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The Ibrox Open Goal

It was described at the time as Scotland’s biggest bank robbery and one of the best planned the country had ever seen. It also had as one of its main suspects a man billed as the Monocled Major and one of Glasgow’s most recognisable districts as its backdrop – in short, the Ibrox heist of 1955 had all the ingredients to make it a headline writer’s dream.

It is no surprise that the crime did indeed hog the front pages, with news of the audacious and meticulously executed raid spreading far and wide within hours. In return, police were fed with leads from as far afield as London as one of the biggest investigations Scotland has ever seen took officers from their traditional inner city beat into the wilds of rural Perthshire and the unfamiliar stomping grounds of England’s counties.

At the centre of the furore was a missing £44,000 haul – the equivalent of close to £1 million in 2014 terms. The money was liberated from the British Linen Bank when a cash van was hijacked as it made its daily delivery rounds. The team responsible for the broad-daylight raid had been as cold as it had been calculating, willing to use violent force to carry through with its carefully plotted blueprint.

Just how well considered the episode had been began to crystallise as the investigation matured. Detectives at the heart of the case revealed they suspected it may have been five years in the planning, a measure of the attention to detail which had been a hallmark of the gang.

After apparently careful deliberation, they struck on 19 July 1955. It was the Tuesday of Glasgow’s Fair Holiday week, with the city quieter than usual and the traffic calmer than might otherwise have been expected. It was perfect for a quick and unhindered getaway.

The chosen location was Ibrox, more specifically Paisley Road West and the bustling district’s branch of the British Linen Bank. Just after 9.30 a.m., a red van drew up outside the bank with a crew of three assigned to make cash deliveries across the city that day. They were early in their shift, as they snaked their way across the city, and had no reason to suspect it would be anything other than an ordinary day’s work.

The driver and one of the messengers left the van to carry money bags to the bank and, as they did, the robbers struck. Knocking the remaining crew member unconscious in the back of the van, they sped off through the traffic and away from the scene . . . with money spilling out of the back as they did so.

In today’s ultra-cautious, security-conscious era, there is a sense of incredulity at one of the crucial facets of the heist – the key to the van, despite its high-value cargo, had been left in the ignition. This was a robbery made easy.

The takeaway, in many respects, was simple. The getaway, as with so many crimes of a similar nature, was a more testing proposition.

The van was soon discovered abandoned in the driveway of an unoccupied villa at 7 Dumbreck Road. The terrified crew member was found trussed up in the van, left helpless, and the bulk of contents had gone. The raiders had driven less than a mile from the scene of the crime before apparently switching vehicles and spiriting the proceeds away from the city. They left behind bags of coins, presumably deemed too bulky to transport easily.

Not surprisingly, the raid made big headlines in the days that followed. The Glasgow Herald, reporting on the incident for the first time, described it as one of ‘the best-planned robberies’ Scotland had ever seen. The Bulletin described it as ‘Scotland’s biggest bank robbery’ and, arguably, that claim still holds true. The paper noted that the robbers had ‘an obvious knowledge of the distributive organisation’ involved in sending money from the British Linen Bank head office to the network of branches in Glasgow. The Ibrox outlet was the second stop of the day. Apart from the money that had been delivered at the van’s initial stop in Eglinton and the cash that had already been taken into the Ibrox branch just before the team struck, the van was practically fully laden.

The British Linen Bank has long since disappeared from the consciousness of consumers, but at the time of the robbery it was still a major player on the Scottish financial scene. Founded in the 1700s in Edinburgh, as the name suggests, it had its roots in the linen industry but quickly established a foothold in the banking sector. The network of branches quickly expanded, with more than 100 across the country by the turn of the 20th century. Bought by Barclays in 1919, by the Second World War, there were 170 branches in Scotland and it continued to operate successfully until it was sold to Bank of Scotland. The name eventually disappeared from branches, but until 1999 it was still used as the umbrella for the merchant arm of Bank of Scotland. However, in the 1950s its branches were significant targets as far as members of Scotland’s criminal underbelly were concerned.

Details of the raid quickly began to filter into the public domain, with police revealing that four men had surrounded the van after it had parked outside the Ibrox branch. With the driver and his assistant inside making a cash drop, the watching rogues sprang into action in a carefully choreographed routine. Two jumped into the cab while the other pair rushed into the rear of the van to disable the remaining employee – messenger Lindsay Currie. The assailants drove off along Gower Street, into Sherbrooke Avenue and on towards Pollokshields. Currie’s shouts for help were heard by his colleagues, who emerged from the bank to see the van being taken. Quick-thinking driver Gilbert Tait, just 24 at the time, commandeered a passing lorry and gave chase – but he was unable to keep pace with the bank van. Incredibly, just a day later, Tait was back on his rounds and delivering to the same branch. For his injured colleague Currie, 10 days of bed rest was the doctor’s order.

Although the chase proved fruitless, it did not take long for the stolen bank van to be located. It was found just 15 minutes at the empty house on Dumbreck Road when a woman near the scene heard Currie’s cries and went to his aid. The elderly eyewitness, Elizabeth Duncan, told reporters, ‘A van was standing with its doors open – I could just see a man’s legs hunched up. He was lying across the back of the van.’

Trees and shrubbery provided natural screening around the property, which had been unoccupied since the war years when it was utilised by the army, making it the perfect location for switching vehicles – which was the theory police worked on too after a report from the neighbourhood that four men were seen at the same house, arriving in a black saloon car. The description of an Austin A40 was circulated after a worker at the nearby Bellahouston bowling green had recalled details of the car seen at the house. That was part of a huge police operation, with patrol cars from across Glasgow converging on the area. They attempted to lock down the area and began a systematic search but to no avail.

Meanwhile, Currie was taken to the Victoria Infirmary suffering from a head injury and shock. He was allowed to return home after treatment. The assailants had at least removed the gag from Currie’s mouth before they left him and made their getaway, a small concession after their ruthless ambush but one which enabled the van to be located far more quickly than it otherwise might have been. It was the first sign of cracks in the plan.

Although it was believed the gang had made their exit by car, police also investigated claims by a local resident that four men, walking in pairs, had been seen on foot in Bellahouston Park at around the same time. They were last seen running off in the direction of Paisley Road West, with one said to have a large bruise on the side of his face. They were all pieces of the jigsaw that was being slotted together. Another line of enquiry related to a theft reported soon after the bank van had been targeted although, this time, it was a more modest £55 which had been stolen, snatched from an open safe at a petrol station on the Glasgow to Kilmarnock road. Three or four men in a grey Wolseley, one of whom was said to have had up to £200 in banknotes in his hand, pulled up at the Turf Petrol Station, near Loganswell, within hours of the Ibrox incident. As they filled up with fuel, one was said to have slipped inside and taken the money from the open safe.

That was one of a string of reports that stemmed from the publicity surrounding the case. On the evening of the robbery, another petrol station attendant had his suspicions aroused when two men in a 1931 Vauxhall pulled up at his forecourt in Bridgeton and acted oddly and irritably, paying with a British Linen Bank £1 note and wearing sunglasses despite the fact it was nearly 9 p.m. That was another lead for the stretched police team to follow up but far from the last.

A length of rope left behind in the van, used to tie up Currie, was another positive line of enquiry. It was described as ‘relatively new’ and officers were tasked with taking samples around various stores in Glasgow to try and track down its roots. It was a thankless task but a sign of the determination within the investigating team to leave no stone unturned.

Detectives said hundreds of leads had been logged within the first two days of the investigation but expressed frustration that sources in the Glasgow underworld scene were not talking. That silence was possibly a case of honour among thieves but consideration was also given to the possibility that there was genuinely no local knowledge of the bank job which had become the talk of the steamie. Could it be that a London gang was behind the crime? Officers certainly thought it was a possibility and roads between Scotland and England were subjected to intense police activity as vehicles were stopped and searched.

Again, there was an element of bad fortune surrounding that task and the search parameters were not aided by the circumstances of the heist. It transpired that the majority of the notes – all but around £1,000 – were in untraceable denominations of 10s, £1 or £5. Only the serial numbers of larger notes had been logged by the bank. It was feasible, given the extent of the planning which appeared to have gone into the exercise, that those responsible were well aware that their haul would be ‘clean’ and able to be pushed into circulation without arousing suspicion.

It was Glasgow’s head of CID, Chief Detective Superintendent Gilbert McIlwrick, who headed the investigation with Chief Detective Inspector Robert Kerr and Chief Detective Inspector James McAulay leading on the ground. Their investigations took them across Britain as they attempted to track down witnesses and suspects, with around 300 people interviewed as part of the probe. Resources were poured into the case as police, no doubt under pressure from out-of-pocket bank chiefs, pushed for a positive result. They were dealing with a well-drilled team of crooks but, fortunately for detectives, this was not a flawless crime. The crew responsible for the robbery were undone by a silly mistake. When they fled Dumbreck Road, abandoning the bank van, they left behind the uniforms they had adopted to help them avoid drawing attention to themselves as they lay in wait at Ibrox.

Those brown dustcoats appeared relatively indistinguishable but police latched on to laundry markings and initials on the labels. For the first time ever, Scottish officers also harnessed the power of the modern media by turning to television for help – appearing on the small screen with the dustcoats in a plea for help in tracing their origins. That appeal went far and wide hitting the target in London, of all places, when an AA patrolman by the name of Frank Buckingham recognised the initials as his own and also told police that he had lent the dustcoats to a man in London, thus providing a name for police to pursue.

Slowly, the case began to slot together. A week after the robbery, police in Perth recovered a black Rover 60 which they believed had been used in the robbery. It had been left in a car park in the town on 20 July, the night after the cash was snatched, and never reclaimed. Examinations revealed it was bearing false registration plates and tax disc, having been stolen in London two months earlier. Fingerprints were discovered in the abandoned car and yet another clue was added to the bulging case files.

At the same time, detectives travelled from Glasgow to London to liaise with Scotland Yard colleagues over the information provided about the dustcoats. Initially it was reported it had been stolen from the AA patrolman’s car, although it was later suggested he had lent it to one of the men who soon became one of a number accused of being involved in the theft. It was a significant turning point in the probe.

The first arrest in the case took place in September 1955 – not in Glasgow but in Dublin. Couples dancing to soft music in the Dun Laoghaire Hotel in the Irish capital watched in shock as a fellow guest was led, handcuffed to a detective, from the building. That man was John Charles Lappen. Australian-born but a resident of England for many years, he had been staying at the hotel with his wife, who was also spoken to by police, and their room was searched. The net was closing on the Ibrox gang, with the police stretching far beyond their usual confines to bring the investigation to a conclusion.

Days prior to that, as the investigation gathered pace, an application had been made in a Dublin court for the release of two men from Mountjoy Prison. One of them, Charles McGuinness, would later be sentenced for his part in the Glasgow robbery. The other, a Londoner, was never the subject of court proceedings.

In October, the operation moved to England as the intriguing character George Grey was apprehended in a hotel in Middlesbrough and arrested. He was the man believed to be the ‘Monocled Major’ who was said to be at the heart of the bank van robbery and who had in his possession a ‘considerable’ sum of money. He was the fifth man to be arrested by that stage, with two others in Dublin and two more in Glasgow.

By the time it came before the court, the case involved six men. John Charles Lappen, John Blundell, Charles McGuinness, Cornelius O’Donnell, John Bryden and William White Thomson appeared on five charges relating to the £44,000 robbery. Accused of acting with George Grey during the alleged crime, they denied all the charges. A jury of eight men and seven women gathered on 9 January 1956 for the opening day of the trial, with Lord Patrick presiding at the High Court in Glasgow. It would prove to be an exhaustive process but one that captured the imagination of the Scottish public, who were following the daily updates with intensity.

Conspicuous by his absence was the Monocled Major. Chief Detective Inspector Robert Kerr said he was led to believe that there were provisions in the Criminal Justice Act which precluded the ‘Major’ from appearing in the dock. Close to £2,000 had been accounted for at the time of Grey’s arrest, whilst Thomson had been found in possession of a holdall containing more than £3,000. Grey eventually appeared in court in September 1957. It had transpired that his absence from the original trial was due to a seven-year sentence he was already serving for safebreaking and robbery in Surrey. The Australian did, however, have to face the music north of the border too and was transferred from Wandsworth to Barlinnie in preparation for the court action.

John Lappen, aged 56, 45-year-old Englishman John Blundell and 43-year-old Scottish national Charles McGuinness were all found guilty of various charges relating to their involvement in the affair. Lappen was jailed for eight years and his two accomplices for six years each. Lappen died in 1960 after suffering a heart problem whilst in Saughton Prison. Charges against the others involved in the case were found not proven.

What the trial served to do was paint a picture of the build-up and aftermath of the Ibrox episode. Throughout the proceedings, the accused denied their involvement and explained their association was through involvement in horse-racing circles. That was also the assumption of many of those they encountered in the build-up, whilst ensconced in their temporary staging post in the wilds of Perthshire. The gang had chosen as their base the Rob Roy Roadhouse near Aberfoyle.

As the trial progressed, staff and guests were called to give evidence, recounting details of a gathering of the crew on the eve of the robbery. Nobody watching had any inkling of the plan being hatched but, with the benefit of hindsight, the telltale clues began to become evident. Staff suggested all of the accused, with the exception of Thomson, were staying at the isolated hotel. The ‘Major’, as Grey was referred to by the housekeeper, was said to have been an affable guest and the centre of attention. The party departed the day after the robbery, travelling in a Riley and a Rover. The Riley had been taken to a local garage during the group’s stay for repairs to its clutch.

On the day the cash was snatched, a guest at the roadhouse reported seeing two men with bundles of money in one of the chalets at the complex. The Major was one; the other, she said, was John Blundell. She suggested there could have been as many as a dozen bundles of blue notes – the same colour used by the British Linen Bank. Other guests confirmed their belief in the horse-racing connection – conversations about race meetings in Scotland had been overheard, which tied in with the claims made by the accused men themselves.

In 1957, the roadhouse, which had been a feature in Perthshire since the 1930s, was renamed the Rob Roy Highland Motel but it did not stop newspapers using the occasion to bring up its intriguing past, flagging up the fact that a cache of cash could still be hidden somewhere in the vicinity. The greatest mystery of all was what had happened to the missing money. Around £6,000 was recovered during the investigation but that still left £38,000 unaccounted for. The search continued for years but enquiries drew a blank.

The assertion that the ‘job’ had been years in the making was repeated in court, with Lappen and McGuinness described as two of the principal ‘brains’ behind the operation. However, it was not only the suspects who found themselves in the dock – so too did the British Linen Bank, as its security procedures were put under very public scrutiny during the course of the trial.

On the opening day, evidence included startling revelations about the laxity in protocol. Driver Gilbert Tait admitted he had left the keys for the van in the ignition and Lindsay Currie, the messenger injured in the robbery, revealed the crew had been given no specific instructions designed to prevent the theft of their load. Tait said he agreed it may not have been wise to leave the keys but claimed it was ‘done all the time’ by the delivery drivers. Tait also confirmed he had been working for Patersons, the transport company contracted by the bank to carry out deliveries, for eight months. He was relatively new to the bank errands when the robbery occurred but admitted that the same route was followed each day and the same timetable followed. He would follow the routine four days per week, collecting a Patersons van from the firm’s Ann Street depot and travelling to Queen Street, the HQ of the British Linen Bank, for it to be loaded by bank employees before the van departed for its deliveries.

On the day in question, it was stated that Tait and Charles McNeil, the other messenger, left Currie in the rear of the van as they made the drop at the Ibrox branch. Currie was busy arranging cash bags for the next delivery when the assailants sprang their unwanted surprise.

On the opening day of the trial, Tait identified the accused John Charles Lappen in court as the man he had seen dressed in a brown dustcoat and standing on the corner of Gower Street looking towards the van as the cash drop was made. Other witnesses told of a ‘signal’ used by the gang, with one appearing to slap a rolled-up piece of paper in the palm of his hand to instigate the well-choreographed operation.

There were lighter moments during a weighty trial with 10-year-old witness Jean Pandelus warming hearts with her testimony. Described in newspaper reports as having a ‘shock of curly dark hair’, the schoolgirl assured the court she knew it was wrong to ‘tell fibs’ and that she would tell the truth while on the witness stand. She confirmed that two men had come from a nearby telephone box and jumped in the van before it was driven away. More than half a century on, Jean Pandelus is now Jean Miller and can no longer be found in the Scottish climes of Glasgow but in the US state of Ohio. Decades have passed and a continent separates her from her homeland but the events of 1955 remain fresh in the mind of the courtroom star. Marriage took the Glaswegian across the Atlantic and to a new life but her links to the country of her birth remain strong and her interest in events on her old stomping ground are as keen as the day she departed in the 1960s.

Speaking from the comfort of her home in the American Midwest, Jean told me: ‘I saw what I saw but it was my mum and aunt who really had a harder time of it – particularly my mum, who was an introvert really and didn’t enjoy the attention the trial brought. It took a lot of courage for her to stand up in court and give evidence – something I know she wasn’t comfortable with but she knew she had to go through with it.

‘Even after the trial, it wasn’t over. I remember my mum was stopped in the street by a man when she was walking along one day and asked if she had been involved in the court case. She was terrified he had something to do with those who had been convicted and tried to say she hadn’t been. The man just said that he’d obviously been mistaken and that, in any case, he just wanted to tell the lady who had given evidence that one of the ringleaders had died in prison. She thanked him and went on her way – breathing a huge sigh of relief as she did. She was really shaken up by the whole thing.’

Just as her mother, May Pandelus, and aunt, Mina Slater, had to take to the witness stand, Jean also had her moment in the spotlight. She was called upon to recount the detail of her brush with the Monocled Major and his gang and impressed everyone with her efforts in court. Even now, she can recount the events of that day with clarity. She said: ‘We were walking past a remodelling shop, full of wallpaper and paint and other decorating goods, when I saw the men standing close to the door. They were wearing brown overalls, presumably to try and look as though they were painters or plasterers.

‘We saw the security guards come out of the van and go into the bank – then all hell broke loose. The van took off down the road, nobody inside the bank had a clue though. My mum and aunt had seen everything and dashed inside to tell everyone what had happened. That’s when the guards ran out and tried to give chase. I had seen it all but, at my age, I didn’t really understand what was going on.

‘Still, I was a witness like everyone else that day and the police treated me just the same despite my age. My mum really didn’t want me to be involved and told them that but I still had to go along to a line-up to try to identify who I had seen. I was terrified. I didn’t have good eyesight and couldn’t recognise anyone – just as my mum had told them would be the case – but it didn’t make any difference. I had to give evidence when the case made it to court and can still remember everything about that day, right down to being taken for lunch by a policewoman to try and make me feel more at ease.’

As it happened, the youngster was perfectly comfortable in the glare of a packed courtroom as one of Glasgow’s biggest trials was played out. The media gallery was packed as reporters attentively listened to every detail in the search of the next big headline – and that day they got their story.

Jean said: ‘I ended up in all the newspapers. We lived at the Paisley Road Toll, right next to the Angel Building, and my mum would send me out to buy the Daily Record each morning. The day after I had given evidence, I picked up the paper in the shop to find a huge picture of myself staring back at me from the page. I was so embarrassed and it didn’t just make the Record – it was in lots of different papers. My dad worked for MacBrayne’s over on the west coast and he even found the picture and story in the Oban Times. When I went back to lessons at Rutland Crescent School, my teacher had me drawing pictures of my experience and telling my classmates all about it.

‘I guess that was my 15 minutes of fame, with my mum and my aunt in the spotlight too. As I say, mum didn’t enjoy that much at all – my aunt was far more gregarious though, so it didn’t faze her at all to come out of court and be greeted with photographers trying to take our picture.’

Jean spent the rest of her childhood in Glasgow, moving to her adopted home in the US in 1966 after meeting her future husband, American Will Miller, and settling in the US where the couple brought up their children. Before moving overseas, there was still time for another brush with Glasgow’s less desirable element. Jean said: ‘When I was slightly older, I was out walking our dog when I stumbled across two men acting suspiciously around the basement of Thomson’s piano store. I must have disturbed them trying to break in and they weren’t best pleased – one of them karate chopped me, the other came at me with the box cutters he was carrying. Fortunately another man appeared on the scene and he must have known the other two and that stopped them in their tracks. I picked up the dog under my arm and made a run for it.’

Those two incidents have not spoilt the exiled Scot’s memories of her childhood in Glasgow, with her contribution to the Ibrox heist trial locked away in her memory bank. It was the evidence of Jean Pandelus which took the story back to a key point, the moment at which the robbers made their escape before abandoning the vehicle and fleeing – leaving their dustcoats behind. The key point in the investigation was when the London-based AA man identified the man he had lent the recovered clothing to – and that person was John Blundell.

Blundell spoke in court of his surprise when police burst into the basement flat in Fulham in which he had been lying low. He admitted his part in the robbery to officers there and then, stressing he hadn’t been involved in the assault on the messenger. With his admission, the case began to take shape although it was not until 1957 that it was finally concluded as Grey appeared at the High Court in Glasgow. The charges were familiar – he stood accused of assaulting a bank messenger and robbing him of £44,025. A plea of not guilty was entered by his solicitor, Harry McGoldrick.

Grey was charged with, while acting with John Charles Lappen, John Blundell and Charles McGuinness and other men on 19 July 1955, in a motor van in Paisley Road West, near Gower Street, assaulting Lindsay Cunningham Currie, of Clarkston, who was then in charge of the van and its contents, and rendering him unconscious. It was further alleged that, during a journey by the van, between Paisley Road West and 7 Dumbreck Road, Glasgow, they bound the hands and legs of Currie with rope and his eyes and mouth with adhesive tape, to his severe injury, and robbed him of the motor van and £44,025 contained in six cases and a number of money bags. For the trial 145 crown witnesses were cited and 115 productions logged. At the end of it, Grey was sentenced to six years in prison for his role.

After serving time for his English indiscretions, he was eventually released in August 1964 and immediately set about suing the police for £750 in relation to clothes and property he said had been destroyed. The Monocled Major, it appeared, had no intention of going quietly.