SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: How The Great Train Robbery Worked

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Thanks for making it through our True Crime playlist.

We're rounding this one out with a good old-fashioned train robbery for which we head across the pond to visit our friends in the UK.

Back in 1963, one of the all-time great holdups was carried out by a huge gang of men who relieved a British mail train of a massive amount of money, and they did it without guns.

Most of the robbers were eventually caught, but most of the money has never been found.

All aboard for the last episode in our playlist on the Great Train Robbery.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Choo-Choo and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark.

There's Charles W.

Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry.

And you put all of us together with a couple of microphones, a crummy IKEA lamp, and uh

you well.

And a head full of nose juice.

You get stuff you should know.

That's right.

Stuff you should nose juice.

Oh, girl.

Uh how's it going, buddy?

Besides the obvious under-the-weatherness of you.

I predict this is the last one.

Great.

I'm going to be back to good as new by the next time we record.

Yeah, we're going to Vancouver and you'll get some of that good Canadian

air in your body and the pine air.

It's healing properties.

I'll get pine and flannel and lotion like in my face.

And moose.

Yeah.

Moose hair.

Yeah.

That's all.

All that stuff.

If you wat it all into a ball and sniff it,

it takes care of everything.

That's right.

What in the world are we talking about?

I don't know.

We're talking about trains.

That's right.

We're talking about a specific train, Chuck.

We're talking about a specific train at a specific moment and place and time

that all came together to become known as the Great Train Robbery.

That's right.

Did you commission this article?

I did not.

Did you know about it already, Sam?

Yeah, I mean, a little bit, but

not as, like, obviously as much after I researched and watched a couple of documentaries and

was looking for a great, awesome movie, but I don't think there really is a great, awesome movie about this yet.

Which is surprising.

I think they did, like, BBC did one, and I think Sean Connery did one that was loosely, I think other things were loosely based, but.

Like the taking of Pelham 123?

Yes, exactly.

That was a good movie.

Did you

the original, of course?

Yeah.

Did you watch The Tale of Two Thieves?

Is that one of the documentaries you watched?

No, I don't think that's out to the public yet, unless I just haven't seen it.

Okay.

I think it's new this year.

Yeah, it seems like a 2014.

Yeah.

I want to see it.

But there are no shortage of YouTube BBC docs because they love it.

And I learned a lot of new words watching them.

Yeah, like

what?

Oh, like

instead of crooked, someone is bent.

Like a bent solicitor, I figured out was a crooked solicitor.

And a cosh is like a

billy club.

And you can cosh somebody.

Oh, wow.

Like the train conductor was coshed.

Yeah.

Yeah, there were just a bunch of cool terms that I had to kind of figure out what they meant in American.

Gotcha.

In my English.

Yeah.

So

I had heard the words great train and robbery together, but I didn't know anything about it.

I think there was another one, an older great train robbery from the 1800s.

There's one in 1855

where a train traveling from London to Paris, or vice versa, had a bunch of gold bullion on it, and it got hit.

That was legendary.

But apparently this was the biggest train heist since then.

Yeah.

More than 100 years later.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was a big deal.

And it was sort of Jesse James style.

That's why it became

one of the crimes of the century in England for sure.

I mean, it was huge in the press, and these guys that knocked off this train became these kind of weird working-class heroes.

Well, one of them became the symbol for the anti-establishment.

Which one?

What was his name?

The one who made off for years and years.

Oh, yeah.

Biggs.

Yeah,

he was on the lamb for like 30 years, so he was super famous.

Yeah, and they knew where he was, and they couldn't get to him, which we'll talk about, but he

became like this folk hero of the anti-establishment.

He sang vocals on lots of punk records.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, I saw it in both documentaries.

They had a bunch of

on-the-street interviews from the time

with regular upstanding citizens, like, whose side are you on?

And a lot of them were like, well, I feel ashamed to admit this, but I kind of think these guys really took it to the cops on this one.

Yeah.

And they thought they were ingenious.

And

even though the plan, as we'll get to, really was pretty uncomplicated.

Yeah.

It wasn't nearly as clever as it was made out to be.

Right.

Well, let's talk about the plan.

So there was this idea.

Who had the original idea?

I believe his last name was Fields.

He was the guy who originally had the idea and approached several people, criminals, for partnership, and they all turned him down except for this ace safecracker by the name of Goody.

Okay, so Goody had a friend who was his name was Bruce Reynolds, and I guess he

originally funded the whole thing.

Yeah, well, they were in a gang called the Bowler Hat Gang in London, I know, right?

I don't think we've said this.

We've made reference to like the Wild West and train robbers and everything.

This is the 1960s.

Yeah.

Like the early 1960s that this is going on.

Yeah, and the Bowler hat gang was,

they dressed in bowler hats and suits and they had done some crimes and they were mainly career criminals and they actually even

they had the press's attention and they actually tried to rob a train at first but it didn't work so well and they got away and but that they had sort of a not a trial run but they legitimately tried to knock off another train.

So is that when they realized that they needed to expand their rank and file?

Yeah, they realized that we don't know trains and we don't know how to stop them, so we need to get some train guys.

Right, so the Bowler Coast gang, who is, I guess, led by Bruce Reynolds, right?

Yeah, Bowler Hat.

The Bowler Hat

gang, they got with the South Coast gang, I think.

Yeah, the South Coast Raiders.

So they, and this is, I mean, those are some great gang names, by the way.

Totally great.

But the Bowler Hat gang and the South Coast Raiders, who were led by a dude named Buster Edwards, right?

Yeah, and Tom Wisby, he was one of of the main guys, or Wisney, sorry.

So those guys all got together and they said, We've got this great idea.

We need your people

to come help us.

We're going to rob a train.

And not just any train.

There was one specific train that this gang targeted, and for good reason.

It was called the UP Special.

And the UP Special had been running since the 1830s between Glasgow, Scotland, and London, right?

Yeah.

And

it had run every night.

And it was basically like a mail sorting facility on wheels.

Yeah.

Like it was pretty clever.

They thought, well, we'll take all the mail from Glasgow that's going to London and we'll sort it along the way.

So there was 12 cars in the Glasgow special or the up special

and a diesel engine.

So it was a pretty simple train.

Yeah.

And it had run for years and years

without incident.

For like 150, 100, almost 150 years.

Yeah, and it wasn't loaded with guards and cops.

I mean, it was a bunch of postmen, basically.

Which is a really it's really weird then that the the banks would trust their money that were moving from Glasgow to London

to this

postal train.

Yeah.

That had like no security, no armed guards, no no alarms until the early 60s

on the train cars themselves.

But yet every night the banks would empty their their accounts into this train and say, Good luck getting to London.

Like, here's a bunch of huge sacks of money.

We're going to put it on the train, and you're going to sort it along the way.

Exactly.

They had an inside man who, and this is one of those weird stuff you should know things.

You know how there's all these weird correlations in the news?

Right.

I picked out this article two days ago, and two days ago, it was announced who the identity of the inside man was.

Yeah, the last great mystery of this thing from the 60s

was just unraveled like two days ago.

And I didn't even know it at the time.

I found out afterward.

But the code name was Ulster Man, and it was always believed to be someone on the inside of

the train and post industry to give him information like, you know, the train is super loaded on this particular night because of a bank holiday.

And he was named by Gordon Goody as Patrick McKinna.

Yeah, in that documentary, A Tale of Two Thieves, they hand a picture of Patrick McKenna to Goody and say, is that Ulster Man?

And apparently he kind of gets visibly uncomfortable

because he's kept this guy's identity secret.

He was the last person alive

to know who this person was.

There were two other people who knew.

They both died before Goody.

Patrick McKenna died years back.

And there was just this one man who swore he would take the secret to his grave and he named them.

These guys were really good at keeping secrets over the years.

They wore bowler hats, for goodness sake.

So McKenna's family was super surprised to hear all this.

Police never suspected him, and

they basically think that this guy felt bad afterward and never even spent the money and gave it to the Catholic Church, like slowly over the years.

Oh, yeah.

His cut is what the family is saying.

That sounds like an Ulsterman kind of thing to do.

Yeah, you know, Ulste.

Right.

He's a good guy.

Well, before he had his change of heart, he was the inside man that helped the gang figure this out.

Yeah, he actually recommended they change the date to get a bigger take.

Yeah.

And

it worked.

Can you explain this to me?

So a bank holiday.

And it's the same thing here in the U.S.

It's like a day the banks are closed.

They have official bank holidays.

There is a banking act in the U.K.

from the 19th century that designated certain days as bank holidays.

What I don't understand is why is there so much more money the day after a bank holiday?

It's like everybody waited to do their banking business that they would have done on Monday, on Tuesday.

Like, there's so many more people or so many more transactions that didn't get to be done on that Monday that were carried out on the Tuesday that that's why there's so much more money.

I don't know.

Maybe it's that

because of the holiday, they didn't

do their deposits and

make the money leave the bank like they normally would, so it was compounded.

I guess.

So there was like double the amount of money as usual because they didn't do their drop on the holiday or something.

Yeah, but they didn't conduct any business on the holiday, so there wouldn't have been more money to accumulate than usual.

You know what I'm saying?

Well, if it came after a weekend, though, maybe it was like all of that weekend's deposits had gathered up.

Okay.

I don't know.

That's a good question.

Okay, the point is, is that...

There's a lot more money than usual.

A lot more.

Usually

this train car, the UP special, carried about 300,000 pounds

between Glasgow and London each night.

Yeah.

On this particular night, the night of August 8th, 1963,

which was Thursday, early wee hours of a Thursday,

it was carrying something like 2.6 million pounds, which today in dollars would be worth about 50 million.

I think it's ⁇ I looked that up and it was like double that.

100 million?

Well, yeah, because you're going from 1963 to 2013 and from pounds to dollars.

Yeah.

I might be off, but I got 69 million pounds today or $111 million U.S.

Let's go with that.

That's way better.

Either way, 2.6 million pounds was a ton of money for a high-spec then.

Yeah.

It was like really, really a lot of dough.

Yeah.

Even splitting it among 15 guys.

Yeah, and they didn't even necessarily split it evenly.

There were

the core gang who were carrying this thing out, and they all got even splits, but they're also accomplices in addition to Ulsterman.

There was Mr.

1, Mr.

2, and Mr.

3.

Yeah, and those are their names, so because they were never brought to justice, there were three that just got away with it.

Even though they knew who they were, supposedly, they didn't have evidence to go pick them up.

So like the identities of the three guys that got away, they think they knew who they were the whole time.

Really?

I mean, one of them's named John Weeder, he got away?

I'm not sure.

Was he one of the one, two, or three?

He was, yeah, he was the one who got the safe house for the gang.

Yeah, well, he worked with Fields to get the safe house.

Well, let's back up here.

Okay.

We're so excited.

We're getting ahead of ourselves.

So he mentioned that they recruited another gang that knew how to work with trains, knew how to stop trains.

And what they did was they brought this guy on board who had a this elderly man who was a train driver.

His name was Peter.

And Peter's job, once they stopped the train, was to get it to where the drop point, the exchange point, was in case, you know, because the train stops at the red light, right?

Which they very awkwardly wired the red light to turn on, and they just covered the green light with some gloves, but it worked.

They stopped the train and still needed to get it down the track to the exchange point.

And this old man gets on board and he's like, I don't know how to undo this new handbrake.

Right.

So he was useless.

And so the guy, Biggs, who became this criminal legend for evading the law for so many years, apparently his only job was to find somebody who could drive the train.

And he failed at that time.

And he screwed it up.

So, the guy who was supposed to drive the train got thrown off the train.

And they got the original train engineer, the one whose job it was to actually drive the train under normal circumstances, and made him drive another mile and a half to this bridge.

Yeah, and that was Jack Mills.

And this is a very important detail.

He was, like you said, the conductor.

And

two jumped on the train at the very front there and coshed him, which is smacked him on the head a bunch with this billy club.

I thought it was a crowbar.

Well, it was an iron kosh, which is English for crowbar, I guess.

And

this was a big point because

for a lot of reasons.

One,

it was why the justice ended up coming down so harshly on them because they were apparently way more violent than they needed to be with this guy.

Yeah.

And the public perception of these guys as working-class heroes doesn't jibe with the violence because they weren't, you know, the English still aren't really into violence as a whole.

No, especially if you're the bowler hat gang.

Yeah, like you dressed nicely and you conducted your business, your criminal business, like gentlemen.

Right.

And you didn't need to beat this old guy up.

He was elderly, nearing retirement.

And his family says the robbers still say today that like he wasn't beaten up nearly as bad as they say.

And the family's like, no, he never fully recovered and died of cancer.

But

about seven years later, I think he died of leukemia.

Yeah, but they say he had headaches for the rest of his life and he was just not the same man.

Yeah.

You can't do that to somebody.

You can't do that to someone.

And like you said, that changed absolutely everything.

Goody,

the guy who's really the brains behind this whole operation,

he wrote a book a few years back before he died.

And he said it was either Buster Edwards or a guy named James Hussey, who was the one who caused the poor conductor.

Yeah, and supposedly Hussey, who was brought in as a heavy, as some muscle, supposedly at his deathbed, he said that it was him who coshed the guy.

But there are other people that say, including Jack Mills' son, who said, no, my father told me who it was and it wasn't him.

This guy is just doing that robber thing where you still cover for your people.

So like on his deathbed, he was still trying to cover for the real guy.

And I don't know if we'll ever know for real if it was him or the other dude.

Wow, lying on your deathbed.

Yeah.

That's not okay.

No, that never happens.

Yeah, that's where you're supposed to be the most truthful.

Sure.

Like, yeah, I mean, they take deathbed confessions

as

completely legitimate in court.

Yeah.

That's where you're supposed to look at your wife and say, I never really loved you.

Wow, that's terrible, Chuck.

Could you imagine?

I think that was in a movie once.

You thought it was going to be some tender moment, and he was like, I never really loved you.

I think I know what you're talking about, the War of the Roses, where they're both laying there dying and Michael Douglas goes to put his arm around Kathleen Turner.

That's what I think of it.

It's a great movie.

No, I don't think anybody's done that.

Okay.

So Roger Cordry is the guy's name who came up with the idea to fix these train signals.

And he was an associate of Buster Edwards.

And if you had ever seen the movie Buster with Phil Collins?

Oh, is that who it's about?

That's who it's about.

Oh, yeah.

Sort of like a working-class

criminal.

Like criminals back then were kind of revered in certain circles in England.

It's weird.

Two hearts

beating in just one mind.

Was that from that movie?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Great song.

All right.

So after this break,

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So, Chuck,

we've got the Bowler Hat gang and the South Coast Raiders coming together for one huge heist that's worth about $100 million in today's money.

Yeah, or half that.

They're hitting the up special, just this crotchety old 12-car train moving along through the night from Scotland to London, right?

Yeah.

And so the gang messes with the lights.

Yeah.

They put a glove around the green light and manage to turn on the red light so the train comes to the stop.

They all board the train.

Yeah.

They hit the conductor over the head.

Huge mistake.

Yeah.

They bring on the guy who's supposed to drive the train, find out he can't drive the train, throw him off, stand the conductor back up, probably give him a handkerchief for his head, and say, we need you to drive this another mile and a half to the drop point, which is called Bridigo Bridge.

Yeah, was it like a bridge overpass?

Uh-huh.

And the guy does that, and they start offloading the loot.

Yeah, they got 120 of the 128 sacks of cash money onto,

they had this uh big lorry and a couple of land rovers yeah could could it be could this be any more stylish yeah it was pretty cool they had land rovers as getaway cars yeah it was pretty cool um you see why people bought into all this stuff and thought it was cool because i think it's cool right now yeah um

and so what they did they had prearranged a hideout and this was fields' job as well was he bought this farm and farmhouse leather slade farm right yeah to and it was sort of ingenious but ended up screwing them in the end because the idea was within 30 minutes of this robbery, they have effectively disappeared off the face of the earth.

Well, they stopped the train and got it to the bridge and offloaded more than a ton of money.

Yeah, two tons, I think.

Two and a half tons of money in 15 minutes.

Yeah, and they were back in their hideout in another 15.

So by the time this thing was reported, they were gone and in this farmhouse, like with the windows shut and the shades drawn.

Okay.

But that also kind of screwed them because before they left the train, they said, all right, no one moves for 30 minutes.

And so the cops hear this and they went, oh, well, they're probably within a 30-mile radius then.

And so they put this out on the news.

We know that they're within a 30-mile radius and we're going to start canvassing the area.

They get word of this.

They're within 28 miles and they go, well, crap.

They're going to find us.

And they also said it was sort of a city boy's move to think you can hide out in the country like that.

And this one guy in the documentary was like, nah,

out in the country, you get noticed.

Right.

If you're 15 guys in a farmhouse.

That was their undoing.

A neighbor said, there's a lot more people at this old, rambling old farm.

And they're all wearing bowler hats for some reason, or at least half of them are.

There's something fishy going on.

So

when the word got out that this train had been hit, this guy came forward and said, you guys should go check this farm out.

Well, the guys weren't only at this farm for the half hour after the heist.

They'd been there for like eight days waiting for the day to come, getting ready, eating things that required ketchup, playing Monopoly.

Yeah.

Played a lot of Monopoly with their real money.

Yes.

They thought that was just a fun thing to do.

Hilarious.

And they did go to the trouble of wiping down a lot of the stuff, but they left a lot of stuff behind, including the Monopoly game, including the ketchup ketchup bottle, and a lot of other stuff that had prints on it.

Well, yes, because Fields was supposed to get a guy to go torch the place.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

I was like, why wouldn't you just burn the place down?

That was the plan, and apparently the guy never did it.

And they ended up getting out of there a few days early.

They left five days into it because they obviously heard the news that they were canvassing the area.

So they left quicker than they wanted to.

And, like you said, left a lot of stuff behind because they thought it was going to be torched.

Their plan was to lay low there for for a few days.

Yeah, to keep laying low.

But when they found out they were basically making their way to them little by little, they got the heck out of Dodge.

Well, that probably kept them from getting caught sooner.

Yeah.

But

so the public is being treated to this incredibly daring train heist.

These people got away without a trace for at least the first week.

Finally, within a week,

this Leather Slade Farms has been identified as the place where these guys were hiding out.

Yeah, they found the trucks.

And they got at least one person within eight days of

the heist.

Yeah.

And all of a sudden, people start falling.

There's 15 people.

And on the case is called the Flying Squad, who are like the best of the best that Scotland Yard has to offer to combat these.

Some of the best of the best criminals that Great Britain had to offer at the time.

Yeah, Chief Superintendent Detective Tommy Butler was the head of the flying squad.

And like you said, this was so sensational because it was the top robbers and the top cop.

It was, I guess, sort of like the Elliott Ness of the day going after Al Capone.

It was just a huge story.

And like you said, they started getting nicked one by one.

And

it came out later that there was an informant by the name of Mickey Kehoe, supposedly, Scotland Yard said this guy, Mickey Kehoe, was telling us all about it because it was well known within the criminal underground, like what was going on,

and started naming names, although the robbers to this day still say, nah, it wasn't Mickey Kehoe.

We know that guy.

He didn't even know us that well.

He wasn't giving up names.

Yeah.

But I don't know.

Scotland Yard says he was, so I don't see why they'd make that up.

I could see them making it up to protect somebody else, especially if they didn't like Mickey Kehoe and the way he looked.

That's true, but you're right.

They started to go down one by one.

There was a pretty short list of people who they thought it was.

It wasn't like some great mystery.

Plus, once they started peeling away one and catching one here or there, others started falling.

Did anyone who was caught name names?

Did you get that impression?

No,

most of them were pretty tight-lipped.

In fact, one guy, Charlie Wilson, he was the treasurer of the gang.

They called him the silent man because he literally said nothing.

He just didn't speak at all during the trial.

Right.

He went on to become become a U.S.

congressman who waged a proxy war against Russia and Afghanistan in the 70s.

I don't think so.

I think that's a different Charlie.

Different Charlie?

Okay.

Tom Hanks.

Yeah, right.

So

consider this from the public's point of view.

There's a staring robbery, right?

Words getting out.

Within a week, you got your first guy caught, but there's still tons more people on lamb, which gave the press tons of fodder.

They had so much to write about.

There was a capture of one of the guys that involved involved rooftops.

Like the guy was running and jumping from roof to roof with the police in chase, you know.

And finally, by August, all these guys are rounded up.

12 of the 15, I think, were rounded up.

Yeah.

And they started to stand trial in January.

They were caught.

They're being quiet.

The public is just totally in awe.

And finally, this trial starts.

And right out of the gate, the judge found out that Biggs had a criminal past, so he shouldn't be tried with the rest of them because it could taint the jury

against all these other guys unfairly.

So Biggs got spun off to his own trial, and these guys stood trial.

The other four or the other 11,

no, 10 of them stood trial.

One of them managed to have a lawyer.

He was there because his prints were on the catch-up, no, the Monopoly game.

Yeah, there were prints on ketchup and Monopoly and pots and pans.

And some of the guys wore gloves the entire time, and they were smart ones, yeah.

But Biggs was the one.

Remember, Biggs' one job was to bring the train engineer, and

he screwed that up.

Yeah, his prints were on the ketchup bottle, so he screwed that up too.

But

there was another guy whose prints were on the Monopoly game, and his lawyers managed to show that those could have gotten there long before the crime, yeah, and that it didn't necessarily mean he had anything to do with it.

He got set

he was acquitted during this trial.

Yeah, he was the only lucky one.

Everybody else had the book thrown at them.

Yeah.

I mean, there was a lot of them were saying that they cooked up a bunch of evidence because they knew it was them, but they just didn't have the evidence.

So

the big lorry truck they had painted hastily painted yellow.

And

the goodie, one of the main, you know, two guys, was...

Supposedly, some of his evidence was that they found yellow paint on a shoe.

And he was like, I didn't paint in those shoes.

And it was funny because years later he's like, oh, I did it.

And yeah, I painted that truck yellow, but I wasn't wearing those shoes.

They planted that evidence.

Isn't that right?

Yeah, and apparently there was false confessions.

There was another great British word for that.

I can't remember what they called it.

Chabadaba.

Chaber dabbing.

False confessions were big at the time in England, and there was a lot of reports from these robbers that they were using false confessions and planning evidence.

And again, even though they did it, they were like, yeah, but if you don't have evidence, you can't convict this.

All right.

So I don't think we'll ever know if they cooked up some of this evidence or not.

Well, there was one guy named Boll, William Boll.

Poor guy.

He apparently had nothing to do with it.

He received money in payment from a debt,

I think, that Goody owed him.

No, it was Biggs.

Oh, Biggs!

Biggs again!

He was a friend of Biggs, and when he got out, helped him kind of lay low, but he had nothing to do with the robbery.

He got 14 years.

No, I'm sorry, it was Cordry.

It wasn't Biggs.

Okay, Cordry.

I know, I feel bad for Biggs.

We're just dragging his name through the mud.

Yeah.

But it was Rob Cordry.

It wasn't Rob Cordry.

It was his dad.

It was his great-grandfather, Cordry.

And he

was Bull's friend.

He helped him lay low, and he went.

Cordry was actually the first one to get.

get pinched because he and Bull helped him rent a garage and they paid in like the same banknote bills for like three months in advance in cash and the lady said eh this is a little suspicious turned him in Bull got wrapped up and because all these guys were saying we're innocent they couldn't come out and say well he really is innocent right so they kind of had to take this guilt with them to prison so Boll got 14 years for doing nothing really yeah and for just basically knowing the wrong guys and hanging out with the wrong guys he died in prison

I'm not laughing because it's just tragic.

It is tragic.

So, his family's trying to mount a campaign now to get a posthumous pardon, at least.

Yeah, but

he and the guy who got hit over the head, the conductor, are really the two big victims in all of this.

Yeah, and one of them, there was only one guy that

turned in his cut of the money and actually pleaded guilty out of the rest.

That was Cordry, I think.

Yeah, that was Cordry.

So, even

he says, yes, I did it.

Here's my 80 grand.

The guy who he associated with still got 14 years.

And died in jail.

Yeah, that's so sad.

So you'll notice that we're talking about 12 of the 15.

Biggs, by the way, after he stood trial separately, was also found guilty and got things like

these guys were getting like 20 years, 30-year sentences.

This is enormous sentences for this train robbery.

Yeah, generally 30, which was double the harshest penalties for robbery that they've ever seen.

Right, which is really strange because the judge in the case

had actually reduced another robber in a completely separate robbery

where a man had been shot and killed during the commission of the robbery.

Oh, wow.

Someone who was involved in that robbery had his sentence reduced from 15 years to 10 years

because that judge thought it was excessive.

That same judge was handing out 30-year sentences to these guys where no one got killed.

Yeah, that was Justice Edmund Davies.

I think because it was such a high-profile case, he felt he could make his name.

Had to be.

So

he was making his name, though, against public sentiment because a lot of people were

very much

saw these guys as folk heroes, none more, though, than Biggs.

And the reason why Biggs was a folk hero was because he evaded capture so long.

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All right, so

some really interesting things happened after they were sentenced.

Charlie Wilson escaped prison,

which was pretty cool.

A couple of them escaped prison.

And the way that it was very cute how you could escape prison back then, like, let's put a ladder by the fence and climb up and jump over into a truck and speed away.

It turns out that the Benny Hill show was basically a docudrama

at the time.

Another one escaped when he, I think he had some guys infiltrate the prison and help him escape.

Yeah, in a furniture truck.

Yeah.

That was Biggs, I think.

Yeah, it was a lot easier to escape prison back then.

And some of these were maximum security for what it's worth, you know?

Yeah, well, yeah, one of them was Britain's version of Alcatraz, they say, Wandsworth prison.

And Biggs escaped from there.

When he escaped and went on the lamb,

he went to Australia and then eventually moved on to Brazil.

But first, he stopped off at one of the worst human beings to ever walk the planet's office, the very same cosmetic surgeon

who redid the faces of Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of World War II.

Really?

Yes.

That's who his plastic surgeon was.

Yes.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So Biggs got his face redone a little bit, went to Australia, made it to Brazil, and he had a family in Australia, which he left behind there, and then went on to Brazil, got a girlfriend, and

she was pregnant with their child when

the authorities, the British authorities, found him in Brazil.

And he said, oh, turns out under Brazilian law, you can't extradite the parent of a Brazilian citizen.

Oh, crazy.

So for many, many years, Ronald Biggs lived openly as this felon escapee in Brazil.

And there are things that he couldn't do in Brazil.

Apparently, he couldn't go to bars.

He couldn't be out after 10 p.m.

He couldn't associate with

anybody with a criminal record or anything like that.

But he wasn't imprisoned by the Brazilian authorities, and he couldn't be extradited to Great Britain, which drove Great Britain crazy.

Oh, I'm sure.

And there was this one very famous detective who was on this case, who made his own name.

His name was Jack Slipper.

Yeah, I get the feeling that he and

Biggs, it was sort of like the les Miserables, like Jean-Valjean.

You know, they had this lifelong pursuit.

Smoking in the bandit.

Sure.

Yeah.

It's a very old story.

Yeah, it is.

And Biggs and Jack Slipper were

playing it out in real life, so much so that Jack Slipper in 1974 showed up on Biggs' doorstep, I guess, just to rattle him, just to say, I know where you are and I can get to you.

And Biggs said, yeah, but you really can't do anything to me.

Yeah, and some of the other guys evaded police for a little while for a number of years, but I think by 1969, they were all caught except for the three that they couldn't finger with good evidence.

Yeah.

But even the main mastermind was able to evade the police for four or five years.

I think he went down to Mexico.

Buster.

He turned himself in after living on the lamb for three years.

Yeah, and Bruce Reynolds, I think he was on the lamb for a while too.

Yeah, he got caught in Canada, I think.

One of the guys,

well, I guess it was Bruce Reynolds.

When he changed his name when he went on the lamb, he changed his family's last name to Firth.

Oh, really?

And he had a wife and son.

Colin?

He changed his son Nick's name to Colin Firth.

Shut up.

Is that the guy?

No, no.

Oh.

Totally coincidental.

Okay.

I thought you were going to say that.

Wouldn't that be amazing if Colin Firth was the son of Bruce Reynolds and it was all an alias that he turned into a stage name?

That would be awesome, actually.

So one of the the fun things that the the prime minister tried to do because he was so upset about this was uh he tried to at one point or he didn't try to he had the idea to reissue every banknote in england so their money would no longer be good so from what i understand and they were like yeah you can't do that i from what i understand uh most of the money was never recovered yeah 400 grand out of the 2.6 million was recovered right so there there was a lot of that out there still oh yeah But apparently England went to a different type of decimal currency by like 1970, I think.

And that means that that money that was out there automatically became worthless.

Well, apparently they laundered it pretty quickly afterward.

So I don't know how much that affected them.

Okay.

Like through bookies and

stuff like that, they made it new money.

However,

all of the robbers ended up saying, like,

even if they got their cut, like, it was a curse and they didn't live this rich lifestyle in Mexico and Spain.

Like, a bunch of them moved to these places

and served shorter sentences because I think parole was brought in after they were sentenced.

It wasn't even like a thing in England until then.

Right.

But retroactively, they were able to get out in, like, you know, 10 or 14 years.

And then, you know, supposedly had some of this money still hidden away.

But most of them ended up like one guy committed suicide.

One guy died in in a medical trial

that he signed up for.

One guy was murdered.

Yeah, by a hitman on a bike in Spain.

Yeah, so like most of them have these awful sort of ending stories, and they didn't live that out like sexy beast, like Ray Winstone on the Spanish Riviera.

Yeah.

I think some of that might have been influenced by some of that movie might have been influenced by it.

A lot of Great Britain's love of gangsters was influenced by these guys.

Yeah, they were definitely looked up to, and

it's pretty interesting.

I've got a little more on Biggs, the ballot of Biggs

of Biggsy.

So he, I mean, he really is like a folk hero

against anti-est with anti-establishment types in the UK,

in part because he was, you know, living openly in the face of, you know, British authority.

And it irked the British enough that a group of ex-British ex-British military in 1981 kidnapped him from Brazil and put him on a boat and got as far as Barbados where they had boat trouble.

Wow.

And they were picked up by the Barbadan authorities.

And it turns out Barbados doesn't have an extradition treaty with the UK either.

So he got sent back to Brazil.

And supposedly, these ex-military were saying that they planned on, I guess, getting some sort of reward from the British crown for bringing this guy back.

But it's also been supposed that that was actually a plausible deniability cover that it was actually like the British really tried to have this guy kidnapped.

That wouldn't surprise me.

Yeah.

He finally turned himself in and died in 2009, but he turned himself in in like 2000.

He started having like

failing health.

So he's like, I guess I'll go live out my life in jail for some reason.

And I think he went to like an old man's hospital jail.

Back in the UK.

And not all of them met

gross, untimely demises.

know, several of them just kind of retired or went back to their work as florists.

And

just sort of retired with their family in Sussex or London or sort of around England.

But apparently none of them

got rich off this, or they're not talking if they did.

Yeah.

Still.

Well,

Goods wrote a book.

So there you go.

There you have it.

If you want to know more about the Great Train Robbery, a great place to start is the search bar at howstuffworks.com.

And since I said said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this horse milk.

In our animal domestication podcast, we talked about horse milk, and I can't remember what I said.

I probably said it was gross or something.

Oh, I think we said like we want to hear from people who've had it.

And I figured we'd hear from a couple people, but I'm blown away by how many people have had a brush with horse milk.

A lot of people liked it, too.

This is not one of them.

Hey, guys, just listen to the podcast on animal domestication.

I wanted to tell tell you about the revolting drink called Kumis from Kazakhstan.

That's K-U-M-I-S.

Milakumis.

Milakumis.

It is similar to the more familiar product, Kiefer,

which we talked about that in something else, right?

Yeah, that's like

it's like Balki's version of sour milk.

It's Bulgarian, I think.

Yeah, he said it's made from horse milk.

Because horse milk has more natural sugars than cow, sheep, or goat milk, kumis ends up being mildly alcoholic after fermentation.

Crazy.

Imagine the sourness of raw yogurt mixed with the bite of a shot of vodka.

Whoa.

And round it all out with the disgusting tang of horse milk and you've got kumis.

Well, I don't understand that last part.

Like, I don't have anything to equate that with.

Horse milk.

Vodka check.

Sour, like, fermented yogurt.

But you don't know that disgusting tang.

No.

And I want to know now.

You know, in Toronto, when I was there, my friend Chris from Let's Drink About It ate horse meat.

Like in front of you?

No, I was supposed to go out to dinner with him, but I was sick.

And after we recorded, they went out, and the next day he was like, dude, they ate horse meat yesterday.

I went.

Did they go to IKEA?

No, they went to one of those adventurous restaurants.

And I was like, Josh would have been all over that, but not me.

No, thank you.

Yeah.

You'd eat horse meat, right?

You'd try it out.

Probably.

But not horse milk.

Only if the horse died of old age.

So Greg says, I drank it.

Well, that's what they said.

They supposedly all of them, they're called, what do you call them?

Barbarians.

Something horses, like

old dead horses?

No, basically they were horses that died of natural causes.

They called them like

senior horses?

No, like...

Golden Age horses?

No.

There's a word.

There's a lot of words.

I can say them all.

So Greg drank it in Kazakhstan, and he said it was served in a bowl, what he would describe as a bowl.

You get cocktail peanuts like you would get cocktail peanuts in.

Instead of a bowl of peanuts, it's a bowl of this disgusting drink.

Wow.

I've lived in the Caucasus for four years now.

I've had my share of questionable foods.

And the only thing I found more disagreeable than a saucer of kumis was a pickled rooster comb.

Oh my gosh.

He said it was all skin and cartilage.

It felt like I was eating an ear.

Wow.

Man, that is from Greg.

That's called using every part of the animal.

Yeah, Greg, you just blew my mind.

Same here, man.

I wish I could think of the horses.

Not like freedom horses, but it was something like freedom horses.

It's a word.

The horses that want you to eat them.

Yeah.

Donor horses?

No.

We'll find out and tell everybody next time, okay?

Yeah.

The essential is they're horses that died of natural causes.

They weren't killed for their meat.

I gotcha.

Yeah.

If you want to let us know about an experience you had that is fascinating or amazing, you can tweet it to us at SYSK Podcast.

You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffy should know.

You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at housetuffworks.com.

And you can hang out with us at our home on the web, the internet clubhouse known as stuffyushouldknow.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

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