
like fermented yogurt. But you don't know that disgusting tang. No,
(40:25):
And I want to know now. You know, in Toronto,
when I was here with my friend Chris from Let's
Drink About It, eight horsemeat than in front of you know,
I was supposed to got to dinner with him, but
I was sick. And after we recorded, they went out
and the next day he was like, dude, mate, horsemeat inster.
Now went they go to Ikea. Now they went to
some one of those adventurous restaurants. And I was like, Joshua,
have been all over that, but not me, thank you.
(40:47):
Beauty horse meat right, probably, but not horse milk. Only
if the horse died of old So Greg says, I
drained it. Well, that's what they said. They supposedly all
of them. They're called what do you I'm barbarians something
horses like old dead horses. No, basically, there were horses
that died of natural causes. They called them like senior horses. No,
(41:11):
like golden AIGs horses. No, there's a word. There's a
lot of words. I can say them all. So Greg
drank in Kazakhstan and he said it was served in
a bowl what he would describe as a bowl. You
get cocktail peanuts like you would get cocktail peanuts, and
instead of a bowl of peanuts is a bowl of
dis disgusting drink. I've lived in the Caucuses for four
(41:32):
years now. I've had my share of questionable foods. The
only thing I found more disagreeable than a saucer of
kumas was a pickled rooster comb. Oh my gosh. He
said it was all skinning cards as it felt like
I was eating an ear. Wow, man, that is from Greg.
That's called using every part of the animal. Yeah, Greg,
you just blew my mind. Same here, man. I wish
(41:54):
I could think of the horses, not like freedom horses,
but it was something like the words the word the
horses that want you to eat them donor horses. We'll
find out and tell everybody next time, Okay, the essentialist.
They're horses that died at natural causes. They weren't killed
for their meat. Uh. If you want to let us
(42:17):
know about an experience you had that is fascinating or amazing,
you can tweet it to us at s Y s
K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com
slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and you can hang out with us at our home
on the web, the Internet clubhouse known as stuff you
(42:37):
Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.
Welcome to you stuff you should know from House Stuff
Works dot Com to too and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bright, there's Jerry Uh.
And you put all of us together with a couple
of microphones, a crummy ikea lamb and uh you will,
(00:25):
and a headful of nose juice, you get stuff you
should know. That's right, stuff you should knows juice. Oh girl,
how's it going, buddy? Besides the obvious under the weather
and nests of you, I predict this is the last one. Great.
I'm gonna be back to good as new by the
next time we record. Yeah, we're going to Vancouver and
you'll get some of that good Canadian air air in
(00:48):
your body, and the pine air it's healing. Yeah. Properties,
I'll get pine and flannel and ocean like in my
in my faith and and moose yeah, moose hair. Yeah.
That's so if you wal wadded all into a ball
and sniff it, it takes care of everything. That's right.
(01:10):
What the world are we talking about? I don't know. Uh,
we're talking about trains, It's right. We're talking about a
specific train, Chuck. We're talking about a specific train at
a specific moment in place and time that all came
together to become known as the Great Train Robbery. Right,
(01:31):
did you know? Did you commission this article? I did not.
Did you know about it already? Some? Or yeah? I
mean I a little bit, but um not as like
obviously as much. After I researched and I watched a
couple of documentaries, and uh was looking for a great
awesome movie. But I don't think there really is a
great awesome movie about this yet, which is surprising. I
think they did, like BBC did one, and I think
(01:53):
Sean Connery did one that was loosely I think other
things were loosely based, but like the Taking of Pelham one,
two three, Yes, exactly, that's a good movie. Did you
the original? Of course? Yeah? Did you watch The Tale
of Two Thieves? Is that one of the documentaries you watched? No?
I don't think that's out to the public yet unless
I just haven't seen it. I think it's new this year. Yeah,
(02:15):
it seems like it's two thousand fourteen. Yeah, I want
to see it. But there are no shortage of YouTube
BBC docks because they love it, and I learned a
lot of new words watching them. Yeah, like um what
oh like, um, instead of crooked, someone has bent, like
a bent solicitor, I figured out was a crooked solicitor.
And a cosh is a like a like a billy
(02:38):
club and you can cash somebody like the train conductor
was cosht. Yeah. Yeah, there were just a bunch of
cool terms that I had to kind of figure out
what they meant an American in my English. Yeah, so, um,
I had I heard the words great train and robbery together,
but I didn't know anything about. I think there was
(03:00):
another one, an older great train robbery from the hundreds.
There's one in eighteen fifty five where a train traveling
from London to Paris or vice versa had a bunch
of gold bullion on it and it got hit. That
was legendary. But apparently this was the biggest train highest
since then, more than a hundred years later. Yeah, it
(03:22):
was a big deal and it was sort of Jesse
James style. That's why it became uh one of the
crimes of the century. Um in England for sure. I
mean it was huge in the press, and these guys
that knocked off this train became these kind of weird
working class heroes. Well, one of them became the symbol
for the anti establishment, which one, uh what was his name? Um,
(03:48):
the the the one who made off for years and
years Yeah, he Um, he was on the lamb for
like thirty years, so he was super famous. Yeah, and
they knew where he was and they couldn't get to him,
which we'll talk about. But he, you know, became like
the this folk hero of the anti establishment, saying vocals
on lots of like punk records. Yeah. Yeah. I saw
(04:11):
in both documentaries that had a bunch of interviews, like
on the street interviews from the time, like with regular
upstanding citizens like who side are you on? And a
lot of them were like, well, I feel ashamed to
admit this, but I kind of think these guys really
took it to the cops on this one, and they
thought they were ingenious and um even though the plan,
as we'll get to really was pretty uncomplicated. Yeah, it
(04:34):
wasn't nearly as clever as it was made out to be. Well,
let's talk about the plan. So there was this idea
who had who had the idea, the original idea. I
believe his last name was Fields. He was the guy
who originally had the idea and approached several people criminals
for partnership, and they all turned him down except for
(04:56):
this a safe cracker by the name of Goody. Okay,
So Goody had a friend who was His name was
Bruce Reynolds and I guess he Um, he originally funded
the whole thing. Yeah. Well, they were in a gang
called the Bowler Hat Gang in London. No, right, I
don't think we've said this. We've made reference to like
the Wild West and train robberts and everything. This is
(05:18):
the nineteen sixties, Yeah, like the early nineteen sixties that
this is going on. Yeah, and the Bowler Hat Gang
was Um, they dressed in bowler hats and suits and
they had done some crimes and they were mainly career
criminals and they actually even uh, they had to press
his attention and they actually tried to rob a train
at first, but it didn't work so well and they
(05:40):
got away, and but that they had sort of a
not a trial room, but they legitimately tried to knock
off another train. So is that when they realized that
they needed to expand their rank and file. Yeah, they
realized that we don't know trains and we don't know
how to stop them, So we need to get some
train guys, right, So the Bowler Coast Gang, who is
(06:00):
guests led by Bruce Reynolds, right yeah, Bowler Hat the
Bowler Hat Gang they got with the South Coast Gang
I think, yeah, the South Coast Raiders. So they and
this is I mean, those are some great gang names,
by the way, but the Bowler Hat Gang and the
South Coast Raiders, who were led by a dude named
Buster Edwards, right yeah, and Tom Wisby he was one
(06:21):
of the main guys. Whitney. Sorry. So those guys all
got together and they said, we got this great idea.
We need your people together to come help us. We're
gonna rob a train. And they're not just any train.
There was one specific train that this gang targeted, and
for good reason. It was called the Up Special. And
the Up Special had been running since the thirties between Glasgow,
(06:44):
Scotland and London, right and uh. It would run every
night and it was basically like a mail sorting facility
on wheels like it was pretty clever. They thought, well,
we'll take all the mail from Glasgow that's going to
London and we'll sort it along the way. So there
was twelve cars in the Glasgow Special or the up
(07:06):
Special UM and a diesel engine. So it's a pretty
simple train. Uh. And it didn't run for years and
years without incident, for for like a hundred and fifty
almost a hundred and fifty years. Yeah. And and and it
wasn't loaded with guards and cops. I mean, it was
a bunch of postmen basically, which is a really it's
really weird then that the banks would trust their money
(07:31):
that we're moving from Glasgow to London to this postal
train that we had like no security, no armed guards,
no no alarms until the early sixties, um on the
train cars themselves. But yet every night the banks would
empty their um their accounts into this train and say,
(07:55):
good luck, get into London. Like here's a bunch of
huge sacks of money. We're gonna put it on the
train and you're going to sort it along the way.
They had an inside man who and this is one
of those weird stuff you should know things, you know,
how there's all these weird correlations in the news. I
picked out this article two days ago, and two days
(08:15):
ago it was announced who the identity of the inside
man was. Yeah, the last great mystery of this thing
from the sixties. Yeah, was just unraveled like two days ago.
And I didn't even know it at the time. I
found out afterwards. But the code name was ulster Man,
and it was always believed to be someone on the
inside of the of the train and post industry to
(08:40):
give him information like you know, the train is superloaded
on this particular night because of a bank holiday. And
uh he was named by Gordon Goody as Patrick McKenna. Yeah.
In the documentary A Tale of Two Thieves, they hand
a picture of Patrick McKenna too. Goody and says that
Ulsterman and apparently he like kind of like gets visibly
(09:01):
uncomfortable because he's kept this guy's identity secret. He was
the last person alive for fifty years to to know
who this person was. There were two other people who knew.
They both died before good Patrick McKenna died years back,
and there was just this one man who swore he
would take the secret whose grave and he he named
(09:22):
them he had fingered him. These guys were really good
at keeping secrets over the years. They wore bowler hats
for goodness thing. Uh So McKenna's family was super surprised
to hear all this. Police never suspected him, and um,
they basically think that this guy felt bad afterward and
never even spent the money and gave it to the
Catholic Church like slowly over the years his cut is
(09:44):
what the family is saying. But um, it sounds like
an ulsterman kind of thing to do. Yeah, you know,
he's a good guy. Well before he had his change
of heart, he was the inside man that helped the
gang figure this out. Yeah, he actually recommended change the
day to get a bigger take and it was then
it worked. Can you can you explain this to me?
(10:06):
So a bank holiday and it's the same thing here
in the US. It's like a like a day the
banks are closed. They have official bank holidays. There's a
banking Act in the UK from the nineteenth century that
designated certain days as bank holidays. Um, what I don't
understand is why is there so much more money the
(10:26):
day after bank holiday. It's like everybody waited to do
their banking business that they would have done on Monday
on Tuesday, Like there's so many more people, are so
many more transactions that didn't get to be done on
that Monday that were carried out on the Tuesday. That
that that's why there's so much more money. I don't know.
Maybe it's that the because of the holiday, they didn't
(10:50):
uh do their deposits and and like make the money
leave the bank like they normally would, so it was compounded.
I guess. So that is like double the amount of
money as usual because they didn't do their drop on
the holiday or something. Yeah, but they didn't conduct any
business on the holiday, so there wouldn't have been more
money to accumulate than usual, you know what I'm saying. Well,
(11:11):
if it came after a weekend, though, maybe it was
like all of that weekend's deposits had gathered up. I
don't know. That's a good question, Okay. The point is
is that a lot more money than usual, a lot
more usually this um. This train car, the Up Special,
carried about three hundred thousand pounds UM between Glasgow and
London each each night. On this particular night, the night
(11:33):
of August eighth, nineteen sixty three, which was Thursday early
wee hours of a Thursday, UM, it was carrying something
like two point six million pounds, which today in dollars
would be worth about fifty million. I think it's I
looked it up and it was like doubled that million. Well, yeah,
(11:54):
because you're going from nineteen and from pounds to dollars,
I might be off, but I got sixty nine million
pounds today or a hundred and eleven million dollars US,
let's kill with that. That's way better either way. Two
point six million pounds was a ton of money for
a high speck. Then it was like really really a
(12:16):
lot of dough even splitting it among fifteen guys. Yeah,
and they didn't even necessarily split it evenly. There were
the core gang who were carrying this thing out and
they all got even split. But they're also accomplices. In
addition to Ulsterman, there's Mr One, Mr Two, and Mr Three. Yeah,
and those are the their names. So because they were
(12:36):
never brought to justice, there were three that just got
away with it even though they knew who they were. Supposedly,
they didn't have evidence to go pick them up. So
like the identities of the three guys that got away,
they they think they knew who they were the whole time.
Really can, I mean one of them is named John Weeder,
he got away. I'm not sure. Was he one of
the one, two or three he was, Yeah, he was
(12:56):
the one who got the safe house for the gang. Yeah,
well he worked with Fields to get the safe house.
Uh well, let's let's back up here. Okay, we're so excited,
we're getting happen. So he mentioned that they recruited another
gang that knew how to work with trains, knew how
to stop trains, and um, what they did was they
brought this guy on board who had a this elderly
(13:17):
man who was a train driver. His name was Peter,
and Peter's job once they stopped the train was to
get it to where the drop point the exchange point
was in case, you know, because the train stops at
the red light, which they very awkwardly wired the red
light to turn on and they just covered the green
light with gloves. But it worked. They stopped the train
(13:38):
and still needed to get it down the track to
the exchange point. And this old man gets on board
and he's like, I don't know how to undo this
new handbrake. So he was useless. And so the guy
Bigs who became this criminal legend for evading the law
for so many years. Apparently his only job was to
find somebody who could drive the train, and he screwed
(14:00):
it up. So the guy who was supposed to drive
the train got thrown off the train, and they got
the original train engineer, the one whose job it was
to actually drive the train under normal circumstances, and made
him drive another mile and a half to this bridge. Yeah,
and that was Jack Mills. And this is a very
important detail. He was, like you said, the conductor and
(14:21):
two guys jumped on the train at the very front
there and uh coshed him, which is smacked him on
the head a bunch with this billy club. I thought
it was a crowbar Wells and iron cash, which is
English for crow bar, I guess. And this was a
big point because, um, for a lot of reasons. One
and that it was why the justice ended up coming
(14:44):
down so harshly on them, because they were apparently way
more violent than they needed to be with this guy.
And the public perception of these guys is working class
heroes doesn't jibe with the violence because they weren't. You know,
the English still aren't really into violence as a whole. No,
especially if you're the bowler hat gang. Yeah, like you do.
You dressed nicely and you conducted your business, your criminal business,
(15:06):
like gentleman. Uh. And you didn't need to beat this
old guy up. He was elderly, nearing retirement. And his
family says that the robbers still say today that like,
he wasn't beating up nearly as bad as they say.
And the family is like, no, he never fully recovered
and died of cancer. But um, about seven years later,
I think he died of leukemia. Yeah, but they they
(15:27):
say he he had headaches for the rest of his
life and he was just not the same man. Yeah.
You can't do that to somebody. You can't do that
someone and and like you said, that changed absolutely everything.
Um good. He uh. The the guy who's really the
brains behind this whole operation, he uh. He wrote a
book a few years back before he died, and he
named he said it was either Buster Edwards or a
(15:47):
guy named James Hussey who was the one who coshed
the poor conductor. Yeah, and supposedly Hussy who was brought
in as a heavy as some muscle. Supposedly at his
deathbed he said that it was him who cashed the guy.
And uh, but there are other people that say, including
Jack Mills's son, who said, no, my father told me
(16:08):
who it was and it wasn't him. This guy is
just doing that that robber thing where you still cover
for your people, so like on his deathbed, he was
still trying to cover for the real guy. And I
don't know if we'll ever know for real if it
was him or the other dude while lying on your deathbed.
Yeah that's not okay, No, that never happens. Yeah, that's
where you're supposed to be the most troops. Like, yeah,
(16:29):
they I mean they take deathbed confessions like as like
completely legitimate in courts. Yeah, that's where you're supposed to
look at your wife and say, I never really loved you. Wow,
that's terrible. Could you imagine? I think that was in
a movie. Once you thought it was gonna be some
tender moment and he was like, I never really loved you.
I think I know what you're talking about. The War
(16:51):
of the Roses where like they're both laying there dying
and Michael Douglas goes to like put his arms around
That's when I it's a great movie. Um No, I
don't think anybody's done that. Okay, So Roger Cordry is
the guy's name who came up with the idea to
fix these train signals. Uh. And he was an associate
(17:14):
of Buster Edwards. And if you had ever seen a
movie Buster with Phil Collins, I was that who it's about.
That's who it's about. Sort of like a working class criminal,
like criminals back then. We're kind of revered in certain
circles in England's weird two Hearts beaten in. Just was
that from that movie? Okay, alright, so after this break, uh,
(17:41):
we were going to talk a little bit more about
how it went down and what happened right after. So Chuck,
we've got the Bowler Hat Kang and the South Coast
Raiders coming together for one huge heights that's worth about
a hundred million dollars in today's money, or or how
that they're hitting the up special. Just this crotchety old
(18:03):
twelve car train moving along through the night from Scotland
to London. Right, And so the the gang messes with
the lights. They put a glove around the green light
and managed to turn on the red lights. So the
train comes to the stop, they all board the train.
They hit the conductor over the head, huge mistake. Uh.
(18:27):
They bring on the guy who's supposed to drive the train,
find out he can't drive the train, throw him off,
stand the conductor back up, probably give him a handkerchief
for his head, and say we need you to drive
this another mile and a half to the drop point,
which is called the Brittigo Bridge. Yeah, it was it
like a bridge overpass. Uh and uh. The guy does
(18:48):
that and they start offloading the loot. Yeah. They got
hundred and twenty of the hundred and eight sacks of
cash money onto Um. They had this big and a
couple of land rovers. Yeah, could could have been? Could
this be any more stylish? They had land rovers a
getaway cars. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Um. You see why
(19:09):
people bought into all this stuff and thought it was cool,
because I think it's cool right now. Um. And so
what they did they had prearranged a hideout and this
was fields His job as well, was he bought this
farm and farmhouse leather Slade farm, right, yeah, two And
it was sort of ingenious but ended up screwing them
in the end because the idea was within thirty minutes
(19:31):
of this robbery, they have effectively disappeared off the face
of the earth. Well, they stopped the train and got
it to the bridge and offloaded more than a ton
of money. Yeah, two tons of two and a half
tons of money in fifteen minutes. Yeah. And they were
back in their hideout in another fifteen So by the
time this thing was reported, they were gone and in
(19:55):
this farmhouse like with the windows shut and the shades drawn.
But that also kind of screwed them because before they
left the train, they said, all right, no one moves
for thirty minutes. And so the cops here this and
they went, oh, well that they're probably within a thirty
mile radius. And then and so they put this out
on the news. We know that they're within a thirty
(20:16):
mile radius, and we're gonna start camvasing the area. They
get word of this there within twenty eight miles and
they go, well, crap, they're gonna find us. And they
also said it was sort of a city boys move
to think you can hide out in the country like that. Um,
And this one guy in the documentary was like, no,
out in the country, you get noticed if you're fifteen
(20:37):
guys in a farmhouse. That was their undoing. A neighbor said,
there's a lot more people at this old rambling old
farm and they're all wearing bowler hats for some reason,
at least half of them are. Um, there's something fishy
going on. So when the when the word got out
that this train had been hit, this guy came forward
and said, you guys should go check this farm out. Well,
(20:59):
the guys weren't only at this farm for the half
hour after the heist. They've been there for like eight days,
waiting for the day to come, getting ready, um, eating
things that required catchup. Playing Monopoly. Yeah, uh, played a
lot of Monopoly with their real money. Yes, they they
thought that was just a fun thing to do. Hilarious. Um.
(21:21):
And they did go to the trouble of like wiping
down a lot of the stuff, but they left a
lot of stuff behind, including the Monopoly game, including the
catchup bottle, and a lot of other stuff that had
prints on it. Well, yes, because Fields was supposed to
get a guy to go torch the place. Yeah, that's
what I thought, was like, why wouldn't you just burn
the place down? That was the plan And apparently the
guy never did it, and um, they ended up getting
(21:43):
out of there a few days early. They left five
days into it because they obviously heard the news that
they were canvasing the area, so they left quicker than
they wanted to. And um, like you said, left a
lot of stuff behind because they thought it was gonna
be torched. Their plan was to lay low there for
a few days. Yeah, to keep laying low. But um,
when they found out they were basically making their way
(22:05):
to them, little by little they got the heck out
of Dodge. Well that probably kept them from getting caught sooner.
But in so the public is being treated to this
incredibly daring train heist. These people got away without a
trace for at least the first week. Finally within a week, Um,
(22:25):
this leather Slade Farms has been identified as the place
where these guys were hiding out and they found the trucks. Uh,
and they got at least one person within eight days
of the of the heist. Yeah, and all of a
sudden people start falling. There's fifteen people, um, and on
the case is called the Flying Squad, who are like
(22:47):
the best of the best that Scotland yard has to
offer to combat these some of the best of the
best criminals that that Great Britain has had to offer
at the time. Yeah, Chief Superintendent Detective Tommy Butler was
the head of the Flying Squad. And like you said,
this was so sensational because it was the top robbers
and the top cop. It was. I guess it's sort
(23:08):
of like the elliott Ness of the day going after
al Capone. It was just a huge story. Um. And
like you said, they started getting nicked one by one,
and UM, it came out later that there was an
informant by the name of Mickey Keiho. Supposedly, Scotland Yard said,
this guy, Mickey Keiho, was telling us all about it
(23:28):
because it was well known within the criminal underground, like
what was going on, and started naming names. Although the
robbers to this day, UH still say, nah, I wasn't
Mickey Kiho. We know that guy. He didn't even notice
that well, he wasn't giving up names, but um, I
don't know Scotland Yard says he was. So I don't
see why they make that up. I could see them
making it up to protect somebody else, especially if they
(23:51):
didn't like Mickey Keiho and the way he looked. That's true,
but they You're right, they started to go down one
by one. Uh. There was a pretty short list of
people they thought it was. It wasn't like some great mystery. Plus,
once they started peeling away one and canting one here
or there, others started falling. Others did did Did anyone
who was caught name names? Did you get that impression? No?
(24:13):
They were Most of them were pretty tight lipped. Uh.
In fact, one guy, Charlie Wilson, he was the treasurer
of the gang. He uh. They called him the silent
Man because he literally said nothing and he didn't didn't
speak at all during the trial. He went on to
become a U. S. Congressman who waged the proxy war
against Russia and Afghanistan. I don't think so. I think
(24:35):
that's a different different Tom Hanks. Yeah right, Um, so
consider this from the public's point of view. There's a
staring robbery, right words getting out within a week he
got your first guy caught. But there's still tons more
people on lamb, which gave the press tons of fodder.
They had so much to write about. Um. There was
(24:55):
a capture of one of the guys that involved roofed ops,
Like the guy was running and jumping from roof to
roof with police and chase you know, and the and
finally by August, all these guys are rounded up twelve
or the fifteen, I think we're rounded up. Uh, And
they started to stand trial. Um in January, they were caught.
(25:18):
They're being quiet. The public is just totally in awe.
And finally this trial starts, and right out of the gate,
the judge found out that Biggs had a criminal past,
so he he shouldn't be tried with the rest of
him because it contained the jury against all these other
guys un fairly. So Biggs gets spun off to his
own trial. And these guys uh stood trial. The other
(25:41):
four or the other elevens, no, ten of them stood trial.
One of them managed to have a lawyer. He was
there because his prints were on the no, the monopoly game. Yeah,
they were prints on Ketchup and Monopoly and pots and pans.
And some of the guys were gloves the entire time,
and they smart, smart ones. Yeah, but Biggs was the one.
Remember biggs one job was to bring the train engineer
(26:03):
and uh, he screwed that up. His princes were on
the catchup bottle, so he screwed that up too. But um,
there was another guy who's prints round the Monopoly game
and his lawyers managed to show that that those could
have gotten there long before the crime, and that it
didn't necessarily need anything to do with it. He got set.
(26:24):
He was acquitted. During this trial, he was the only
lucky one. Everybody else had the book thrown at them. Yeah. Um,
I mean there was a lot of them were saying
that they cooked up a bunch of evidence because they
knew it was them, but they just didn't have the evidence.
So um, the big lor truck they had painted hastily
painted yellow and uh, the Goody, one of the main
(26:48):
you know, two guys, was supposedly some of his evidence
was that they found yellow paint on a shoe and
he was like, I didn't paint in those shoes. And
it was funny because years later he's like, oh did it,
And yeah, I painted that truck yellow, but I wasn't
wearing those shoes they planted. That's evidence. Yeah, And and
apparently there was false confessions. There was another great British
(27:10):
word for that. I can't remember what they called it,
but chopper dabba, choder dobbing. They false confessions were big
at the time in England and there was a lot
of reports from these robbers that they were using false
confessions and planning evidence. And again, even though they did it,
they were like, yeah, but if you don't have evidence,
you can't convict this. So I don't think we'll ever
(27:32):
know if they cooked up some of this evidence or not.
Well there's one guy named Bowl William Bull. Poor guy.
He apparently had nothing to do with it. Well, he
received money in payment from a debt. Yeah, I think
that good. He owed him. Now it was it was Bigs,
a big big again. He was a friend of Biggs
(27:53):
and when he got out, helped him kind of lay low.
But he had nothing to do with the robbery. And um,
fourteen years No, I'm sorry. It was Cordrey. It wasn't Biggs, Okay, Cordrey, Um,
I know, I feel bad for Biggs. We're just dragging
his name through the mud. Yeah, but it was Rob Cordrey.
It wasn't Rob Cordrey, but um, it was his dad.
(28:15):
It was his great grandfather of Cordrey, and he was
Bull's friend. He helped him lay low and he wanted
Quardrey was actually the first one to get to get
pinched because he and Bull helped him inn a garage
and they paid and like the same bank note bills
for like three months in advance in cash, and the
lady said, hey, this is a little suspicious, turned him in.
(28:37):
Ball got wrapped up, and because all these guys were
saying we're innocent, they couldn't come out and say, well,
he really is innocent, so they kind of had to
take this guilt with them to prison. So Bowl got
fourteen years for doing nothing really, yeah, and for just
basically knowing the wrong guys and hanging out with the
wrong guys. He died in prison. I'm not laughing because
(29:01):
it's just tragic. It is tragic. So his family's like
trying to mount a campaign now Um to get a
posthumous pardon at least. But he, uh, he and the
guy who got hit over the head the conductor are
really the two big victims and all of this. Yeah,
and one of them, there was only one guy that
Um turned in his cut of the money and actually
(29:23):
pleaded guilty out of the rest. That was Cordrey. I think, yeah,
that was Cordry. So even he he says, yes, I
did it, here's my eighty grand the guy who he
associated with still got fourteen years in jail. Yeah, that's
so sad um. So you'll notice that we were talking
(29:43):
about twelve of the fifteen Bigs by the way, after
he stood trial separately, was also found guilty and got
things like, uh, these guys were getting like twenty years,
thirty years since it's enormous sentences for this this train robbery,
generally thirty which was double the harshest penalties for robbery
(30:03):
that they've ever seen, right, which is really strange because
the judge in the case, um, he had actually reduced
another robber in a completely separate robbery, um where a
man had been shot and killed during the commission of
the robbery. Someone who was involved in that robbery had
(30:24):
his sentence reduced from fifteen years to ten years because
that judge thought it was excessive. That same judge was
handing out thirty years sentences to these guys where no
one got killed. Yeah, that was justice, Edmund Davies. I
think because it was such a high profile case, he
felt he could make his name had to be you know,
so um he was making his name though against public sentiment,
(30:45):
because a lot of people were very much I saw
these guys as folk heroes, none more though than Biggs.
And the reason why Biggs is a folk hero was
because he evaded capture so long, and we'll talk about
that right after this. Alright, so, uh, some really interesting
(31:11):
things happened after they were sentenced. Um, Charlie Wilson escaped prison,
which was pretty cool. A couple of them escape prison. Um,
and the way that it was very cute how you
could escape prison back then, like let's put a ladder
by the fence and climb up and jump over into
a truck and speed away. It turns out that Benny
Hills show was basically a docu drama at the time.
(31:34):
Another one escaped when he I think he had some
guys and filtrate the prison and help him escape. Yeah,
in the furniture truck. Yeah, that was Bigs. I think
it has a lot easier to escape prison back then.
And some of these were maximum security for what it's worth,
you know, yeah, well yeah, one of them was Britain's
version of Alcatraz, they say, Wandsworth Prison and um that
(31:55):
big escape from there. Um when he escaped and when
on the lamb Uh. He went to Australia and then
eventually moved on to Brazil, but first he stopped off
at um one of the worst human beings to ever
walk the planet's office. This very same cosmetic surgeon who
redid the faces of Nazis fleeing Europe at the end
(32:18):
of World War Two. Really that's who was plastic surgeon
was yes, um, yeah he uh he So Bigg's got
his face redone a little bit, went to Australia, made
it to Brazil and um he had a family in
Australia which he left behind there, uh, and then went
on to Brazil, got a girl friend and um, she
(32:38):
was pregnant with their child when the the authorities, the
British authorities found him in Brazil and he said, oh,
turns out under Brazilian law you can't extradite the parent
of a Brazilian citizen. So for many, many years Ronald
Biggs lived openly as this felon escape e in Brazil. Uh.
(33:03):
And there are things that he couldn't do Brazil. Apparently,
he couldn't go to bars, he couldn't be out after
ten pm, he couldn't associate with, um, you know, anybody
with a criminal record or anything like that. But he
wasn't imprisoned by the Brazilian authorities, and he couldn't be
extradited to Great Britain, which drove Great Britain crazy. And
there was this one very famous detective who was on
(33:25):
this case who made his own name. His name was
Jack Slipper. Yeah. I get the feeling that he and
Uh and Biggs it was sort of like the lay
Misser rob like Jean Valjean. You know, they had this
lifelong pursuit smoking in the band. Sure, yeah, it's a
very old story. Uh and Biggs and Jack Slipper, we're
(33:47):
playing it out in real life, so much so that
Jack Slipper in four showed up on Bigg's doorstep, I
guess just to rattle him, just to say I I
know where you are and I can get to you.
And Big said, yeah, but you really can't do anything
to me. Yeah. And some of the other guys evaded
police for a little while for a number of years,
(34:08):
but I think by nineteen sixty nine they were all caught,
except for the three that they couldn't finger with good evidence.
But um, even the main mastermind was able to evade
the police for four or five years. I think he
went down to Mexico buster he turned himself in after
living on the lamb for three years. Yeah, and Bruce
Reynolds I think he was on the LAMB for a
(34:29):
while too. Yeah, he got caught in Canada. I think,
um one of the guys, well, I guess it was
Bruce Reynolds when he changed his name when he went
on the Lamb. He changed his family's last name to Firth,
and he had a wife and son, Colin. He changed
his son Nick's name to Colin Firth. Shut up, no, no, oh,
(34:53):
totally coincidental. Okay, I thought you were gonna say it.
Wouldn't that be amazing that Colin Firth was the son
of Bruce Reynolds and it was all in alias that
he turned into a stage name. That would be awesome actually.
Um So. One of the fun things that the the
Prime Minister tried to do because he was so upset
about this was uh he tried to at one point,
(35:13):
or he didn't try to. He had the idea to
reissue every bank note in England so their money would
no longer be good. So from what I understand, they
were like, yeah, you can't do that. From what I understand,
most of the money was never recovered. Fo grand out
of the two point six million was recovered right, So
there was a lot of that out there still, but
(35:36):
apparently England went to a different type of decimal currency
by like nineteen seventy I think, and that means that
that money that was out there automatically became worthless. Well
apparently they laundered it pretty quickly afterwards, so I don't
know how much that affected them, Like through bookies I
(35:57):
got of stuff like that, they made it new money. However,
all of the robbers ended up saying like even if
they got their cut, like it was a curse and
they didn't live this rich lifestyle in Mexico and Spain,
like a bunch of a move to these places and
serve shorter sentences because I think parole was brought in
(36:18):
after they were sentenced. It wasn't even like a thing
in England until then. But retroactively they were able to
get out and like you know, ten or fourteen years
and then you know, supposedly had some of this money
still hidden away. But most of them ended up like
one guy committed suicide, one guy died in a medical
trial that he signed up for um. One guy was murdered,
(36:43):
uh yeah by a hit man on a bike in Spain. Yeah,
so like most of them have these awful sort of
ending stories and they didn't live out like sexy Beast
like Ray Winstone on the Spanish era. I think some
of that might have been influenced by some of that movie.
Might a lot of Great Britain's love of gangsters was
(37:05):
influenced by these guys. Yeah, they were definitely looked up to,
and it's pretty interesting. I got a little more on
Biggs the ballot of Biggs, so he I mean, he
really is like a folk hero in in against anti
with anti establishment types in the UK um in part
(37:26):
because he was, you know, living openly in the face
of you know, British authority, and it irked the British
enough that a group of ex British military kidnapped him
from Brazil and put him on a boat and got
as far as Barbados, where they had boat trouble and
(37:46):
they were picked up by the Barbadoon and authorities. And
it turns out Barbados as an event extradition treaty with
the UK either so he got sent back to Brazil
and supposedly these ex military were saying that they play
and on I guess getting some sort of reward from
the British crown for bringing this guy back. But it's
also been supposed that that was actually a plausible and
(38:10):
deniability cover, that it was actually like the British really
tried to have it, wouldn't surprise me. He Yeah, he
finally turned himself in and died in two thousand nine.
But he turned himself in in like two thousand he
started having like, um, failing health. So he's like, I
guess I'll go live out my life in jail for
some reason. And I think he went to like an
old man's hospital jail back in the UK. Uh. And
(38:33):
not all of them at you know, gross untimely demises.
You know, several of them just kind of retired and
went back to their work as florists and uh sort
of retired with her family in Sussex or London or
sort of around England and um, but apparently none of
them like got Rich off this or they're not talking
if they did. Yeah. Still, well, good good, Yeah, Goods
(38:56):
wrote a book. So there you go. There you have it.
If you want to know more about the Great Train Robbery.
A great place to start is the search part how
stuff works dot Com. And since I said search parts
time for listener mail. I'm gonna call the horse milk.
In our Animal Domestication podcast, we talked about horse milk
(39:17):
and I can't remember what I said. A price said
it was gross or something. Well, I think we said like,
we want to hear from people who've had it, and
I figured we'd hear from a couple of people. By
I'm blown away by how many people have had a
brush with horse milk. A lot of people liked it too,
this is not one of them. Hey, guys, just listen
to the podcast on Animal domestication. Wanted to tell you
about the revolting drink called kumas from Kazakhstan. That's k
(39:41):
u m I s Mila kumas, Mila kumas. It is
similar to the more familiar product keefer. Uh what you
we talked about that and something else, right, Yeah, it's
like or something. It's like Balky's version of sour milk. Think. Yeah,
he said it's made from horse milk because horse milk
has more natural sugars than couch eap for goat milk.
Kumas ends up being mildly alcoholic after fermentation. Imagine the
(40:05):
sourness of raw yogurt mixed with the bite of a
shot of vodka and round it all out with the
disgusting tang of horse milk. And you've got kumas well.
I don't understand that last part, like I don't have
anything to equate that with horse milk vodka check sour
like fermented yogurt. But you don't know that disgusting tang. No,
(40:25):
And I want to know now. You know, in Toronto,
when I was here with my friend Chris from Let's
Drink About It, eight horsemeat than in front of you know,
I was supposed to got to dinner with him, but
I was sick. And after we recorded, they went out
and the next day he was like, dude, mate, horsemeat inster.
Now went they go to Ikea. Now they went to
some one of those adventurous restaurants. And I was like, Joshua,
have been all over that, but not me, thank you.
(40:47):
Beauty horse meat right, probably, but not horse milk. Only
if the horse died of old So Greg says, I
drained it. Well, that's what they said. They supposedly all
of them. They're called what do you I'm barbarians something
horses like old dead horses. No, basically, there were horses
that died of natural causes. They called them like senior horses. No,
(41:11):
like golden AIGs horses. No, there's a word. There's a
lot of words. I can say them all. So Greg
drank in Kazakhstan and he said it was served in
a bowl what he would describe as a bowl. You
get cocktail peanuts like you would get cocktail peanuts, and
instead of a bowl of peanuts is a bowl of
dis disgusting drink. I've lived in the Caucuses for four
(41:32):
years now. I've had my share of questionable foods. The
only thing I found more disagreeable than a saucer of
kumas was a pickled rooster comb. Oh my gosh. He
said it was all skinning cards as it felt like
I was eating an ear. Wow, man, that is from Greg.
That's called using every part of the animal. Yeah, Greg,
you just blew my mind. Same here, man. I wish
(41:54):
I could think of the horses, not like freedom horses,
but it was something like the words the word the
horses that want you to eat them donor horses. We'll
find out and tell everybody next time, Okay, the essentialist.
They're horses that died at natural causes. They weren't killed
for their meat. Uh. If you want to let us
(42:17):
know about an experience you had that is fascinating or amazing,
you can tweet it to us at s Y s
K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com
slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an
email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and you can hang out with us at our home
on the web, the Internet clubhouse known as stuff you
(42:37):
Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.
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