The Great Train Robbery: The Man History Forgot to Feel Sorry For
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- 7 min read
Bruce Reynolds called it his Sistine Chapel. Ronnie Biggs got a folk hero's send off. Buster Edwards got a film named after him and a flower stall by Waterloo station. Sixty years on, the Great Train Robbery still gets talked about like a caper, a bit of cheeky British villainy pulled off by a gang of lovable rogues who outsmarted the establishment. There's just one problem with that story. It leaves out the man they nearly killed.
A very ordinary night shift
On the night of 7 to 8 August 1963, 58 year old Jack Mills was doing a job he'd done thousands of times before. He'd taken over the Glasgow to London Travelling Post Office train at Crewe, his hometown, and was easing it south through the dark towards Euston. Nothing about that shift should have been remarkable. Post Office trains like this one ran the same route most nights, carrying registered mail and a fair bit of cash, usually somewhere around £300,000. Because of a bank holiday weekend in Scotland, this particular train was carrying closer to £2.6 million, and somebody had found out about it. The tip came from a mysterious source the gang only ever knew as the Ulsterman, whose real identity has never been confirmed.
Just after 3am, as the train passed Leighton Buzzard, Mills saw a red signal ahead at a spot called Sears Crossing. He did exactly what any driver would do and brought the train to a stop. The signal was fake, rigged with a glove over the green light and a six volt battery wired to the red one, the sort of trick that only works if you know precisely which train is coming and when. His co-driver, David Whitby, climbed down to phone the signalman and found the lineside cables had been cut. As he turned back towards the train, he was grabbed by two men waiting in the dark and thrown down the embankment.
The moment the gang's plan nearly fell apart
This was meant to be a fifteen man operation run with almost military precision. One member uncoupled the engine and the first two carriages from the rest of the train, while the gang's own replacement driver, a retired railwayman brought along specifically for this job, was supposed to take over and drive the shortened train the half mile down the line to Bridego Bridge, where the rest of the gang and their vehicles were waiting. That was the plan, and it fell apart almost immediately. The substitute couldn't get to grips with the newer diesel locomotive's controls, and with the clock running, the whole operation started to wobble.
Mills, dazed and bleeding from being struck with an iron bar, was the only person on that embankment who actually knew how to move the train. So the gang put him back in the driver's seat. A man who'd just been beaten around the head was made to drive the very train that was being robbed, because the robbery simply didn't work without him. Once the train reached Bridego Bridge, the gang formed a human chain and passed around 120 mailbags down the embankment to their waiting Land Rovers and an army truck. The whole operation, from stopping the train to driving away with the money, took around 25 minutes.
Playing Monopoly with real money
The gang's hideout was Leatherslade Farm, a remote farmhouse in Buckinghamshire bought under a false name by the gang's fixer. The plan was to lie low there for a couple of weeks while the search died down, then slip away separately once things had gone quiet. For the first day or two it must have felt like the whole thing had worked. They counted out the money, with full shares reportedly coming to somewhere around £150,000 each, and settled in with beer, cigarettes and blacked out windows. At some point somebody produced a Monopoly set and the gang played it using real stolen banknotes instead of the game's own paper money, which is either the most British detail in the entire story or the most reckless, depending on how you look at it.
Before leaving the train, one of the gang had told the terrified Post Office staff to stay put for half an hour before raising the alarm, which gave detectives an important clue once they started working the case. If the gang needed that half hour of head start, the thinking went, their hideout was probably within roughly thirty minutes' drive of the crossing. A local farm worker grew suspicious of the new tenants at Leatherslade, who'd paid well over the asking price and covered every window, and he tipped off the police. When officers finally called at the farm five days after the robbery, the gang had already fled in a hurry after hearing a radio report, wrongly as it turned out, that police were searching farmhouses across a thirty mile radius rather than thirty minutes.
What the gang left behind amounted to a written confession. The Land Rovers were still there. So were sleeping bags, food, post office sacks, banknote wrappers, and that Monopoly board, all of it covered in fingerprints and palm prints. An associate had been hired to burn the farmhouse and destroy the evidence and simply never did it. One detective later described the scene as one big clue. It didn't take long for names to follow from there.
Years spent running, and what it cost
Most of the gang were rounded up within months and handed sentences totalling more than 300 years between them. Ronnie Biggs got 30 years, and 15 months into that sentence he scaled a wall at Wandsworth prison with a rope ladder and dropped into a waiting furniture van. What followed was 36 years on the run, first through France, Australia and Panama, then more than three decades in Brazil, where he couldn't legally work but lived comfortably off his own notoriety, selling t shirts, giving paid interviews, and even recording a track with the Sex Pistols. He avoided extradition for years partly through legal argument and partly because he fathered a son with a Brazilian woman, which under Brazilian law protected him as the parent of a citizen. By the time failing health finally brought him home in 2001, decades of running and a bit of plastic surgery along the way had eaten up most of what he'd taken from that train.
Bruce Reynolds, generally regarded as the gang's chief planner, lasted five years on the run through Mexico and Canada before he was finally tracked down and brought back to face ten years in prison. Buster Edwards fled too, and eventually came home to serve his time before ending up running that flower stall near Waterloo, which later became the basis for a fairly sympathetic film. Charlie Wilson escaped from Winson Green prison in 1964 and spent four years free in Canada before being caught. Piece by piece, over years and sometimes decades, almost the whole gang eventually paid some price for it, even if the price often looked more like a great story than a real punishment by the time the newspapers had finished with it.
The man who never really recovered
Jack Mills didn't get a getaway, a hideout story, or a memoir. He got headaches that never properly went away, and a body that couldn't cope with the job he'd spent his working life doing. He tried to go back to driving trains but his health kept breaking down, and he retired in 1967, four years after the robbery. He died in 1970 from leukaemia, and while doctors at the time couldn't officially tie the illness to the beating, his family always believed the trauma and the injuries had worn him down long before his time was up. He was 64.
He did get some recognition eventually, just a lot later than seems fair. In December 2014, more than fifty years after the robbery, a locomotive at Crewe station was named Driver Jack Mills in his honour. It's a nice gesture, but it sits oddly next to the newspaper column inches, TV dramatisations and pop culture affection the robbers themselves collected in the meantime, right up to Ronnie Biggs turning his own notoriety into a small industry of t shirts and paid photographs.
Why the gang got remembered as loveable rogues
Part of it is timing. The robbery landed right in the middle of the era of the Kray twins and the rise of a certain kind of British criminal mythology, where gangsters mixed with actors and aristocrats and the tabloids couldn't get enough of them. Part of it is the sheer scale of the haul, which at the time was the biggest robbery Britain had ever seen and still sounds enormous today. And part of it is simply that nobody was shot. It's easy to file a crime away as a caper when the worst of it happens off camera, to one man, on a railway embankment, in the middle of the night, while the rest of the story plays out as a decades long game of cat and mouse across three continents.
But Mills didn't experience it as a caper. He experienced it as the worst night of his life, followed by years of declining health and an early death that his family never stopped connecting to that iron bar. The gang got books, biopics, Monopoly boards in police museums and a strange kind of folk hero status that outlived most of them. Jack Mills got a locomotive named after him five decades too late. If the Great Train Robbery deserves to be remembered as anything, it's worth remembering it as both things at once, the audacious heist and the ordinary man who paid for it.
