Gangland UK: The Inside Story of Britain's Most Evil Gangsters (21 page)

Of course, the real victims of this robbery were the innocent employees of the Securitas firm and the Dixon family, who, it is fair to say, were terrorised for hours at gunpoint.

At the trial, however, there were suggestions by some defence lawyers that the inside man was, in fact, Colin Dixon. Added to Colin’s trauma was the fact that one of the officers who looked after Mr Dixon in the wake of the robbery had harboured suspicions about him and had emailed her boss. Victim liaison officer PC Lorraine Brown said she believed he was intentionally deceiving the police over a camera and photographs of the inside of the high-security depot that were found in his desk.

Former police officer Graham Huckerby also knows what it is like to be wrongly suspected of being the ‘inside man’. He was driving a Securicor van on 3 July 1995 when it was ambushed by armed robbers near the Midland Bank clearing centre in Salford, Manchester. The gang made off with 29 cash bags containing
£
6.6 million, making it the biggest cash-in-transit robbery in British criminal history. None of the robbers was ever caught but, four years after the raid, Greater Manchester Police decided that Mr Huckerby’s actions on the day had been suspicious and, in 2002, he was convicted of conspiracy to rob and jailed for 14 years.

His girlfriend, Luci Roper, fought a long campaign to clear Graham’s name and, in December 2004, three Court of Appeal judges quashed his conviction, saying, ‘We are not satisfied as to the safety of the conviction.’ Huckerby – who had been the victim of a robbery seven months before – was suffering from ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ at the time of the Midland Bank cash-
in-transit
robbery, which was why he did what the robbers told him when they pointed a gun at his head, instead of following company policy – which was, one might suppose, to duck!

The entire saga has since ruined Graham Huckerby’s life. His girlfriend has since left him, he lives in someone else’s back room, and he’ll probably never get a decent job again.

And what about compensation? According to Luci, who sold her house to help pay for his appeal, he has been offered nothing.

I
t must be said that the Great Train Robbery was brilliantly planned and executed. Apart from the attack on the train driver, Jack Mills, it was non-violent and no firearms were used. The raiders managed to steal much more money than they had planned – they even left several bags of notes behind because they had run out of time – and perhaps it was the greed in sharing all the money out which led to them being careless and leaving so many fingerprints behind, sealing their own fate.

It was a crime which, for its magnitude and sheer audacity, made the exploits of train robbers in the past, such as the legendary Jesse James in America’s Wild West, appear almost child’s play. Indeed, one American newspaper, the
New York Herald Tribune
, printed an account of the opening of the trial on its
front page and devoted six columns to the story under the headline: ‘
HISTORY’S GREATEST ROBBERY – THERE’LL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND
.’

The trial opened on the bitterly cold Monday of 20 January 1964 in the courtroom at Aylesbury Assizes in Buckinghamshire. Amid what the press like to call ‘tight security’, seventeen men and three women were seated in the dock with its spiked-topped mahogany surround. As soon as the presiding judge, portly Mr Justice Edmund Davies, had taken his seat on the bench, and before the jury was sworn, the decision was taken to ‘put down’ seven of the accused – including the three women – who were charged with the lesser offence of receiving stolen property.

Of the remaining thirteen, 41-year-old florist shop owner Roger Cordrey, of East Molesey, Surrey, had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to rob and also to two charges of receiving. He had a serious gambling habit, and was of a neurotic temperament, and had ‘helped’ the police by leading them to the recovery of
£
141,000 of the stolen money. The Crown accepted his plea and he, too, was removed from the dock.

The remaining twelve defendants included William Boal, 50, a small, red-faced man with defective eyesight. Married with three children, he lived in Fulham and was just working up a nice little business in aircraft components and precision work when he became involved with criminal types outside his class. He was later sentenced to 24 years, reduced to fouteen on appeal. He eventually went on to serve only seven years in prison before he died. All he got out of his participation in the robbery was a short-lived spending spree.

Charles Frederick Wilson, 31, was a dark,
good-looking 
and amiable bookmaker, who also ran a greengrocery business and came from Clapham. He was married to a pretty young wife and, like Boal, had three children – all daughters. He was sent down for 30 years.

Thomas William Wisbey, 34 – another jovial character, married with children, also ran a betting shop in London. A former private in the Royal Army Service Corps, discharged with a good character. Wisbey would be sentenced to 30 years.

James Hussey, 31 – a painter and decorator, he was a bachelor and looked rather stupid which was said to be the result of nervousness. He was reputed to be good company and popular among his friends. Hussey was also given 30 years’ imprisonment.

Leonard Dennis Field, 31, was sentenced to 24 years, later reduced to 5 years on appeal. He was also a florist, and one-time shoreside waiter with the merchant navy.

Douglas Gordon Goody, 34, was a hairdresser from Putney. Always immaculately dressed, he was about to marry a pretty redhead named Patricia Cooper, who lodged in his house.

Sitting in the back row of the dock was the one and only defendant with a public school and university education. John Denby Wheater, 42, a London solicitor, with a dark, heavy, impassive face and a moustache, he lived in a prosperous commuter belt in Surrey with a wife and two young daughters. Like Wisbey, he had a good wartime record and had been awarded the Member of the British Empire medal for ‘personal courage of a very high order’ while serving as an officer with his regiment in Italy. He would receive three years’ imprisonment.

Brian Arthur Field, 29, was no relation to Leonard
Field. He was Wheater’s managing clerk who lived in Oxfordshire with his second wife Karin, who was German. He was sentenced to 24 years.

Robert Alfred Welch – a 35-year-old club proprietor, he was pale and tense and was said to look more like a research student than a criminal. He got 30 years.

Indeed, none of the men in the dock looked at all like criminals and this applied to 28-year-old Roy John James. A silversmith by profession, unmarried but very attractive to women, he was much addicted to motor racing and was nicknamed ‘The Weasel’. He also got 30 years.

Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Arthur Biggs, a 34-year-old carpenter from Redhill, Surrey. Tall, dark and mild-mannered, he was a kindly husband and father to his wife and two children. He had previously served in the RAF and, prior to the trial, was working up a lucrative business in the building trade. His sentence was 30 years.

Finally, there was John Thomas Daly. A 32-year-old Irish antique dealer and skilled craftsman, his wife, Frances, was the sister of another antique dealer in London, Bruce Reynolds, a Michael Caine lookalike and the acknowledged leader of the gang, whom the police only managed to arrest four years after the robbery. John Daly was discharged.

Altogether, 40 barristers were engaged in the case. Leader of the prosecution was Mr Arthur James QC, who took ten hours to open the case for the Crown. The trial lasted 48 working days, six of which the judge took to sum up the evidence, after which the jury were kept in seclusion for three days and three nights.

Prior to 1963, the ‘Great Train Robbery’ referred to
the theft of gold bullion from a train travelling between London and Paris in 1855. However, the events of Wednesday, 7 August 1963 displaced this as being one of the most audacious robberies in the UK.

The narrative revolves round the TPO (Travelling Post Office) night train which travelled nightly between Glasgow and London, making scheduled stops en route to pick up additional mail. On the night of the robbery, it comprised a diesel engine and 12 coaches, which were exclusively concerned with the carriage and sorting of mail. The coach second from the engine was known as the HVP (high-value package coach) where registered mail was sorted. On this occasion, it also contained 128 mail bags filled with banknotes, most of them in denominations of
£
5 and
£
1, which were being sent by banks, mainly in Scotland, to their branches or head offices in London. The total on the day of the robbery was
£
2.3 million (the equivalent of about
£
30 million today).

On the footplate was the 58-year-old train driver Jack Mills, and the fireman David Whitby, 26. They both boarded the train at Crewe where they lived. The man in charge of the high-value package coach was a postal employee named Frank Dewhurst, a taciturn, 49-year-old Londoner, who had other colleagues helping him to sort the mail in that and the other coaches. The reason for there being such a large amount of money on board that day was because it was just after the Bank Holiday spending spree.

The two co-drivers had just finished their last cup of tea and the train, travelling at 76 mph, had just passed Leighton Buzzard at about 2.30am the following day. Just after Leighton Buzzard there was a dwarf signal
known as the ‘distant signal’. If this showed green, it meant that the driver could proceed at full speed, but if it showed amber, it meant that he must slow down, since he must expect that the next signal, known as the ‘home signal’, would be red.

A minute or two later, Jack Mills saw a red signal ahead at a place called Sears Crossing. He did not realise that the red light was false – a glove was obscuring the correct signal and the red light was activated by attaching it to a 6-volt battery.

When he stopped, David Whitby climbed out of the diesel engine in order to ring the signalman to ascertain the problem. He discovered that the cables from the
line-side
phone had been cut and, as he turned to return to his train, he was attacked and thrown down the steep railway embankment where he was overpowered by two men. One of them put a hand over Whitby’s mouth and hissed, ‘If you shout, I’ll kill you.’

‘All right, mate,’ the terrified man answered when he had recovered his breath, ‘I’m on your side.’

At the same time, a masked man climbed into the train cab. Mills fought back and was struck around the head with possibly a cosh, some say an iron bar, others claim an axe handle, rendering him unconscious. Meanwhile, other robbers were uncoupling the rest of the carriages, leaving the engine and the first two carriages containing the high-value property.

Whitby was then taken back to the train, where he saw Mills in the driver’s cab on his knees bleeding heavily from the head. He also saw that the cab was full of men in boiler suits and balaclavas. Then, because the diesel was a new type with which the gang’s railway expert was
unfamiliar, and which he was consequently unable to operate, Mills was forced to drive the engine a distance of about half-a-mile to Bridego Bridge, where the track crossed a road. Mills and Whitby were handcuffed together and the windows of the HVP were smashed with coshes and an axe.

Frightened post office staff were pushed to one end by some of the 15-strong gang – but in the remaining ten carriages (left at Sears Crossing), staff did not even realise anything had happened.

At Bridego Bridge, a human chain of robbers removed 120 sacks containing 2½ tons of money. The robbery was well organised and swift. Before leaving, one of the gang threatened the post office staff to stay still for 30 minutes before contacting the police, then the gang drove off to their hideout at Leatherslade Farm, which was about 20 miles away. The alarm was raised and both drivers were rushed to the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, where Mills was treated for a black eye and facial bruising. They had to wait for a police officer to arrive before the handcuffs could be removed.

Leatherslade Farm at Oakley had been rented and, during the next few days, the jubilant gang shared out the proceeds of the heist. They even played Monopoly using real money, while a huge police investigation was launched, run by the Flying Squad at Scotland Yard and senior detectives from the Buckinghamshire force. The officer in overall command was Detective Chief Superintendent Jack Slipper – or ‘Slipper of the Yard’.

Born Sunday, 20 April 1924, the high-water mark of Slipper’s career was the Great Train Robbery, and he became so involved with its aftermath that he continued
in retirement to hunt down many of the robbers who managed to escape. He worked as an electrician’s apprentice until 1941, when he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, joining the Metropolitan Police in 1950.

He was also involved in several other cases, including the 1966 Massacre of Braybrook Street. Also known as The Shepherd’s Bush Murders, three police officers were shot dead in what was then the worst police killing in British criminal history.

Slipper also set up the Robbery Squad, which later merged into the Flying Squad. He was also responsible for Britain’s first ‘supergrass’ trial in 1973, in which bank robber Bertie Smalls testified against his former associates in exchange for his own freedom. In the 1980s and 1990s, Slipper worked in security for IBM UK, working out of their Greenford, Middlesex, offices. His local pub was the Black Horse, in Harrow Road, Wembley. He died after a long illness on 24 August 2005, aged 81.

Meanwhile, back at the farm, the gang were becoming spooked by low-flying RAF aircraft, which they took to be police spotter planes. Actually, the aircraft were merely on training flights had nothing to do with the manhunt that had now been established. However, a nearby resident, a herdsman named Maris, saw vehicles coming to the farm on various dates between 29 July and 11 August. A Mrs Mappin had also become suspicious of the comings and goings at the farm and had contacted the police. She was able to give some useful particulars of the movements of the vehicles on the night of the robbery. Then, another neighbour, Mr Wyatt, had noticed dirty curtains being put up at the farm to cover the windows and had chatted with several of the
occupants who described themselves as ‘decorators’. Finally, there was Mrs Brooke, who had delivered the keys of the farm to its new owners.

The police arrived in the form of PC John Wooley, although by now the robbers had fled. They had split the money up, with Biggs receiving
£
147,000, and had gone to ground. A thorough scene-of-crime examination found several fingerprints, including some on the Monopoly board and others on a ketchup bottle. There was a miscellaneous collection of other clues, including a can of paint and two Land Rovers with the same number plate. The fingerprints and other enquiries led to the perpetrators and, one by one, they were arrested.

The first two arrests – that of Cordrey and Boal – came about when two men turned up in Bournemouth in an Austin A35 van, and spoke to Mrs Ethel Clark, a policeman’s widow, about renting her lock-up garage in Tweedale Road. There was no thought in her mind that the two had anything to do with the train robbery, but when they offered to pay three months’ rent in advance and pulled out a large wad of 10-shilling notes to do so, her suspicions were aroused. Mrs Clarke phoned the police and, in a matter of minutes, two plain-clothes detectives turned up.

During the initial questioning, one of the robbers made a dash for it and was brought down by a rugby tackle. The other also tried to escape, but was quickly captured.

While Cordrey and Boal were ‘helping police with their enquiries’ at the nearby police station, their van was subjected to a thorough search. It revealed notes to the value of
£
141,000. A further sum of
£
300 was discovered at Boal’s house in Fulham.

At about the same time, a young couple were walking through Redlands Wood, a beauty spot near Dorking, Surrey, and spotted two holdalls and a briefcase lying just off a pathway. There was nothing inside any of the abandoned articles to identify the owner, but the contents consisted of thousands of banknotes. Rightly convinced that they had stumbled on some of the loot of the robbery, the couple immediately telephoned the police, who arrived on the scene with tracker dogs, which sniffed out another case filled with money. The total recovered was
£
101,000, now leaving the police to believe that the robbers had panicked when they realised the heat was on, and that they had stashed the money away in various hiding places to be retrieved later.