The Great Train Robbery and the Metropolitan Police Flying Squad by Geoff Platt

Author:Geoff Platt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: TRU000000; TRUE CRIME / General
ISBN: 9781473857469
Publisher: Wharncliffe
Published: 2015-03-31T04:00:00+00:00

An Overview

The popular view states that the Great Train Robbery was committed by a gang of clowns, who eventually got their just desserts, and were duly tracked down, arrested, convicted and sentenced to very long prison sentences. However, Detective Inspector Frank Williams, who managed the investigation, under the supervision and tactical direction of his superior, Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, stated in his autobiographical book No Fixed Address that the Great Train Robbery was committed ‘by a highly-trained and well-disciplined gang of men’ and that the enquiry had to work hard in order to achieve ‘the limited degree of success it attained.’ He then went on to explain the reasoning behind his view was that, ‘At least three men who were directly involved are still at liberty and enjoying to the full extent their share of the stolen money.’ So which version is correct?

The Great Train Robbery was exceptionally well conceived, planned and executed, although as with most activities managed by a committee, errors were made when one or two things inevitably went wrong during the execution of the robbery and adjustments had to be made to the plan. This is demonstrated by the fact that when the old man recruited by Ronnie Biggs to move the train was unable to do so they forced the original driver Jack Mills to move it but they allowed him to see the vehicles that they had disguised as military vehicles, so that he reported this to the Police and, as a consequence, the gang were later unable to use the vehicles to leave the farm as they had originally planned. Also, after they had left the farm, the committee failed to monitor that the clean-up that they had commissioned and paid for had been successfully carried out so that the robbers were safe from arrest as a result of their fingerprints being found at the farm. Bruce Reynolds revelled in the nickname of ‘The Colonel’ but an autocratic army officer would have acted swiftly to resolve these issues and only a committee would have allowed these issues to drift in the way that the robbers did.

Frank Williams felt that three robbers escaped justice and that is best assessed by the fact that Roger Cordrey who was arrested just four days after the robbery was found in possession of £141,000 in cash and that he is very likely to have spent some money celebrating his success, so that the shares of each full member of the gang was around £150,000. Eighteen shares of £150,000 would have meant that there was not sufficient money to afford to pay any ‘drinks’ to those who helped the robbers, so it is more likely that there were just seventeen robbers, fourteen of whom were brought to justice.

Williams was also very forward-thinking in believing that it was the squad’s responsibility to assist the insurance loss adjustors to recover as much of the stolen money as possible, a task that did not go well with only a little under £400,000 ever being recovered.

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