The term ‘The Great Train Robbery’ was neither born as a result of the 1963 mail train hold-up, nor indeed the 1855 train robbery immortalised by Michael Crichton in his 1975 novel The Great Train Robbery (which was later filmed by MGM in 1978 as The First Great Train Robbery starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland).
While Crichton’s book was a work of fiction, it drew heavily upon real-life events that took place on the night of 15 May 1855 when the London Bridge to Paris mail train was robbed of 200lb of gold bars. Crichton took something of a historical liberty by retrospectively re-christening it the Great Train Robbery. At the time, and for over a century afterwards, it was commonly known as the ‘Great Gold Robbery’.
The term ‘The Great Train Robbery’ has, in fact, no basis at all in any real-life event; it is instead the title of a 1903 American western movie written, produced and directed by Edwin S. Porter. Lasting only twelve minutes, it is still regarded by film historians as a milestone in movie-making. Shot not in Hollywood but in Milltown, New Jersey, its groundbreaking features include cross-cutting, double exposure composite editing and camera movement.
When, within twenty-four hours of the 1963 mail train robbery, the enormity of the heist began to sink in and the British press frantically searched for a suitable iconic headline, Edwin Porter’s 60-year-old movie title fitted the bill perfectly. Ironically, Fleet Street went one stage further the following week when, on the discovery of Leatherslade Farm, they dubbed it ‘Robbers’ Roost’. This secluded location in southern Utah was, in fact, a favourite hideout of the American outlaw and train robber Butch Cassidy and his ‘Hole in the Wall Gang’ back in the 1890s.
Mail was first carried in Britain by train in November 1830, following an agreement between the General Post Office and the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Eight years later, Parliament passed the Railways (Conveyance of Mails) Act, which required railway companies to carry mail as and when demanded by the postmaster general. Trains carrying mail eventually became known as TPOs (Travelling Post Offices). Mail was sorted on a moving train for the first time in January 1838 in a converted horsebox on the Grand Junction Railway. The first special postal train was operated by the Great Western Railway on the Paddington to Bristol route, making its inaugural journey on 1 February 1855.
Because of the wide expanse of territory in the American West and Mid-West, train robbers tended to stop trains by placing obstructions on the track to halt the locomotive, or by boarding the train, jumping into the back of the locomotive and holding up the engineer and fireman.
The location chosen was usually a desolate or isolated stretch of line, miles away from the nearest town, where plenty of time would be available to rob the train and make a getaway well before the alarm was raised. Unlike the 1855 ‘Great Gold Robbery’ in England, there was no need to rob the train while it was in motion. Train robberies carried out by the likes of Jesse James and Butch Cassidy would have been impractical, if not near impossible, in Victorian England due to the short distance between stations and the observant signal box system.
By the time Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch hit the Union Pacific train at Tipton on 29 August 1900, the writing was already on the wall for American train robbers. The Board of the Union Pacific Railroad Company had resolved to spend money to save money - by employing the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Their agents, such as the legendary Joe Lefors, were usually well paid, well armed and mandated to take the fight directly to the train robbers. This they did by tracking them, sometimes for months on end, until they were arrested or forced into a gunfight. Unlike US law officers, Pinkertons were not constrained by state boundaries, which escaping robbers had previously exploited by criss-crossing. Pinkertons’ strategy, although criticised in many quarters as a shoot-to-kill policy, was to prove particularly effective in combating railroad robberies.
Unlike America, the regional railway companies in Britain (GWR, LMS, LNER and SR) were permitted by Parliament to employ their own railway police constabularies. With the nationalisation of the railways in 1948 and the creation of one sole state-owned company, British Railways, these private-company police forces became one constabulary known as the British Transport Commission Police. In Britain there was no need to employ the likes of Pinkertons to investigate mail crime, as a highly effective official force had operated in the shadows for over 300 years.
The Post Office Investigation Branch (IB) has a just claim to be the world’s oldest criminal investigation department, tracing its origins back to 1683, when King Charles II appointed Attorney Richard Swift to the General Post Office (GPO) with specific responsibility for ‘the detection and carrying on of all prosecutions against persons for robbing the mails and other fraudulent practices’. On a salary of £200 per year Swift was, according to GPO records, an effective bulwark against post office crime. A Treasury department letter of 1713 affirms that, ‘Richard Swift has been Solicitor to the General Post Office for about thirty years in which he has all along acted with great diligence, faithfulness and success.’1
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reports of the apprehension and sentencing of post office offenders appeared regularly in local and national newspapers. The Evening Mail of 8 May 1795, for example, reported in some detail on the case of a letter sorter by the name of Evan Morgan, who had been arrested and charged with ‘secreting a letter at the Post Office’. He was hung on 20 May at Newgate Prison. Of particular note was the fact that three of the six men hung that day were postmen.
The sentences for post office crimes were historically harsh, as demonstrated by the records from that era, which show that both capital punishment and transportation to the colonies were common. In 1765, Parliament passed an act that set down the death penalty for ‘theft of the mail’, ‘secretion’ and ‘embezzlement or destruction of mail’. A further twenty-nine postmen were hung between that date and the passing of the 1837 Post Office Act, which abolished the death penalty for post office offences, replacing it with transportation for terms of seven years to life.
In terms of investigating such offences, responsibility remained with the solicitor to the Post Office until 1816, when much of it was transferred to the Secretary’s Office, where the team of investigators were to become known as the Missing Letter Branch. By 1823 the investigators were supplemented and supported by Bow Street Runners. Founded by Henry Fielding in 1750, the Runners (or Robin Redbreasts, on account of their scarlet waistcoats) were London’s first band of constables who travelled up and down the country serving writs and pursuing criminals. In 1829, on the founding of the Metropolitan Police by Sir Robert Peel, the Missing Letter Branch used seconded police officers instead.2
In 1840 the introduction of the first postage stamp, the penny black, led to a massive increase in the volume of postal traffic. This inevitably meant a consequent rise in the amount of post office-related crime. The Post Office reacted to this by recruiting more investigators who, from 1848, were placed under the supervision of the Post Office inspector general in a separate department. In 1883, the Missing Letter Branch was renamed the Confidential Enquiry Branch and the officer in charge given the title of director. In 1908 the unit once again changed its name to the Investigation Branch, usually shortened to the IB. In 1934 the GPO underwent a radical reorganisation, and in 1935 the Investigation Branch became one of the administrative departments of the new headquarters structure of the GPO. In 1946 the title of the head of the Investigation Branch changed from director to controller. At the time of the 1963 train robbery, Clifford Osmond was controller, having taken over the post in 1957. Formally deputy controller from 1948, Osmond, a native of the West Country, had joined the Post Office at the age of 18 before successfully applying to join the Investigation Branch in March 1934.3
In retrospect, the Post Office was most fortunate in having Osmond, a highly motivated, resourceful and effective investigator, at the head of the organisation during a period in which mail crime was to rise significantly and, indeed, culminate in the Great Train Robbery of 1963.
Notes
1. Sources for the early history of the IB and its predecessors: POST 23/13-66; Missing Letter Branch case papers, 1839−1859; POST 30/1492 Confidential Enquiry Branch (GPO): Revision, 1907; Historical summaries of Branch workings and grades employed, 1793−1907; POST 74 Solicitor’s Department; POST 74/199−203 Prosecutions in England and Scotland, 1800−1896; POST 74/204−344; Prosecution Briefs in England, Ireland and Wales, 1774−1934; POST 122/13084 Investigation Branch Annual Reports 1957/58−1966/67.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.