Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (6 page)

A busy period of comings and goings at a London station around 1840. It is easy to see how such apparent chaos provided golden opportunities for pickpockets and luggage thieves.

Unfortunately railway employees have, from time to time, succumbed to the temptation to pilfer luggage or goods in transit. A desperado by the name of Frost obtained a job as a passenger guard on the Great Western Railway, probably with theft in mind. Late in 1848 the Earl of Craven complained long and loudly about the disappearance of items of his luggage from Shrivenham station in Wiltshire. An investigation was set in motion which failed to recover the missing items or unearth any suspect. However, in 1849 Frost was discovered by a supervisor removing items of clothing from the luggage in his van. He leapt out of the slowly moving train but was arrested and charged with theft. He was carrying a pistol and he asked for other cases to be taken into consideration.

Items recorded as having been stolen by staff from parcels or luggage, on railway premises or on trains, have included cash, clothing, jewellery, gramophone records, footwear and even trunks and cases themselves, all of which might interest a receiver of stolen goods who would pay good prices for them. Sometimes items were taken which turned out to have little or no value on the black market. Sacked railway employees have found themselves doing time for having stolen, for example, travellers’ samples, artists’ materials, boxes
of cricket balls, tins of paint, seedlings, doorknobs, geological specimens, rotting cheese and, perhaps best of all, baby alligators only a few inches long. It might have taken an effort to find a market for them.

Freight wagons standing in goods yards, sidings or marshalling yards could provide extremely tempting targets for the few bad eggs among the mass of railway workers. In 1889 eight men working for the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway at Miles Platting, Manchester, filched a barrel of brandy and embarked on the drinking bout to end all such bouts. One of them died of alcohol poisoning but the others, being in advanced stages of inebriation, were unable to resist arrest. Still, they had had a great binge. For most of their existence the railways were common carriers, and the range of goods and merchandise they carried defied description. It was insider information that led to the theft of 800 Christmas puddings from Wellington Street goods depot, Leeds, in 1949. The railwaymen involved were caught and punished.

Those who say that crime does not pay certainly ought to get out more often. It would be more realistic to say that honesty does not pay as one passenger guard found out when in 1957 he found a handbag containing
£
3,829. He gave this in to a supervisor at what was then London Road station, Manchester. A passenger claimed the handbag and to show her gratitude she rewarded him with what used to be called half-a-crown. This generous gesture amounted to less than 0.1 per cent of the money in her handbag.

Most theft from the railways was carried out by members of the criminal fraternity, some merely opportunist, others well organised and planned. Excisable items like tobacco and spirits were among those of which the stealing needed most planning, but which also brought lucrative results.

Ironically the development of the internal combustion engine, the biggest threat to railway business, also assisted those wanting to steal from the railway. The massive growth in the number of small vans and cars in the 1950s and 1960s made it easy for such a vehicle to be driven into a goods yard, a sizeable and worthwhile quantity of goods to be taken and a quick getaway made.

A van was involved in a well-organised heist in July 1949. The thieves had obviously been watching train movements for some time and had established that an overnight freight from Nottingham to Darlington was usually put into the loop at Markham near Tuxford on the East Coast Main Line to allow faster trains to pass. A gang using a car drove into a field alongside the track and broke into the van containing cigarettes from Player’s at Nottingham. They were seen, however, and rapidly apprehended. Over 170,000 cigarettes had been stolen and the gang members each received five years.

In 1954-5 another gang spent months visiting railway installations along the East Coast Main Line in Nottinghamshire, South Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. This was the ‘Margham Gang’ named after its leader who had a well-known propensity for violence. They used a van and were successful for
several months, getting away with wine, tea, tobacco and shoes, all of which would find a ready market. There was, however, an element of hit-and-miss in their operations and they seem to have been disgusted when they rifled a van containing carpets and textiles. These they left scattered around the scene of the crime. They cunningly varied their operations, keeping one jump ahead of the Transport Police, but were eventually caught after using extreme violence to resist arrest. Margham himself had the small matter of eighty-three previous convictions. Some might call him a career criminal.

In 1838 the railway companies were required by law to carry mails and post as directed by the postmaster general. Mail in transit provided a very tempting target for thieves. Some came to specialise in this type of crime and often did so with boldness and elan. One famous case occurred in 1849 on the Great Western Railway at Bridgewater where both the up and down overnight Exeter mail trains were robbed by the same gang.

The robbers, who were two fit and strong young men and needed to be, were in the carriage next to the van with mailbags on the up train. They opened the door of their compartment as the train was moving along rapidly, held on while clambering along the running board of their lurching carriage and then gained access to the mail van which was unattended. They concentrated on registered letters and other potentially valuable packets, which they stuffed into sacks they had brought along for precisely this purpose. When the train was slowing for its halt at Bristol, they dropped down to the track and made their way over a fence.

The robbery was quickly discovered but these two bold robbers returned a few hours later and performed the same operation on the down train. However, while they had been hanging around on Temple Meads station they had excited the suspicion of another man waiting for the same train. He gave the authorities a description and the robbers were quickly apprehended. They had almost certainly been responsible for a number of other robberies on the Great Western Railway.

The mails continued to be a tempting target for criminal activity right up to the loss of most rail-carried postal and mail traffic to air and the roads – itself, it could be said, a criminal waste of resources. Some of those who have robbed the mails have exercised great ingenuity. In the late 1960s one thief used to place himself in a large but light aluminium trunk. This desperado wore an oxygen mask in order to breathe and had himself delivered by accomplices to a busy station, hidden from sight in the trunk and signed for as a parcel. The trunk was then loaded into a train along with the mail bags.

He would listen and when he thought the coast was clear he would open the trunk, seize a few likely looking mailbags, pull them inside the trunk with him and then travel on with the train to wherever the trunk was due to be unloaded. There his accomplices would of course meet the trunk and carry it away,
opening it and examining the contents of the mail bags at their leisure. This criminal enterprise was successful for some time before he was caught, and it is thought that he had stolen something like
£
200,000 of valuables in this way.

Tester, Agar and Burgess who carried out the Great South Eastern Train Robbery.

Britain was shocked in 1855 by an extremely bold robbery on a moving train, the event quickly coming to be known as the ‘Great South Eastern Bullion Robbery’. This was planned by two men. Edward Agar, an expert in the field of locks and as such highly regarded in the criminal underworld, and his accomplice, William Pierce, whose main motivation seems to have been hatred for the South Eastern Railway who had dismissed him in 1852. They recruited two workers employed by the South Eastern Railway: Burgess, a train guard, and Tester, a clerk whose duties included devising duty rosters for the company’s guards.

They decided to rob a consignment of gold conveyed in a bullion van marshalled in a train from London to Folkestone. The problem was that the timing of the shipments was unpredictable. Each member of the gang had his assigned task. Tester’s role was to ensure that Burgess was the guard when the next shipment was made, and he also copied keys for the safe carrying the gold. He had many dealings with the Chubb Company, makers of security locks. Agar and Pierce checked how the consignment was handled at the Folkestone end. The preparations were meticulous but also time-consuming because they involved watching the train every night. If Burgess gave the agreed signal, it indicated that the gold was aboard. Eventually their patience was rewarded, Burgess indicating that this was the night!

Agar and Pierce bought first-class tickets to Ostend via Dover and they took their seats in separate compartments. However, as arranged, Agar joined Burgess in the guard’s van before the train started out. Agar got to work on the locks, and well before the train got to Folkestone the bags they had brought with them were filled with gold and the safe filled up with lead shot. Agar and Pierce returned to London on the first available train, the gold innocently carried in carpet bags. They then melted the gold down, the men already having a buyer, and the proceeds were then shared out as agreed. The total value was approaching
£
1 million by today’s prices.

A great hue and cry went out when the robbery was discovered and the gang might well have got away with the whole thing had not Agar and Pierce fallen out. Agar had been sentenced to life imprisonment for another offence, uttering a forged cheque (he was possibly framed), and he eventually decided that he had nothing to lose by turning Queen’s evidence which allowed him to drop Pierce in it, as they say. Pierce received only a two-year sentence but Tester and Burgess were transported to the Antipodes for fourteen years. They were viewed as particularly culpable because they had been employed in trusted positions by the South Eastern Railway.

The story of the Great Train Robbery has been told many times but it needs to be mentioned here, if only briefly. A number of thefts of mail from moving trains had been carried out by two gangs operating in the south of England in 1961 and 1962. They were not all particularly rewarding in terms of what they stole but the men gathered information about how the railway handled valuable consignments of mail, and in doing so learned that there were frequent shipments of untraceable bank notes from Scotland to London on an overnight train on the West Coast Main Line.

A criminal consortium was assembled to plan a robbery of this train. They included a self-taught expert in the science of tampering with signals and line-side electrical equipment. Several luminaries from the underworld made up this consortium which really was a gathering of all the relevant criminal talents. The outcome was a theft which netted over
£
2.5 million pounds. The robbery was planned with military precision and no small initial investment to ‘buy’ the right people for the various tasks involved in the project.

The robbery took place on 8 August 1963 near Cheddington in Buckinghamshire when the gang halted the southbound mail train at about three in the morning. Ironically, the gang were disappointed with their haul – they had been hoping for twice as much. One by one the gang members were arrested, convicted and sent to prison, mostly for extremely long terms, emphasising that this was officially seen as a crime against property, such crimes tending to be punished more harshly than crimes against the person.

The engine driver was very badly beaten after attempting to fight back and he received injuries which almost certainly shortened his life. Only a small amount of the stolen money was ever recovered and many people think that the robbery’s chief organiser and investor, who received the largest share of the proceeds, was never identified and obviously never brought to justice.

Theft of railway property has been a constant problem from earliest times to the present. In the days when refreshment rooms and restaurant cars invariably used heavy-duty crockery, this disappeared in quite extraordinary quantities, as did cutlery. Light bulbs have always been a target of thieves and were stolen in large numbers, especially from carriages with closed compartments. The same type of compartment used to display the attractive publicity posters that older readers will remember. These were fixed above the seats and below the luggage racks and usually showed reproduction paintings or photographs of ‘holiday haunts’.

Locals on a train travelling up the soot-laden steel-making district of the Don Valley out of Sheffield might be tempted to get away from it with a day out by train to sample the fleshpots of Cleethorpes or the boisterous delights of Blackpool. Elsewhere other passengers travelling, for example, through what were once similarly Stygian surroundings between Wolverhampton and West Bromwich on the Great Western Railway might succumb to the sun-kissed temptations of Torquay or Weston-super-Mare.