Bruce Reynolds, who has died aged 81, was the mastermind behind the Great Train Robbery.
Regarded by some as a “criminal from a more honourable era”, Reynolds never carried a gun, avoided violence where possible and viewed the police as an occupational hazard. Having started his career stealing cars and housebreaking, he worked his way up until he reached the top of his profession with “The Train” .
On August 8 1963 Reynolds’s highly-organised gang stopped the Glasgow to Euston Royal Mail train at Sears Crossing, Buckinghamshire, by tampering with the signals. They forced the driver to roll the train two miles to Bridego Bridge, where they unloaded mailbags containing more than £2.5 million into waiting vans.
The size and audacity of the robbery gripped the nation, and a vast manhunt ensued. Foreseeing this, the gang had earlier bought Leatherslade Farm, almost 30 miles from the scene of the crime, and were lying low. Two days later they began to disperse, leaving the job of removing any trace of their presence to an associate known as “Mark”.
With the police closing in, however, “Mark” left Leatherslade untouched. Before the robbers themselves could return to clean up, the police discovered the hideout, describing it as “one big clue”. Quickly identified through their fingerprints, the miscreants’ faces appeared on newspaper front pages, and several were swiftly rounded up.
Reynolds, through a mixture of luck, judgment and loyal friends, managed to escape to Mexico, where he learnt of the draconian sentences that were being handed down to his captured colleagues. But as the cost of living on the run and of his taste for high-rolling ate into his share of the haul, he was forced to return to England to try his luck with another “job”. Arrested in Torquay, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Apparently reformed by the experience, he was released in 1978 to piece together an honest existence.
Like some of his fellow robbers, Reynolds came to be regarded as something of a folk-hero. Students at Southampton University, for example, elected him to honorary life membership of their union — in protest, as a spokesman explained, “at the sentence that was passed on Mr Reynolds”. This was typical of an attitude which — as the journalist Bernard Levin pointed out — was dismally at odds with the public’s indifference to the engine driver, who had been badly injured in the course of the crime.
Bruce Richard Reynolds was born in London on September 7 1931, the only son of a jobbing labourer and a nurse. Apart from a spell as a wartime evacuee in Suffolk, he was educated largely on the streets of south London. He left school at 14 and, after failing to join the Navy on account of his poor eyesight, worked as a courier on the Daily Mail, as a hospital porter and in a bicycle shop in Battersea.
His career in crime started early. By the time he was 16 he was breaking and entering and fencing stolen goods . It was unsophisticated, dangerous and far from lucrative. At 17 he was convicted of burglary and sent to borstal.
Despising the regime, he absconded; but he was spotted on Clapham Common and returned to the juvenile wing of Wandsworth prison. Filled with a loathing of — and determination to beat — the system, Reynolds escaped again, was caught again, and consigned once more to what he called the “hate factory”. After a third escape, during which he again supported himself by burglary, he was caught and sentenced to 18 months, which he served in Reading jail.
National Service was treated with a similar enthusiasm. Reynolds went Awol after six weeks and returned to a life of petty crime. Arrested at 21, he received three years for breaking and entering. It was in the adult wing of Wandsworth that Reynolds completed his “education”. The prison was, he said, “like an old boy reunion of the elite criminals of the land”. He listened, made contacts and learnt to appreciate the “dedication” of the professional villain.
On his release in 1954 Reynolds determined to enjoy a life of crime. Hooking up with an old friend from borstal, he began to raid warehouses and country houses. Subsequently he focused his attention on jewellers and department stores in country towns — where heritage regulations preserved historic, and therefore less secure — facades.
The late Fifties and early Sixties were halcyon days. He was earning £1,000 a week from his activities and gaining the respect of the criminal fraternity. As if born to the role, he behaved with the suavity of a gentleman thief. He holidayed in the South of France, escorted women to expensive restaurants and nightclubs, patronised Jermyn Street tailors, drove Aston Martins, and mixed with the new aristocracy of actors, models, pop stars and hoods.
As crime evolved so did Reynolds’s modus operandi. Initially a “ladder gang”, his team smoothly embraced the introduction of gelignite, insurance scams and highway robbery. In addition to its obvious rewards, Reynolds seemed genuinely to love his job. “I was beginning to see the thief as an artist,” he would later note. “Writing the scenario, choosing the cast, deciding the location, acting and directing the action. Nothing could match the tension, excitement and sense of fulfilment.”
Inevitably there was a price to pay. Eventually he was caught and sentenced to three and a half years in Wandsworth, where he reacquainted himself with old friends. On his release he considered — but swiftly discarded — the idea of “going straight”. Again he teamed up with an old friend and began scouring the pages of Tatler and The Collector for appropriate targets.
But the world had moved on. The big coups were being perpetrated by large gangs rather than teams of two or three. So Reynolds adapted. Gradually he began expanding his team. Buster Edwards, Gordon Goody and an old school friend, Charlie Wilson, were added to create the nucleus of “The Train” gang.
After a number of modestly successful outings, Reynolds and his team scored their first major success when they snatched the wages of the staff of BOAC at Heathrow Airport. The police guessed who was responsible — the crime had all the hallmarks of Reynolds’s careful planning — but had sufficient evidence to proceed against only Wilson and Goody. Both were acquitted, although Goody only after a retrial in which he had “nobbled” a juror and bribed a witness.
It was Goody who, in May 1963, received a tip-off about the Glasgow-Euston mail train, from a mysterious informant known only as “The Ulsterman” whose identity remains a mystery to this day. Reynolds sprang into action, assembling his team, selecting a location, a hideout and transport, procuring a substitute train driver, undertaking reconnaissance, dividing labour and covering — or so he thought — every eventuality.
On August 8 his plan worked to perfection — though the train driver, Jack Mills, was beaten over the head and never worked again. Hardly an hour later the gang was back at Leatherslade counting up £2,631,684 in £1 and £5 notes when they heard a policeman announce over the VHF scanner: “You won’t believe this, but they’ve just stolen a train.”
The robbers would not celebrate for long. On August 12 their hideout was discovered. The police, aided by the fingerprints and whipped into frenzied activity by the media and an unpopular government still reeling from the Profumo, Philby and Rachman scandals, quickly began making arrests.
By Christmas 11 of the 15-strong gang had been captured. Reynolds was not among them, though he had several close calls. On one occasion a policeman saw a ladder leaning against the wall of the house in which Reynolds was hiding. Thinking there might be a burglary he knocked on the door. While his wife spoke to the policeman, Reynolds stripped and emerged from behind the sofa to “confess” to an adulterous liaison – at which stage the policeman winked knowingly and departed.
Eventually able to escape to Mexico, Reynolds worked as an agent for Dunhill and gradually began to build a new life for himself and his family. He kept in touch with Charlie Wilson, who had escaped from prison and was living in Canada, and with Buster Edwards, who briefly lived in Mexico before homesickness drove him back to England and jail.
Although prepared to live in Mexico forever, Reynolds’s expensive tastes drove him to return to the South of France and then to England for more “work”. After six months he was arrested.
His release in 1978 initiated the most difficult period of his life. His marriage had folded, he had no home, no job and no friends. Though he was famous, the landscape of organised crime had changed, and he was a celebrity without influence.
Depressed and adrift, he oscillated between jobs, and it was not until the late 1980s that he began to settle. He emerged to write The Autobiography of a Thief (1995), enjoy occasional television exposure, reunite with his wife and lead a law-abiding existence. Living simply in south London, he claimed that he no longer had an appetite for the wild twists of fortune that had inevitably accompanied his former life of crime.
Bruce Reynolds married Frances Margaret Allen in 1961. Their son survives him.
Bruce Reynolds, born September 7 1931, died February 28 2013
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