After departing London at 7.20pm on August 31, 1943, a train stopped off in Glasgow before making its way up to Inverness - it was here that a theft was discovered, with over £6000 of banknotes and jewellery missing from the mail bags.
When workers moved the mail bags, with many of the packages addressed to Glasgow, they noticed the seals had been opened and the bags were rifled through. The money stolen amounted to £5170 in Bank of England £1 notes, and jewellery amounting to £1000.
It was unclear to police exactly where the robbery had taken place, though there were some clues. The Scotsman told readers on September 10: “A few miles north of Crewe the train was brought to a standstill by someone pulling the communication cord in a lavatory.
“It is thought that this was a ruse to enable the robbers to leave the train with their haul, or to allow them to obtain access to the mail van. The train was held up for nearly half-an-hour.”
The mail van was detached from the train later in the journey, and was brought into Glasgow where the theft was uncovered. Police asked any passengers who saw suspicious activity to come forward, though the criminals in this case were never brought forward.
In an edition of the Sunday newspaper John Bull from October 1943, an article warned of a ‘super criminal’ with an army of willing agents across the country with the headline: “Men with guns rob our trains.”
It continued: “Scotland Yard officers are convinced of it. So are the police chiefs of many leading provincial forces.
“Wholesale robbery, organised on the most elaborate and perfected lines, and affecting almost every phase of commercial life, has increased during the last year or so.”
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Since January of 1943, over 9,000 serious robberies and thefts had taken place. One criminal, John Webster Palmer, was brought in by police for conspiracy in mail-bag thefts from trains.
It took police in Glasgow, Liverpool, Sheffield and Carlisle to bring him down. They discovered he had several associates, who were well trained in unlocking train doors and maneuvering their robberies.
The crime wave of train robberies slowly died out, until the Great Train Robbery of 1963. On an overnight train from Glasgow to London, £2.6 million was stolen by a gang of 15 gang members.
The group successfully tampered with the lineside signals to bring the train to a stop at Bridego Bridge, then forced the workers to lie on the ground as they formed a chain to carry the packages into a waiting truck. In 2013, the events were made into a two-part series for BBC one - detailing the robbery and subsequent arrest of many of the perpetrators.
Ronnie Biggs, one of the criminals, was jailed for the role he played in the robbery - subsequently escaping from prison and having plastic surgery before moving abroad. In 2001, when he eventually returned to Britain, he was arrested though was freed in 2009 on ‘compassionate grounds’.
In 2014, the Daily Record reported that former Glasgow gangster Ian ‘Blink’ MacDonald had travelled to London to chat to Ronnie. Ian asked Ronnie if the renowned Glasgow ganglord Arthur Thompson was behind the Great Train Robbery.
In his old age, Biggs was unable to speak but wrote on a board: “I might be dying, but I’m not a grass.”
