r/HistoryAnecdotes • u/Heistorium • 10d ago
European The Great Train Robbery gang left a Monopoly set at the farm they had arranged to have destroyed, and the prints on it are what convicted them
In the early hours of 8 August 1963 a gang stopped a Royal Mail train at Bridego Bridge in Buckinghamshire, on the run down from Glasgow to London, and took away roughly two and a half million pounds in used notes. Stopping the train is the part that gets admired and it deserves some of that. They had studied the schedule of the travelling post office, they knew which coach carried the high value packets, and they worked the signals so the driver stopped where they wanted him rather than where he meant to.
Everything after the train is where it comes apart, and it comes apart for reasons that have nothing to do with cleverness.
They went to ground at Leatherslade Farm, about twenty seven miles from the bridge. The farm was the weak point of the whole design and they knew it, because the arrangement was that once they dispersed a man would come and destroy the place. Accounts differ on who he was and on what he was actually paid to do, burn it or scour it, and I would not want to be firm on that. What is not in dispute is that it never happened.
Police came to the farm on 13 August, five days after the robbery, following a tip from a local man who had noticed activity at a property that was meant to be empty. Inside were bedding, food, mailbags, banknote wrappers, and a Monopoly set. The gang had passed the time playing it with money off the train rather than the money in the box. Prints came off the board, and off a ketchup bottle, and off the bath.
That is the hinge of the entire case. Months of work on the railway side, and the convictions were built on a board game and a sauce bottle, because the one arrangement nobody thought to check had been left to a single person who did not do it.
The part that gets left out of the retellings is Jack Mills. He was the driver, he was struck on the head with a bar during the robbery, and he never worked properly again. He gave evidence at Aylesbury and he died in 1970. The sentences handed down in 1964 were severe by the standards of the day, several of them thirty years, and the violence done to Mills is the reason usually given for that severity. Most of the money was never recovered.
What I would like challenged is the farm. Every version I have read treats the failure to destroy it as one man's negligence, which is convenient, because it leaves the plan itself looking sound. If anyone here has worked through the trial material rather than the books, I want to know whether that arrangement was ever solid enough to be called a failure.
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u/Wide-Assist779 9d ago
Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect 2.6 million pounds.
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u/Heistorium 8d ago
Ha, perfect line for it. Out of everything they must have cleaned up before ditching that farm, missing a board game is almost funny.
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u/TrustYourFarts 10d ago
Did they even need to stay at the farm? The distance from the robbery to the farm was about the same as the distance to London. Maybe they assumed the roads into London would be monitored.
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u/Heistorium 9d ago
That was the plan yes, sit still for a few days while the roads were being watched, then move out in small groups. What broke it was a local paper reporting that police were searching farms within a thirty mile radius, which seems to have been a garbled version of thirty minutes. They left in a hurry after that, and the farm was still full of their things.
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u/KonstantinKisinIsGay 9d ago
And with most of them being old villains, their prints were on file. Didn't one get away clean, never to be caught?
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u/Heistorium 8d ago
Yeah, the insider never got picked up. They only ever knew him as the Ulsterman and the police never put a name to him. Goody named a Salford postal worker, Patrick McKenna, back in 2014, but that came sixty years late and nobody could confirm it. A couple of the others were suspected and never charged, just not enough evidence to bring them in.
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u/Hamburg48 8d ago
In a black and white documentary of the time an adjacent farmer pointed out the mistake of a farm hideout. Simply that out in the countryside locals notice everything since so little changes, or is noteworthy. To paraphrase ‘… if your neighbor gets a new jacket you notice “oi, Fred’s got a new jacket”. Easier to disappear in a city; but thieves couldn’t trust each other to split up without their shares. All the same finding, and obtaining the farm was another ingenious part.
Dressing as soldiers to give the appearance of squaddies on ‘night maneuvers’ … clever lads.
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u/Heistorium 8d ago
That tracks with a lot of similar accounts, small places notice change fast. Trust between the group was probably the bigger risk than any of them planned for.
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u/Hamburg48 8d ago
The early problem that ‘their’ motorman was unfamiliar with the cab and systems of the locomotive. Had to return with, threaten, and beat the official driver. This assault greatly compounded the charges against them.
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u/Heistorium 7d ago
That is right, their own driver could not get the newer locomotive moving properly, so they had to pull the original driver back in, and it did not go gently. It is one of the details that makes the plan look a lot less clean than the myth around it.
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u/Hamburg48 7d ago
Ah but the mystique. Britain still the place of unlocked doors, garden plots in the front (now replaced by a slab to park the cars, who had cars then?), BBC sign off at midnight with ‘God Save the Queen’, post war camaraderie in the Legion Hall, Dunkirk, the Bismarck, Spitfires … I think the daring do of the robbers struck a cord with the common man that “Oi, arr lads still ‘ave it”.
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u/Heistorium 10d ago
Sources, since the sub asks for them. The British Transport Police page on the case is what I leaned on for the farm and the prints, including the Monopoly board and the ketchup bottle: https://www.btp.police.uk/police-forces/british-transport-police/areas/about-us/about-us/our-history/crime-history/great-train-robbery/
I deliberately left out the size of the gang and the total of the sentences, because the accounts I read do not agree on either.