The Great Train Robbery (35 page)

ROBERT WELCH

Robert Alfred Welch, you have been convicted on the first and second counts of this indictment. Your
c
ounsel has urged upon me that there is no evidence of any sudden flowing of money into your pockets or as to when you joined the conspiracy or what you actually did. These and all matters urged in mitigation and your antecedents, I have sought faithfully to bear in mind. The sentence of the court upon you is that on the first count you go to prison for 25 years and upon the second count you go to prison for 30 years. Those sentences will be concurrent.

JAMES HUSSEY

James Hussey, you have been convicted on the first and second counts of this indictment. You have previous convictions of gravity, including two involving substantial violence. On the other hand, I accept that as a son you are warm-hearted and it is obvious you have qualities of personality and intelligence which you might have put to very good stead. I balance these and all other matters to the best of my ability and having done so the concurrent sentences that you will serve are, on the first count, 25 years’ imprisonment and on the second count, 30 years.

ROY JAMES

Roy John James, you have been convicted on both the first and second counts. You are the only one out of the accused in respect of whom it has been proved that you actually received a substantial part of the stolen moneys. On your arrest you still had in your possession over £12,000 which I have no doubt was the result of exchange out of the original stolen moneys received by you. I entertain no doubt that the original sum you received substantially exceeded that figure. Your record in the past is a bad one and corrective training seems to have done you little or no good. Yet you have ability of a kind which would have assured you an honest livelihood of substantial proportion; for in a very short space of time you had, as your learned Counsel has said, brilliant and meteoric success as a racing driver. I strongly suspect that it was your known talent as a driver which enabled you to play an important part in the perpetration of this grave crime. It may be, as you say, that you personally have never resorted to physical violence, but you nevertheless stand convicted of participating with others in armed robbery and for that you must be sentenced. You have told me that you went to Leatherslade Farm knowing you were doing wrong, that you became involved, but not in the robbery, and then ran away. I do not find it possible to differentiate your case from that of most of the other accused. You will accordingly go to prison for concurrent terms of 25 years on the first count and 30 years on the second count.

GORDON GOODY

Douglas Gordon Goody, you have been convicted on the first and second counts of this indictment. You have a bad record, notably with a conviction for grave violence at the early age of 18, and you qualify for preventive detention. Yet, in some respects, you present to this Court one of the saddest problems by which it is confronted in the trial. You have manifest gifts of personality and intelligence which might have carried you far had they been directed to honesty. I have not seen you in Court for the best part of three months without noticing signs that you are a man capable of inspiring the admiration of your fellow accused. In the Army you earned a very good character assessment and it is easy to imagine you becoming, in an entirely honourable role, a leader of your comrades, but you have become a dangerous menace to society.

The Crown have said that they do not consider this criminal enterprise was the product of any criminal master-mind. I do not know that I necessarily agree with the Crown in this respect. I strongly suspect that you played a major role, both in the conspiracy and in the actual robbery. Suspicion, however, is not good enough for me any more than it would be for a jury. It would be, therefore, quite wrong for me to cause my suspicions to lead to imposing upon you any heavier sentence than upon other accused and I shall not do so. You will go to prison for concurrent terms of 25 years on the first count and 30 years on the second.

BRIAN FIELD

Brian Arthur Field, you have been convicted upon count one and count twelve of conspiracy to rob the mail and conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice. Of the righteousness of both verdicts I personally entertain no doubt whatsoever. You had earned an excellent reputation beginning with little original advantages. By a combination of native ability of no mean kind and hard work you had attained a responsible position of a solicitor’s managing clerk. Your strength of personality and superior intelligence enabled you, I strongly suspect, to attain a position of dominance in relation to your employer, John Wheater. I entertain no serious doubt that you are in some measure responsible for the disastrous position in which that wretched man now finds himself, but it is for your own misdeeds and for them alone, that you now have to be sentenced. They are serious enough in all conscience. You are one of the very few convicted persons in this trial of whom it can be said with any degree of certainty what it was that you were able to contribute to the furtherance of criminal ends. Whether it was in your mind or that of Leonard Field or that of some other entirely different person that there originated the idea of acquiring possession of Leatherslade Farm by subterfuge by saying it was wanted for purely honest purposes, I have no satisfactory means of knowing. Whether it was simply a remarkable coincidence that two out of the four bags found in Dorking Woods containing over £100,000 were your property or whether the fact is an indication of your further complicity in the main conspiracy again I have no means of knowing, though naturally I loyally give effect to your vindication by the jury on both the robbery and the receiving charges.

But that you played an essential role in the major conspiracy is clear. Out of that there naturally flowed the later conspiracy to obstruct justice. I have borne in mind your antecedents, as spoken by the police, the contents of the probation officer’s report and all those matters urged upon me by your learned Counsel. You express regret for the position in which you now find yourself and that is understandable. The concurrent sentences of the Court upon you are that on the first count you will go to prison for 25 years and on the twelfth count you will go to prison for 5 years.

LEONARD FIELD

Leonard Dennis Field, you have been convicted on the first and twelfth counts in this indictment. Although you have but one previous conviction, which I ignore, you are a dangerous man. Not only have you perjured yourself repeatedly in this trial to save your own skin but on your own showing at one stage you perjured yourself in an endeavour to ruin the accused, Brian Field. I sentence you not for perjury, but I sentence you solely for conspiracy. How and when you entered the major conspiracy I do not know. Whether you joined it at the instigation of another again I do not know, but an overt act committed by you in pursuance of that conspiracy is established beyond doubt and very important it was.

I cannot agree with your learned Counsel that your part in acquiring possession of Leatherslade Farm may properly be described as a small contribution to the criminal enterprise. On the contrary, it was a vital contribution. Once having joined the major conspiracy, the lesser conspiracy to obstruct justice was a natural outcome. I bear in mind your antecedent history and all those matters urged upon me by your learned Counsel. Having done so I can see no valid grounds for differentiating your case from Brian Field. You will accordingly be sentenced to concurrent terms of 25 years on the first count and 5 years on the twelfth count.

JOHN WHEATER

John Denby Wheater, your case is in many respects the saddest and most difficult of all. You are 42 years old, a married man with heavy family responsibilities and of excellent character up until the present crime. You too served your country gallantly in the war and faithfully in peace. There is no evidence that you have contributed to your present disastrous position by profligate living of any kind. Indeed your standards appear to have been distinctly lower than those of your managing clerk. Yet you, as a solicitor of the Supreme Court, stand convicted under count 12 of conspiring with Leonard Field and your managing clerk to obstruct the course of justice. The jury have acquitted you on the first count and I naturally treat you as having had no knowledge until after the mail train robbery of the criminal purpose for which you had been instructed to secure possession of Leatherslade Farm. Your conviction on the twelfth count establishes, as I interpret the verdict, that at some time after the robbery that criminal purpose became clear to you, as indeed it must have done, and you could then have given the police vital information by identifying Leonard Field as your professional client. A decent citizen would have volunteered to do that very thing whatever his strictly legal obligations must be. Instead, you professed inability to do so. That profession the jury have found was false and I regret to have to say that I have no doubt the verdict of the jury in that regard was right. At that time not a single one of the accused had been identified and, indeed, it was not until some days later that Mrs Rixon picked out Leonard Field. But for that no thanks are due to you. Instead of assisting justice you were obstructing it and that at a time when speed was obviously of vital concern to the forces of law and order. Furthermore, your deliberately obstructive actions clearly sprang from the conspiracy between you and the two Fields. It is in respect of that conspiracy that you must now be sentenced.

Why you participated in it I do not know and you have not told me. You learned Counsel has been able merely to hazard a guess. Whether or not all the facts, if known, would speak in your favour or to your prejudice I have no means of telling and must not speculate, but I am disposed to accept the view that you allowed yourself to be overborne in some manner by your more masterful and able managing clerk. I cannot accept the submission that the fact that the maximum punishment for being an accessory after the fact to felony, with which you were originally charged, is 2 years’ imprisonment, offers a sure guide to the proper sentence for this criminal conspiracy. Such conduct on the part of any citizen is gravely blameworthy. The criminality of it is gravitated when practiced by an officer of the Supreme Court and that fact must weigh heavily against you. On the other hand, I realise that the consequences of your conviction are disastrous both professionally and personally. Bearing in mind all relevant considerations I have come to the conclusion that you must go to prison for 3 years and you will be sentenced accordingly.
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Shocked reactions to these heavy sentences were not only evident in the public gallery but equally among the national and international press representatives who expressed their views the following day.

The
Daily Mail
editorial was a prime example:

People everywhere are puzzled by one glaring contrast. It is this – an evil doer convicted of conspiracy and robbery as in the Train Case can be sentenced to thirty years which, with normal remission, means serving twenty years in prison. But an evil doer convicted of murder and jailed for life is unlikely to serve more than fifteen years. Does this mean that stealing banknotes is regarded as being more wicked than murdering somebody? What is the real purpose of punishment in both cases? To mete out retribution? To deter others? To reform the criminal?
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For once, the Labour-supporting
Daily Herald
(which, five months later would be renamed
The Sun
),
29
found itself in full agreement with the right-wing
Daily Mail
:

Those of the gang sentenced would have got lighter sentences for non-capital murder,
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still lighter for blackmail, infinitely lighter for breaking [a] baby’s legs. Our legal system tends to take a sterner view of crimes against property than crimes against people.
31

The
Daily Herald
also compared the sentences with another headline story on the same day. The Ferranti Company had been exposed for making an unfair profit of more than £4 million from a government missile contract. The irony was given full vent by the paper’s cartoonist Belsky, who showed a father telling his son after reading the newspaper, ‘Well, that shows crime doesn’t pay – Government missiles – that’s what you want to go in for.’
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The
Daily Telegraph
took a different view of the sentences and focused on the deterrent issue:

Another interpretation is that killers are thought less susceptible to deterrence than thieves – a view maintained by many experts of crime. Certainly the learned judge made it clear that his severity was aimed at striking fear into the heart of the criminal world by making the penalty match the exorbitance of the offence.
33

The liberal-leaning
Guardian
’s editorial declared that: ‘... the sentences are out of proportion with everything except the value of the property involved’.
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Probably the most telling comments were made by DCI Frank Williams, when interviewed by a BBC reporter following the sentencing:

BBC Reporter: What do you think would have happened if Leatherslade Farm had been, as they put it, ‘cleaned up’ - do you think you’d have actually caught anybody?

DCI Frank Williams: The job would have been very, very much more difficult of course because you know by the trial we depended to a very, very great extent on what clues were left at the farm. The mistake they made of course was not getting away straight away and by staying at the farm leaving the clues they did, which led to the eventual arrests.
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Notes

  
1
.  POST 120/95 (closed until 2001; opened 2002).

  
2
.  POST 120/95 (closed until 2001; opened 2002), MEPO 2/10571 (still closed at time of writing) and MEPO 2/2/10575 (still closed at time of writing).

  
3
.  See note 2; Black died on 9 March 1964. Two months later, William Goodwin too died suddenly of a heart attack while staying at Endelstowe.