The Great Train Robbery (2 page)

The sentences for post office crimes were historically harsh, as demonstrated by the records from that era, which show that both capital punishment and transportation to the colonies were common. In 1765, Parliament passed an act that set down the death penalty for ‘theft of the mail’, ‘secretion’ and ‘embezzlement or destruction of mail’. A further twenty-nine postmen were hung between that date and the passing of the 1837 Post Office Act, which abolished the death penalty for post office offences, replacing it with transportation for terms of seven years to life.

In terms of investigating such offences, responsibility remained with the solicitor to the Post Office until 1816, when much of it was transferred to the Secretary’s Office, where the team of investigators were to become known as the Missing Letter Branch. By 1823 the investigators were supplemented and supported by Bow Street Runners. Founded by Henry Fielding in 1750, the Runners (or Robin Redbreasts, on account of their scarlet waistcoats) were London’s first band of constables who travelled up and down the country serving writs and pursuing criminals. In 1829, on the founding of the Metropolitan Police by Sir Robert Peel, the Missing Letter Branch used seconded police officers instead.
2

In 1840 the introduction of the first postage stamp, the penny black, led to a massive increase in the volume of postal traffic. This inevitably meant a consequent rise in the amount of post office-related crime. The Post Office reacted to this by recruiting more investigators who, from 1848, were placed under the supervision of the Post Office inspector general in a separate department. In 1883, the Missing Letter Branch was renamed the Confidential Enquiry Branch and the officer in charge given the title of director. In 1908 the unit once again changed its name to the Investigation Branch, usually shortened to the IB. In 1934 the GPO underwent a radical reorganisation, and in 1935 the Investigation Branch became one of the administrative departments of the new headquarters structure of the GPO. In 1946 the title of the head of the Investigation Branch changed from director to controller. At the time of the 1963 train robbery, Clifford Osmond was controller, having taken over the post in 1957. Formally deputy controller from 1948, Osmond, a native of the West Country, had joined the Post Office at the age of 18 before successfully applying to join the Investigation Branch in March 1934.
3

In retrospect, the Post Office was most fortunate in having Osmond, a highly motivated, resourceful and effective investigator, at the head of the organisation during a period in which mail crime was to rise significantly and, indeed, culminate in the Great Train Robbery of 1963.

Notes

  
1
.  Sources for the early history of the IB and its predecessors: POST 23/13-66; Missing Letter Branch case papers, 1839−1859; POST 30/1492 Confidential Enquiry Branch (GPO): Revision, 1907; Historical summaries of Branch workings and grades employed, 1793−1907; POST 74 Solicitor’s Department; POST 74/199−203 Prosecutions in England and Scotland, 1800−1896; POST 74/204−344; Prosecution Briefs in England, Ireland and Wales, 1774−1934; POST 122/13084 Investigation Branch Annual Reports 1957/58−1966/67.

  
2
.  
Ibid
.

  
3
.  
Ibid
.

I
n the 1950s and early ‘60s Percy Hoskins was considered by his peers, and indeed many senior police officers up and down the country, to be Britain’s foremost crime reporter. As chief crime reporter for Lord Beaverbrook’s mass circulation
Daily Express
, he had an almost sixth sense when it came to spotting a unique story angle and a second-to-none ability to get down to its bedrock.

Hoskins was famed for the friendships and acquaintances he cultivated over the years, not only in Britain but also in America, such as Hollywood film director Alfred Hitchcock and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. He also had some of the best sources in the criminal fraternity, the Metropolitan Police and the outlying county forces. According to Victor Davis, writing in the
British Journalism Review
, ‘Hoskins kept open house for senior police officers at his flat at 55 Park Lane; if you were in trouble with the police you rang Percy before your lawyer.’

According to Davis, Hoskins avoided having a desk at the
Daily Express
HQ at 120 Fleet Street, in the City of London (known unofficially at the time as the ‘Black Lubyianka’), so as to avoid Beaverbrook executives keeping a tab on his working hours. During his fifty years working for Beaverbrook newspapers, Hoskins became a personal friend of Lord Beaverbrook and earned a mixture of notoriety and admiration in Fleet Street for the stance he took in his stories. The most noteworthy example being the landmark case of suspected serial killer Dr John Bodkin Adams in 1956, on which Hoskins was the lone voice in Fleet Street not assuming Adams’s guilt.

Initially seen by Beaverbrook as an almost suicidal position for the newspaper to be taking, he phoned Hoskins after Adams was found not guilty by an Old Bailey jury and told him, ‘Two people were acquitted today’ – meaning that Hoskins would keep his job and his reputation. The
Daily Express
was also highly fortunate to have a second-to-none team of crack crime reporters who worked with Hoskins during the 1950s and ‘60s, comprised of Edward Laxton, Arnold Latchman, Rodney Hallworth and Frank Howitt.

The
Daily Express
team first got wind of an escalating number of mail thefts on the London to Brighton main line in the late summer of 1960. The first incident occurred in August and resulted in the loss of £7,500 from nine mailbags. The
Daily Express
reported the following day that three hooded men tied up the guard of the 2.25 p.m. London to Brighton express and escaped with the cash that had been taken from High Value Packets (HVPs) in the mailbags.

Hoskins was a regular passenger on the line, having a weekend home near Brighton, and had good contacts with a number of Sussex police officers. He soon picked up on the second incident the following month, ‘when a train was halted outside Patcham Tunnel, Preston Park, by a rigged signal’. The
Daily Express
report went on to tell readers that, ‘masked bandits over-powered the guard and snatched £9,000 from mailbags’.

By now the Post Office Investigation Branch had become involved and was particularly concerned that the robbers appeared to have a degree of technical know-how in being able to halt trains by manipulating the signals. This is clear from a memo sent by IB controller Clifford Osmond to his Royal Mail security counterparts, Postal Services Department (HMB), on 21 September 1960:

(1)  It was reported last night that a passenger train London to Brighton was brought to a halt by thieves who interfered with the railway signals and who stole six bags of mail containing HVPs valued about £9,000 together with a large number of registered letters. It is alleged that the thieves left the train after attacking the guard and escaped by car which was waiting for them at a predetermined spot.

(2)  The full facts are not yet available but whether or not they turn out to be as stated I am most anxious that urgent attention should be given to a further review of security precautions that are taken generally on each TPO and sorting carriage particularly when the train is brought to a halt (genuine or otherwise) outside a station. The IB is aware that these are overhauled from time to time.

(3)  The IB considers that this exercise could be confined to TPOs and we would be ready to have any discussion on the matter or give any security advice that we might be in a position to offer on TPO routine security measures.
1

Despite such high-level attention, it seems that nothing much in reality was done to review, let alone improve, TPO security on the Brighton line and, in April 1961, the
Express
told its readers of a further audacious robbery not far from the scene of the Patcham Tunnel hold-up, in which, ‘Bandits disguised as railwaymen walked on to the platform at Brighton and got away with a registered bag containing £15,000.’

Bearing in mind that, to the uneducated eye, mailbags containing money in High Value Packets were indistinguishable from regular mailbags, Hoskins became convinced that the men behind these precision raids must have a good deal of knowledge about post office and railway procedures.

A decade before, in May 1952, he had covered the Eastcastle Street robbery with fellow
Express
journalist Tom Clayton, and was sure that it too had resulted from inside information. Someone within the post office must have passed on details to the gang, a view that only hardened when he discovered from a police source that the mail van’s alarm bell had been disabled before it had set out to collect its payload. Returning to the City from London’s Paddington station, where it had collected High Value Packets from the Great Western Region Travelling Post Office, the van had been ambushed in Eastcastle Street by seven masked men in two stolen cars. At the time, the theft of these eighteen mail sacks, containing £287,000 (£6,150,000 in today’s money), was Britain’s largest ever robbery.

While the 1952 hold-up remained officially unsolved, Hoskins was led to believe that the police were reasonably sure who was behind it and knew the identity of the seven masked men. To their extreme frustration, a complete lack of tangible evidence that could be presented in court prevented them from making arrests.

Hoskins’s sources were proved correct five decades later when the extensive investigation files on the Eastcastle Street robbery were finally opened. In a detailed report dated 20 March 1953, Clifford Osmond, then deputy controller of the IB, noted:

Within a day or so Supt. Lee (Flying Squad) told me that as the result of information received he considered that the robbery had been planned and executed by the under mentioned team:

… of the six or seven men who were seen (by witnesses), the under mentioned criminals of the suspect team would fit the descriptions given: -

While the investigation failed to identify the source of the inside information, Osmond addressed the matter of who he believed acted as the link man between the post office insider and the gang:

Inquiry and observation finally proved that Billy Howard is (a) a close associate of Billy Hill; (b) lives in the Walworth area where he meets Billy Benstead who also lives there; (c) was, for a time, running a gambling club in partnership with Billy Hill from the rear of canteen premises used by the Meat Porters Union of Smithfield Market and (d) frequents the Red Cow PH, a pub much used by post office staff. It is significant that PHG’s sent to the LPR School for training in all branches of registered letter work, sometimes use the meat porters’ canteen concerned. Billy Howard was therefore in a position to operate as a ‘contact man’ and I believe he did so.
3

In another IB file on the Eastcastle Street robbery, which contains photographs and extracts from the suspects’ Criminal Record Office (CRO) files, Billy Howard is shown as residing in East Street, Walworth. Sixteen known associates of his are listed, several of whom will enter our story later in this book.
4

While the Eastcastle Street robbery was very much seen as a one-off, these new raids on the Brighton main line seemed to fit a pattern and showed no sign of abating. Indeed, each successive incident seemed to be bolder and more lucrative than the last.

After some months, however, it seemed as though the Brighton line raids had petered out. By the late summer of 1961, the
Daily Express
crime team, and indeed the rest of Fleet Street, had become preoccupied by the police manhunt launched on 23 August for the A6 murderer who had shot dead Michael Gregsten and raped and shot his mistress, Valerie Storie. James Hanratty was eventually arrested and charged; his trial opened at Bedford Assizes on Monday 22 January 1962 amid a flurry of media coverage. In the early hours of Friday 26 January, the day the Hanratty case was adjourned for the weekend, an event occurred that caused the
Daily Express
to prematurely use what would, in a year’s time, become an iconic headline by presumptuously declaring …

A Jesse James-style mail train robbery by moonlight on a lonely stretch of track in Essex failed, it is believed, only because a delayed freight train came along first. The goods train exploded a military-type detonator placed on the line between Colchester and Marks Tey and jolted to an emergency stop. The detonator - the first of 14 found by the driver - was meant for the mail train, police think.

The gang is believed to have been poised to strike, grab mail bags containing thousands of pounds, and escape by car on the A12 London-Ipswich road. Yesterday, police were searching the area of Stanway Woods, alongside the line, for clues. Signalman George Drinkell, on duty at Marks Tey signal box at the time, said: ‘Just after 2.30 am Colchester rang to say the goods train had passed through. But it never reached me. Then I heard from Colchester that the driver had phoned to say he had been stopped by detonators. A few minutes later the train arrived at my box. The driver told me he was very frightened when he stopped the train - he thought he would be coshed as he got out’.