Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain by Alan Brooke, David Brandon Read Free Book Online Page A

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