Thanks for making it through our true crime playlist. We're rounding this one out with a good old fashioned train robbery for which we had across the pond to visit our friends in the UK. Back in nineteen sixty three, one of the all time great holdups was carried out by a huge gang of men who relieved a British mail train of a massive amount of money, and they did it without guns. Most of the robbers were eventually caught,
but most of the money has never been found. All aboard for the last episode in our playlist on the Great train robbery.
Welcome to you Stuff you should know from HowStuffWorks dot com.
Chew, chew, and welcome to the podcast. Um, Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bright, there's Jerry uh and you put all of us together with a couple of microphones at crummy ikea.
Lamb and you well and a head full of nose juice. You get stuff you should know. That's right, stuff you should nose juice. Oh grow, how's it going buddy? Besides the obvious under the weather yess.
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 your body and the pine air. It's healing. Yeah, properties, I'll.
Get pine and flannel and ocean like in my in my face.
And moose yeah, moose hair. Yeah, that's tough.
If you walk, wadd it all into a ball and sniff it.
Uh huh. It takes care of everything. That's right. What in the world are we talking about? I don't know.
Uh, we're talking about trains, that'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. Yes, it all came together to become known as the Great Train Robbery.
It's right.
Did you know did you commission this article?
I did not.
Did you know about it already?
Some? Or yeah? I mean a little bit, but not as like obviously as much. After I researched and I watched a couple of documentaries and 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. Okay, I think it's new this year.
Yeah, it seems like a twenty fourteen.
Yeah, I want to see it. But there are no shortage of YouTube BBC docs because they love it. And I learned a lot of new words watching them. Yeah, like what oh like 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 cosh somebody. Oh wow, like the train conductor was coshed.
Yeah.
Yeah. There were just a bunch of cool terms that I had to kind of figure out what they meant. An American gotcha in my English? Yeah, so I had.
I heard the words great train and robbery together, but I didn't know anything about it.
I think there was another one, an older great train robbery from the eighteen hundreds.
There's one in eighteen fifty five, Yeah, 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 heist since then, Yeah, more than one hundred years later.
Yeah. Yeah, it was a big deal and it was sort of Jesse James style. That's why it became one of the crimes of the century 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 oh what was his name, the one who made off for years and years?
Oh yeah, see bigs. Yeah, he 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.
Oh really like that? Yeah, yeah, I saw in both documentaries. I 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. Yeah, and they thought they were ingenious and 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.
Right, Well, let's talk about the plan. So there was this idea 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 safecracker by the name of Goodye.
Okay, so Goody had a friend who was His name was Bruce Reynolds, and I guess he originally funded the whole thing.
Yeah. Well, they were in a gang called the Bowler Hat Gang in London. I know, right, I don't think we've said this.
We've made reference to like the wild West and Trained Roberts 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 they dressed in bowler hats and suits and they had done some crimes and they were mainly career criminals and they actually even they had the press's 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 run, 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 I guess led by Bruce Reynolds, right, Yeah, Bowler Hat the Bowler Hat, yeah 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, totally great.
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 guy or Whisney Sorry.
So those guys all got together and they said, we got this great idea. We need your people to get 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 eighteen thirties between Glasgow, Scotland and London, right, Yeah, and it had run every night and it was basically like a mail sorting facility on wheels.
Yeah, 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 and a diesel engine, so it's a pretty simple train.
Yeah. And it had run for years and years, right without incident, for.
Like one hundred and fifty one hundred, almost one hundred and fifty years.
Yeah, 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, Yeah, to this postal train.
Yeah.
Different that had like no security, no armed guards, no alarms until the early sixties on the train cars themselves. But yet every night the banks would empty their 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 gonna sort it along the way.
Exactly.
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 what was announced Who the identity of the inside man was.
Yeah, the last great mystery of this thing from the sixties. Yeah, was just unwrapd like two days ago.
And I didn't even know it at the time. I found out afterward. But the code name was Ulsterman, 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 super loaded on this particular night because of a bank holiday. And he was named by Gordon Goody as Patrick McKenna. Yeah.
In that documentary A tale of two thieves. They hand a picture of Patrick McKennon to 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 know who this person was. There were two other people who knew.
They both died before Goody. Patrick McKenna died years back, and there was just this one man who swore he would take the secret cheers grave and he named them he had angered him.
These guys were really good keeping secrets over the years.
They wore bowler hats for goodness.
So McKinnon's family was super surprised to hear all this. Police never suspected him, and 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. Oh yeah his cut, huh is what the family is saying. But it sounds like an ulsterman kind of thing to do. Yeah, you know, Lstie right, 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 they change the date to get a bigger take. Yeah, and it was and it worked.
Can you explain this to me? So a bank holiday and it's the same thing here in the US. It's like a day the banks are closed. Yea, they have official bank holidays. There's a banking Act in the UK from the nineteenth century that designated certain days as bank holidays.
Yeah.
What I don't understand is why is there's so much more money the day after a 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 or so many more transactions that didn't get to be done on that Monday that were carried out on the Tuesday. 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 do their deposits and like make the money leave the bank like they normally would, so it was compounded. I guess. So there was 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 usually. You know what I'm saying.
Well, if it came after a weekend, though, maybe it was like all of that weekend's deposits, yeah, had gathered up. Okay, I don't know. That's a good question. Okay.
The point is, is this a lot more money than usual? A lot more usually? This? This train car, the Up Special, carried about three hundred thousand pounds between Glasgow and London each each night.
Yeah.
On this particular night, the night of August eighth, nineteen sixty three, which was Thursday, early wee hours of a Thursday, 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 that up and it was like double that one hundred million. Well, yeah, because you're going from nineteen sixty three to twenty thirteen and from pounds to dollars. Yeah, I might be off, but I got sixty nine million pounds today or one hundred and eleven million dollars US, let's go with that. That's way better either way. Two point six million pounds was a ton of money for a highspec then. Yeah, it was
like really really a lot of dough. Yeah, even splitting it among fifteen guys.
Yeah, and they didn't even necessarily split it evenly. There were the core game who were carrying this thing out and they all got even split. But there are also accomplices. In addition to Ulsterman, there was mister one, Mister two, and mister three.
Yeah, and those are 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 think they knew who they were the whole time.
Really, I mean, one of them's named John Wheder. He got away.
I'm not sure I 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. Well, let's let's back up here. Okay, we're so excited we're getting out of it. So he mentioned that they recruited another gang that knew how to work with trains, knew how to stop trains, and what they did was they brought this guy on board who had 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, right, which they very awkwardly wired the red light to turn on and they just covered the green light with some 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, right, 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 failed at that and he screwed it up.
Yeah, 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 an ironcosh, which is English for crowbar, I guess. And this was a big
point because for a lot of reasons. One in 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. Yeah, and the public perception of these guys's 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 GK.
Yeah, Like you dressed nicely and you conducted your business, your criminal business like gentlemen, and you didn't need to beat this old guy up. He was elderly, nearing retirement, and his family says the robbers still say today that like, he wasn't beaten up nearly as bad as they say, and the family's like, no, he never fully recovered, yeah, and died of cancer.
But about seven years later I think he died of leukemia.
Yeah, but they say 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 to someone.
And and like you said, that changed absolutely everything. Goodie, the the guy who's really the brains behind this whole operation, 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 Jame Hussey, who is the one who coched 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 coshed the guy. Yeah. And 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.
Wow, lying on your deathbed, Yeah, that's not okay.
No, that never happens. Yeah, that's where you're supposed to be the most truth.
Sure, Like yeah, I mean they take deathbak 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, Chuck.
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 arm around. I think it's a great movie. No, I don't think anybody's done that.
Oh okay. So Roger Cordrey 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, Oh, is that who it's about.
That's what it's about. Sort of like working class criminal like criminals back then were kind of revered in certain circles in England. It's weird.
Two hearts beating it.
Just one was that from that movie. Okay, great song. All right, So after this break we are gonna talk a little bit more about how it went down and what happened right after.
So chuck, Yeah, we've got the Bowler Hat Gang and the South Coast Raiders. Yeah, coming together for one huge heights that's worth about one hundred million dollars in today's money, yeah, or or half that. They're hitting the up Special. Just this crotchety old twelve car train moving along through the night from Scotland to London, right, Yeah, And so the gang messes with the lights.
Yeah, they put a.
Glove around the green light and managed to turn on the red light. So the train comes to the stop, they all board the train. Yeah, they hit the conductor over the head, huge mistake.
Yeah.
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, Yeah, and say we need you to drive this another mile and a half to the drop point, which is called a Britigo bridge.
Yeah, it was it like a bridge overpass.
Uh huh. And the guy does that and they start offloading the loot.
Yeah, they got one hundred and twenty of one hundred and twenty eight sacks of cash money onto They had this big lorry and a couple of land rovers. Yeah.
Could this be any more stylish?
Yeah?
They had land rovers. There's getaway cars.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. You see why people bought into all this stuff and thought it was cool, because I think it's cool right now. Yeah. And so what they did they had pre arranged a hideout. And this was Fields's job as well, was he bought this farm and.
Farmhouse leathers slaid farm right.
Yeah too, And it was sort of ingenius, 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, I think two and a half.
Tons of money, yeah, 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. Okay, 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 hear this and they went, oh, well, that they're probably within a thirty mile radius then, and so
they put this out on the news. We know that they're within a thirty mile radius, and we're going to start canvassing the area. They get word of this, they're within twenty eight miles and they go, well, crap, they're going to find us. And they also said it was sort of a city boy's move to think you can hide out in the country like that. And this one guy in the documentary was like, na, out in the country, you get noticed, right if you're fifteen guys in a farmhouse.
That was their undoing. A neighbors said, there's a lot more people at this old, rambling old farm, and they're all wearing bowler hats for some reason, or at least half of them are. There's something fishy going on. So 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'd been there for like eight days, waiting for the day to come, getting ready, eating things that required catchup, playing Monopoly.
Played a lot of Monopoly with their real money, Yes they did. They thought that was just a fun thing to do, hilarious.
And they did go to the trouble of wiping down a lot of the stuff, but they left a lot of stuff behind, including the Monopoly game, including the ketchup 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. I was like, why wouldn't you just burn the place down?
That was the plan, And apparently the guy never did it, and 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 canvassing the area. So they left quicker than they wanted to, and, like you said, left a lot of stuff behind because they thought it was gonna be torched.
They're playing was to lay low there for a few days.
Yeah, to keep laying low, huh. But when they found out they were basically making their way to them little by little, right, they got the heck out of Dodge Piker.
Well that probably kept them from getting caught sooner. Yeah, 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. Only within a week, this leather Slade Farms has been identified as a place where these guys were hiding out. Yeah, they found the trucks 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 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 elliot ness of the day going after al Capone. It was just a huge story. And like you said, they started getting nicked one by one and it came out later that there was an informant by the name of
Mickey Keo. Supposedly, Scotland Yard said, this guy, Mickey Kejo 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 still say, nah, it wasn't Mickey Kejo. We know that guy. He didn't even know us that well. He wasn't giving up names. Yeah, but I don't know, Scotland Yard says he was, so I don't see why they'd make that up.
I could see them making it up to protect somebody else, especially if they didn't like Mickey Kejo in the way he looked.
That's true, but they You're right. They started to go down one by one. There was a pretty short list of people who they thought it was. It wasn't like some great mystery.
Plus, once they started peeling away one and catching 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. In fact, one guy, Charlie Wilson, he was the treasurer of the gang. They called him the silent man because he literally said nothing and he just didn't speak at all during the trial.
Right, he went on to become a US congressman who waged a proxy war against Russia in Afghanistan of the seventies.
I don't think so. I think that's a different, different Charlie.
Okay, Tom Hanks, I yet right, So consider this from the public's point of view. There's a staring robbery, right words getting out. Within a week, you 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. There was a capture of one of the guys that involved roof tops, like the guy was running and jumping from roof to roof with the police and chase, you know. And finally by August, all
these guys are rounded up. Twelve of the fifteen I think were rounded up.
Yeah.
Uh.
And they started to stand trial 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 passed so he shouldn't be tried with the rest of them because it could taint the jury against all these other guys unfairly. So Biggs got spun off to his own trial, and these guys 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, there 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's one job was to bring the train engineer and he screwed that up. Yeah, his prints were on the Ketchup bottle, so he screwed that up too. But there was another guy whose prints run the Monopoly game, and his lawyers managed to show that those could have gotten there long before the crime, yeah, and that it didn't necessarily mean he had anything to do with it. He got set. He was acquitted during
this trial. Yeah, he was the only lucky one. Everybody else had the book thrown at them.
Yeah, 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 the big lorry truck they had painted hastily painted yellow, and 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, I did it, and yeah, I painted that truck yellow, but I wouldn't wearing those shoes they planted. That's evidence, isn't that right? Yeah? And apparently there was false confessions. There was another great British word for that. I can't remember
what they called it, but chaverdaba, chaverdving. They false confessions were big at the time in England, and it 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, yeah, you can't convict this all right, So I don't think we'll ever know if they cooked up some of this evidence or not.
Well, there was one guy named Bowl William Bowle.
Oh, poor guy.
He apparently had nothing to do with it. Well, he received money in payment from a debt. Yeah, I think that Goody owed him.
Now that it was Bigs, Oh, Big BIG's 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 he got fourteen years. No, I'm sorry, it was Quadry. It wasn't Bigs. Okay, Cordrey, I know, I feel bad for Bigs. We're just dragging his name through the mud. Yeah, but it was Rob Cordrey. It wasn't Rob Qudrey, but it was his dad. It was his great grandfather of Cordrey, and he was Boll's friend.
He helped him lay low and he wented. Uh. Cordory was actually the first one to get to get pinched because he and Bowl helped him rent a garage and they paid in like the same banknote bills for like three months in advance in cash, and the lady said, ah, this is a little suspicious, turned him in. Bowl 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, right, 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 to get a posthumous pardon it least. Yeah, but he and the guy who got hit over the head the conductor are really the two big victims in all of this.
Yeah, and one of them, there was only one guy that turned in his cut of the money, and actually we pleaded guilty out of the rest.
That was Cordry, I think, yeah, that was Cordry. So even he says, yes I did it, here's my eighty grand the guy who he associated with still got fourteen years.
And died in jail.
Yeah, that's so sad. 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 these guys were getting like twenty years, thirty years sentence, these enormous sentences for this train robbery.
Yeah, 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, he had actually reduced another robber in a completely separate robbery where a man had been shot and killed during the commission of the robbery. Oh wow, someone who was involved in that had his sentence reduced from fifteen years to ten years. Crazy because that judge thought it was excessive. That same judge was handing out thirty year 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 he was making his name though against public sentiment because a lot of people were very much saw these guys as folk heroes, none more though than Biggs. And the reason why Biggs was a folk hero was because he evaded captures so long.
And we'll talk about that right after this fish, all right, So some really interesting things happened after they were sentenced. Charlie Wilson escaped prison yeap, which was pretty cool. A couple of them escaped prison in 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 Hill's show was basically a docu drama at the time.
Another one escaped when he I think he had some guys infiltrate the prison and help him escape.
Yeah, in a furniture truck. Yeah, that was a Bigs I think.
Yeah, it was 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 that BIG's escape from there when he escaped and went on the Lamb. He went to Australia and then eventually moved on to Brazil. But first he stopped off at 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 his plastic surgeon was.
Yes, yeah, so Biggs got his face redone a little bit, went to Australia, made it to Brazil, and he had a family in Australia, which he left behind there and then went on to Brazil, got a girlfriend and she was pregnant with their child when 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.
Oh crazy.
So for many, many years Ronald Biggs lived openly as this fellon escapee in Brazil. And there are things that he couldn't do in Brazil. Apparently he couldn't go to bars, It couldn't be out after ten pm. He couldn't associate with, 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
c oh, I'm sure. 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 Biggs it was sort of like the Les Meserab, like Jean Valjean. You know, they had this lifelong.
Pursuit smoking in the band. Sure, Yeah, it's a very old story.
Yeah it is.
And Biggs and Jack Slipper were playing it out in real life, so much so that Jack Slipper in nineteen seventy four showed up on Biggs's doorstep, I guess, just to rattle him, just to say I know where you are and I can get to you. And Biggs 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. Yeah, but even the main mastermind was able to evade the police for four or five years. I think he went down 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.
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. Oh really, and he had a wife and son, Colin. He changed his son Nick's name to Colin Firth, shut up?
Is that the guy? No?
No, oh, totally coincidental.
Okay, I thought you were gonna say.
Wouldn't that be amazing if that Colin Firth was the son of Bruce Reynolds and it was all in alias that he turned into his stage name.
That would be awesome actually. So one of the fun things that the Prime Minister tried to do, because he was so upset about this, was he tried to at one point, or he didn't try to. He had the idea to reissue every banknote in England so their money would no longer good.
So from what I understand, and they were like, yeah, you can't do that. From what I understand, most of the money was never recovered.
Yeah, four hundred grand out of the two point six million was recovered, right.
So there was a lot of that out there still.
Oh yeah.
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 afterward, so I don't know how much that affected them. Okay, like through bookies, I got 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 in Spain, like a bunch of them moved to these places right and served 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 in like, you know, ten or fourteen years and then you know, supposedly he 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. One guy was.
Murdered, yeah, by a hitman on a bike in Spain.
Yeah, So like most of them have these awful sort of ending stories and they didn't live it 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.
I think a lot of Great Britain's love of gangsters was yeah, influenced by these guys.
Yeah, they were definitely looked up to. And it's pretty interesting.
I've got a little more on Biggs the Ballad of Bigs of Bigsy. So he I mean, he really is like a folk hero in against antist or with anti establishment types in the UK, 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 in nineteen eighty one kidnapped him from Brazil and put him on a boat and got as far as Barbados, where they had boat trouble wow,
and they were picked up by the Barbadan authorities. And it turns out Barbados doesn't have an extradition treaty with the UK either, so he got sent back to Brazil. And supposedly these ex military were saying that they planned on I guess, getting some sort of reward from the British crown for bringing this guy back, right, But it's also been supposed that that was actually a plausible deniability cover that it was actually like the British really tried to have this guynapped.
It wouldn't surprise me.
He Yeah, he finally turned himself in and died in two thousand and nine. But he turned himself in two thousand he started having like 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. And not all of them met, you know, gross untimely demises of you know, several of them just kind of retired or went back to their work as florist's and uh, yeah, Cordry sort of retired with her family in Sussex or London or sort of around England. And 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.
Uh. If you want to know more about the Great Train Robbery, a great place to start is the search bar howstuff works dot com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.
Uh, 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. I probably 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, but 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. I wanted to tell you about the revolting drink called Kumas from Kazakhstan. It's ku miss Mela Kumas. It is similar to the more familiar product Kiefer, which we talked about that and something else, right, yeah or something.
It's like Balki's version of sour milk Colgary and I.
Think, yeah, he said it's made from horse milk because horse milk has more natural sugars than cow, sheep or goat milk. Kumus ends up being mildly alcoholic after fermentation.
Crazy.
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 Forto yogurt.
But you don't know that disgusting tang. No, and I want to know now. You know in Toronto when I was there, my friend Chris from Let's Drink About It ate horse meat.
They in front of you.
No.
I was supposed to go to dinner with them, but I was sick. And after we recorded, they went out, and the next day he was like, dude, eight horse meat. Yesterday I went they go to Ikea. No, they went to some one of those adventurous restaurants. And I was like, Josh would have been all over that, but not me. No, thank you. Yeah, you'd eat horse meat, right, you try it out, probably, but not horse milk.
Only if the horse died of old age.
So Greg says, I drank it. Well that's what they said. They supposedly all of them. They're called what do you call them, barbarians something?
Horses like old dead horses.
No, basically there were horses that died of natural casts. They called them like horses.
No, like golden age horses.
No, there's a word.
There's a lot of words.
I can say them all. So Greg drank it in Kazakhstan, and he said it was served in a bowl what he you would describe as a bowl. You get cocktail peanuts like you would get cocktail peanuts, and like, instead of a bowl of peanuts, it's a bowl of this disgusting drink. Wow. I've lived in the Caucasus for four years now, I've had my share of questionable foods, and the only thing I found more disagreeable than a saucer of kumus was a pickled rooster comb. Oh my gosh,
he said. It was all skin and cardles. 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. Uh, not like freedom horses, but it.
Was something like freedom is a word the horses that want you to eat them? Yeah, donor horses. Well we'll find out and tell everybody next time. Okay.
Yeah, essential is they're horses that died of natural causes. They weren't killed for their meat. I gotcha. Yeah.
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