World: The Cheddington Caper

A Royal Mail train pulled out of Glasgow one night last week, bound for London’s Euston station, 401 miles to the south. Aboard were 70 employees of the General Post Office, locked into twelve maroon-colored coaches, each bearing the royal coat of arms and the royal cipher, E R II. As they sped along at 80 m.p.h., the postal clerks busily sorted letters from hundreds of mailbags scooped up from gantries en route. In the “High Value” coach right behind the diesel locomotive, five particularly experienced sorters were on duty, sealed into their car with a pre cious cargo of $7,145,600 in bank notes, many of them old bills destined to be taken out of circulation — though not as it actually happened.

Trackside Blur. Two hours before dawn, as the Royal Mail hurtled through sleeping Buckinghamshire, Engineer Jack Mills, 57, saw a red signal at Sears Crossing. Mills halted the train and Fireman David Whitby, 26, swung down from the cab, went to the track-side telephone to find out what was wrong. He saw that the wires were cut and, turning, spotted a man between the second and third coaches. “What’s up, mate?” asked Whitby, and the next moment he was grabbed from behind, warned, “If you shout, I’ll kill you.”

Two other robbers smashed their way into the engine cab and knocked Engineer Mills cold. Coming to, Mills found that the locomotive and the first two cars had been uncoupled. He was ordered to proceed slowly up the track, leaving the 65 postal clerks in the abandoned cars unaware that anything was wrong. After about half a mile, a white blur emerged — it was a white sheet stretched between poles. “Here it is!” cried one bandit, and ordered Mills to halt atop Bridego Bridge. A truck waited below. The masked mobsters meanwhile had broken into the High Value coach, forced the five unarmed postal clerks to lie face down in a corner. Emptying the coach of 124 mail sacks, the mobsters tossed them down to confederates who loaded them into the truck. It was all over in 15 minutes.

The caper had been brilliantly planned and executed. To stop the train, the robbers had covered the green light with a glove, activated the red one with four flashlight batteries. In uncoupling the cars, they had deftly operated both the hydraulic and steam-brake systems without raising an alarm. In choosing Bridego Bridge as the transfer point, they picked one of the most deserted spots along the rail line, and further safeguarded their escape by systematically cutting all telephone lines in the vicinity. Borrowing a bicycle, a trainman pedaled to the nearest police station in Cheddington, and reached it an hour after the crime.

Flying Snoopers. The $7,000,000 haul was the greatest train robbery in history, and far surpassed the 1950 Brink’s truck robbery in Boston, which netted $2,775,000. In Australia, the Sydney Daily Telegraph editorialized: “It proves that the homeland of Dick Turpin and Charlie Peace is not decadent. Britons may not admit they are proud, but in private many are thinking, ‘For they are jolly good felons.’ ”

Britain’s Postmaster-General Reginald Bevins was not one of the jubilant ones. He believes the robbery was probably an inside job, since the mobsters could hardly by chance have held up the particular Royal Mail carrying so colossal a hoard. If so, the gang’s informer must be someone high up in the postal administration, since British railroads are never told what is carried in the Royal Mail trains, and the postal workers on board are equally ignorant of what they handle in the plain, unmarked mail sacks.

Rewards totaling $728,000 were offered by banks, insurance companies and the government. Scotland Yard was hard at work tracking down rumors that, days before the robbery, a red airplane had taken off and landed at an abandoned R.A.F. field near Cheddington, and that mysterious men had been seen shooting films of trains and the stretch of rail line. Asked if he felt a sneaking admiration for the artistry displayed by the robbers, Postmaster-General Bevins sniffed: “I don’t feel any admiration for these gentlemen at all.” Maybe not. But the shade of Jesse James, whose first and most famous score came to a measly $3,000 on a Rock Island Railroad holdup, would undoubtedly hail his British cousins with a courtly bow and a sweep of his broad-brimmed hat.