How The Great Train Robbery Worked

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 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. 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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. 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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, 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, 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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

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 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 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 Should Know dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.