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犯罪與劫案
1963年8月8日 · 白金漢郡萊德伯恩附近的布里德戈橋
搶劫與盜竊狀態: 已偵破
詳細檔案目前僅提供英文版本。
圖片: Spborthwick · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
£ 2,6 mlntaken in used banknotes (1963)
The night mail train from Glasgow to London carried high-value consignments in a separate carriage, including used banknotes that banks were sending back to London. After a bank holiday weekend the load was exceptionally large. A gang of fifteen led by Bruce Reynolds obtained information about the train from an insider who has never been identified and prepared the raid for months.
In the early hours of 8 August 1963 the gang covered a green signal and lit the red one with a battery, so that the train stopped at Sears Crossing in Buckinghamshire. The driver, Jack Mills, was struck on the head with a bar and never fully recovered. The robbers uncoupled the front carriages, drove them to a bridge further on and transferred 120 mailbags in a quarter of an hour.
The gang hid at Leatherslade Farm, a remote farmhouse some twenty-five miles away. When the police found it a few days later the robbers had left, but they had left fingerprints behind, among other places on a Monopoly set. Within a few months most of the gang had been arrested. In 1964 seven of them were sentenced to thirty years in Aylesbury.
The heavy sentences caused debate, and two of the convicted men escaped: Charlie Wilson in 1964 and Ronnie Biggs in 1965. Biggs lived in Brazil for decades and returned to England voluntarily in 2001. Most of the money has never been recovered. The robbery was often romanticised in films and books, while the violence against the driver long remained underexposed.