4

A Lasting Impression

The headline in The Bulletin said it all – ‘£35,000 BANK RAID BAFFLES POLICE’. Officers arrived at an ordinary branch of the Clydesdale and North of Scotland Bank on an ordinary high street to find no signs of force and no signs of disruption but tens of thousands of pounds were missing from the vault. The gang members responsible were dubbed the ‘immaculate raiders’ by journalists, who were as flummoxed as their police counterparts by what appeared to be the perfect crime.

The scene of this bamboozling heist was the Clydesdale and North of Scotland Bank at 865 Shettleston Road in Glasgow. The name provides a hint of the era in question – the 1950s, a new dawn for the financial services industry in Scotland but one which was not immune to the problems of old. The Clydesdale and North of Scotland Bank was born in 1950, when the Glasgow-based Clydesdale acquired its Northern counterpart, and existed for just 13 years. In 1963 the institution dropped its extended moniker, becoming simply the Clydesdale Bank.

In between, it had fallen victim to those apparently ‘immaculate’ thieves, whose £35,000 haul back then would be worth nearer £700,000 in today’s money. And to get hold of that sum, it appeared they had used brain rather than brawn. The quandary for the police and the bank was just how they had succeeded in breaching security in the dead of night and walking away unchallenged with a small fortune.

Bank robberies, during that period, were far from uncommon. However, the traditional modus operandi involved large quantities of explosives and a healthy dollop of recklessness. The dynamite technique was far from scientific and, as a result, not entirely effective. It was also less than subtle, leading to a more than reasonable chance of being caught in the act.

What had occurred in Shettleston was different to the norm and that presented new challenges for a City of Glasgow Police force which was much more familiar with picking through the wreckage left behind by the safe-blowing fraternity than combing a pristine crime scene offering no visible clues. The Clydesdale may have gone on to pioneer the use of the automatic teller machine (ATM) in the 1970s, but in the 1950s it had yet to discover the benefits of the CCTV camera.

That left Detective Inspector Donald Campbell, of the city’s Eastern CID, to begin piecing together evidence and painting his own picture of events leading up to the disappearance of the cash. He was one of Glasgow’s most respected officers, something of a rising star in the force, and destined to earn subsequent promotion. It was Campbell who had been tasked with heading up the Shettleston investigation and he arrived at the start of a fingertip search of the premises, at the heart of a bustling east-end community. Today, the Clydesdale Bank is a modern building standing on the site of what, in 1959, had been a traditional set-up, with the branch at ground floor and residential flats above. A mix of shops and pubs surrounded it, with the branch sitting on a busy thoroughfare and certainly not hidden from prying eyes. So how did somebody succeed in walking in and walking back out again with £35,000?

The police investigation began early on 30 April 1959. It had been quickly convened at the Shettleston Road branch after a telephone call from startled staff who had reported for duty and discovered the money was missing. Officers and bank staff remained at the branch well into the evening as they searched for explanations. The crime scene was closely scrutinised, with fingerprint experts quickly collating evidence for examination at Glasgow’s police labs.

The Shettleston branch was no stranger to incident. Just two months earlier, a quick-thinking teller had swept bundles of cash from the counter and on to the floor to foil a young man’s attempts to swipe the cash. The year before a window had been smashed with a brick and thieves reached in to lift £200 in cash. However, the April raid was in a whole new league to those earlier attempts and it happened on the watch of a rookie as the manager of the branch had only been in place for three weeks when the thieves struck. He and his four colleagues, all men, arrived for work on a Tuesday morning to be greeted by a stomach-churning realisation.

Interviews with staff ascertained that the money had been securely stored in the bank’s main vault when the branch was closed for the evening. When they arrived the following morning, it had vanished. When the employees turned up, they found the wooden double-front doors intact and there was no damage to the three rear windows or the protective grilles guarding them. Inside, the safe door was closed but not locked. The contents were gone but the keys which provided access to the vault had not been disturbed and remained locked away where they always sat. There was no sign of any use of explosives or force of any description.

There were no immediate suspects and DI Campbell admitted on the day, ‘It’s a mystery. We still don’t know how many men were involved or the time when the raid took place.’

Chief Detective Superintendent Robert Colquhoun, head of Glasgow’s CID, was also on the scene along with other high-ranking officers as the force threw resources at the headline-grabbing affair. A door-to-door operation was launched in the hope of unearthing eyewitness information – but even those living in flats directly above the bank hadn’t heard or seen a thing. Not only were the raiders immaculate, they were also quiet.

Attention focused intently on the safe itself. It was an old unit, manufactured in 1910, but there was no reason to suggest age had anything to do with the apparent ease with which it had been breached. It had been made by Milner, one of the most respected names in the industry. Thomas Milner had founded the company in 1814 and it rapidly expanded – the brand was favoured by many of the leading banks and Milner safes were even said to have been used on the Titanic. The company would put on dramatic public shows, testing their models against raging fires and even gunpowder in front of awestruck audiences. One such occasion ended in tragedy, when a boy in the audience was struck by shrapnel from the demonstration and died from his injuries.

Milner was eventually swallowed up by Chubb in the 1960s but elements of the firm’s technology were still being utilised right up to the 1990s so there was no question that it could have been considered outmoded back in 1959. The List 5 model, the one fitted at Shettleston, was drill resistant with its metal ‘sandwich’ design door and had three key locks running down its door. Three-way bolt work was the other feature which helped increase resistance to explosives, typically rendering the door seized shut if one of those bolts was blown. On face value, it appeared almost impenetrable to even the most forceful attack but that clearly hadn’t been the case. Police in Glasgow quickly came to the only logical conclusion that the locks had been compromised and the realisation caused the Clydesdale and North of Scotland Bank to sit up and take notice.

In the aftermath, all of the organisation’s safes were fitted with keyless combination locks with spy-proof dials. Beyond that, an even more secure breed of ‘time-lock’ protection was then fitted as precautions were taken to new levels – all of which was great for the future but it did nothing to deal with the present or to reunite the bankers with their missing money.

As the investigation at Shettleston took shape, the five members of staff faced an intense grilling from detectives. It became apparent early on in the process that they would hold the answers to many of the questions surrounding the heist. One thing that was causing concern was the timing of the robbery. The thieves had struck on a day when the bank was cash-laden, primed and ready to deal with the end of month payroll for the district’s teachers. Those wages were processed through the Shettleston branch at the same time each month and it quickly became clear that the idea of inside information being used to tip off the raiders was at the forefront of the minds of the detectives.

With that idea under consideration, the internal arrangements then came under particular scrutiny. The manager outlined the present system in place to ensure security of the cash safe. No member of staff should have had access to all three keys at one time; the manager would have to be notified when his key was required and subsequently know each and every time the vault was opened. However, lapses in that procedure were also disclosed by staff at the branch. Police were told that, given the busy nature of the operation and the bond of trust between the close-knit team, there were occasions when keys were left on top of the safe or even in the locks themselves. It was the first sign of cracks within the system – but all three of those keys had been accounted for at the time of the incident so it still did not explain the missing cash.

The fabric of the building, in particular the mortise lock on the solid wooden front doors, also fell under the spotlight. With the aid of specialists, police were able to ascertain that it was not a fail-safe set-up. In fact, master keys for the particular model of lock existed and not all of them were far from the scene of the crime. In time, it was discovered by the team investigating the raid that, amongst others, the master key for a synagogue in Edinburgh worked equally well in the Shettleston bank lock. It was just another quirk in the tale, as the security issues began to unravel.

The potential for a dummy key to have been used to gain access to the branch was clear but officers came to the conclusion that the only possible explanation for the safe being cracked was that it had been an inside job. Since the first lock was invented until modern times, one fact remains true – a key cannot be copied without there first having been access to the original.

Douglas Campbell, owner of Kelvin Lock and Safe in Glasgow, is a member of the Master Locksmiths Association. He admits the tools of his trade have not changed dramatically since the Shettleston heist in the 1950s and many of the techniques remain relevant to those with a legitimate cause to cut keys. Campbell told me: ‘Locking has improved over the years but the principles remain the same. Some of the features from the case in the 50s are not totally outdated – I’ve had people come to me with impressions of a key they have made in a bar of soap because they only have one at home and that’s in use. It is possible to create a key using a mould like that but there does tend to be a fair bit of trial and error involved. It would need to be someone with the expertise to make the key, so a locksmith would have to be involved.

‘It certainly isn’t impossible, whether using soap or Plasticine as the basis for the mould, but the bottom line in any incident like that is it has to be an inside job. You have to have the original key to be able to make the impression and create the mould so it is a relatively easy one to investigate. Quite often, down through the years, you would find people would cause damage to a safe to give the impression that force had been used rather than keys but you can always tell when that has been the case. Anyone with a good knowledge of the trade would be able to spot that almost instantly.

‘Much depends on the type of lock and the age of that lock. It would be far easier to make a copy of a key in that way if it was for a safe manufactured in the late 1800s or early part of the 20th century. If you move forward to the 1970s and 80s, things had moved on by then – some of the locks manufactured by the likes of Chubb, Chatwood and Wolfshead in that particular period were like works of art, so intricate and consequently very secure.

‘Even before then there was a great pride taken by the major firms in how well made their locks were. Chubb and Brahma would have great competitions in which they would put forward what they described as the ‘unpickable’ lock. In truth, any lock can be picked if you have the skill, the time and the patience to do it. In saying that, there are people out there who can pick modern locks but wouldn’t be able to get past one of the older, more complex locks.

‘I don’t think I will see the day in my lifetime when the traditional lock becomes redundant. Certainly electronics, particularly in safes, are becoming more prominent and the likes of fingerprint recognition take it to a new level completely. But there is still something reassuring about having a key in your pocket – if you have a push-button lock or a coded system there is always the possibility something could malfunction or somebody could simply get lucky and guess the right numbers.’

Campbell is aware of the systems the various banks had in place to make their safes secure but, as he is quick to point out, there is a long history of trying to stay ahead of criminals and it has not always been successful. He told me: ‘Since the first lock was invented, people have been trying to make them tamperproof – some systems have been more successful than others. The Egyptians would fit their locks in a recess in the wall so whoever was using it had to put their hand in and operate the lock. If the wrong key was used, a guillotine would drop and they would lose their hand – I can’t imagine that worked too well. What if you had just ended up with a faulty key?

‘The two-key system operated during that era was effective in theory as you would need two people to open the safe. Where it fell down was if things got busy and both keys were handed over or, worse than that, if the safe was left sitting open all day. I believe that did happen in some instances.’

In his professional life, Campbell has had to deal with the aftermath of some elaborate attempts to break into safes and has no time for those who have made it their life’s work to try to get the better of security systems. He said: ‘There has always been a habit of glamorising safe breakers. Johnny Ramensky was one who was always spoken about but he was always getting caught. Where was the sense in that? Generally, you find they always got caught in the end, whether that was because they started spending money and drawing attention to themselves or because they made mistakes that led police to them.

‘Some of the schemes nowadays are incredible. I’ve been to petrol stations that have used underfloor safes where staff simply deposit capsules of cash in through a tube – criminals have broken in and poured lemonade and anything else they can get their hands on into the safe to try and make the capsules bob up to the surface and out. I’ve never seen it work but I have had to deal with the clean-up operation afterwards. The world has changed though. Whereas once criminals would take the time to try and break into safes, today they are far more likely to go in with guns and knives. It is all brute force and ignorance.’

In contrast, there was no need for force in the Shettleston heist of 1959. Each of the five members of staff were pushed and probed when it became clear inside help would have been required but they all appeared to be diligent and dedicated members of the team. Until, eventually, one of that group cracked. That man was William Rae, an 18-year-old apprentice teller. He did not appear to have the hallmarks of a criminal mastermind. Rather, he was a fresh-faced, red-haired teenager who, when the investigation was launched, hadn’t created as much as a ripple of suspicion. However, when faced with the headline-hogging reality of what had happened, Rae admitted his part in the operation. It took two weeks for detectives to break his resistance but, when they did, some staggering insights into what had been a protracted and carefully considered plot emerged.

Most astonishing of all was that the bank had been breached not once but twice. On the first occasion, the ‘immaculate raiders’ had been so careful that their sortie hadn’t even been noticed by management. They had entered in the dead of night in February 1959 but, upon discovering less money than they would have liked in the safe, they exited without taking a penny and resolved to return when the profit was likely to be greater. And they did, coming back with a vengeance on 29 April to escape with their £35,000 haul.

It took near enough two months for Glasgow’s finest to crack the case, which proved more difficult than it had been for the robbers to crack the safe. With Rae opting to turn Queen’s evidence and assist the authorities in bringing his cohorts to justice, the story still had to be corroborated and the jigsaw pieced together bit by bit. Eventually, in June 1959, police made their move and the big breakthrough came to pass. Two houses in the city were raided in quick succession – the first on Great Western Road and the second in Castlemilk – and four men and a woman were arrested in connection with the Shettleston raid and taken to the Tobago Street police station. There, Samuel Mackay, Alexander Gray, Patrick Rice, Jean Rice and Hugh Mannion were charged with breaking into the branch on 29 April, working with Rae to gain access, and stealing £38,789.

Police had never considered Rae to be the driving force – instead, it transpired that Alexander Gray had been the brains behind the lucrative operation. Gray was a well-known Shettleston face, operating a bookmaker’s business and gambling club near to the bank he targeted in the biggest gamble of his life. When the case against the accused was called at the High Court in Glasgow in October 1959, the extent of Gray’s scheming was revealed.

Rae had been a visitor to Gray’s premises on Shettleston Road and Gray had been a customer at the bank as he changed coins into notes. The pair had struck up conversations from day to day. In time, Rae had asked Gray about the possibility of part-time work with him to supplement his Clydesdale wage but the reply he got was not what he had been expecting. Rather than offering employment, Gray revealed he wanted to rob a bank – and not just any bank, but Rae’s bank. The teenager, who travelled to his day job from his home in nearby Carntyne, thought the businessman was joking but soon discovered he was deadly serious.

A role in a major heist was not quite what the 18-year-old had in mind when he went in search of extra income and he had not initially succumbed. The ‘negotiation’ process was aided by a steady flow of alcohol, with Gray grooming his young target during a drinking session which ran long into the night. They started off at Cairns on Miller Street, a bar which today is a popular modern spot with an intriguing past. It was at Cairns, one of Glasgow’s oldest pubs, that the seeds for the Shettleston raid were sown in 1959. The party moved on to Sloans in the Argyll Arcade, another old favourite on the city’s pub and restaurant scene, and Rae admitted he remembered little of the events of that evening. What wasn’t in dispute was that, during the course of that night, his life changed forever, as he became embroiled in something which surely could not have been further from his mind when he reported for his first day’s work at the bank just over a year earlier.

His reward was to be £100 upfront – a reasonable sum for a teenager in the 1950s – as well as a share of the eventual proceeds. It was reported the split could even be as high as 50 per cent for Rae. Shortly after Rae had agreed to play a part in Gray’s enterprise, the ringleader’s plan began to take shape. He presented his rookie sidekick with a chrome soap dish which had been packed with Plasticine. In a throwback to a black-and-white prisoner-of-war camp or jailbreak movie plot, Rae was ordered to make imprints of the safe keys and smuggle them out of the bank. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite as simple as it was made to appear on the silver screen. Rae was able to take advantage of the occasional lapses in the bank system, with stolen moments with the safe keys enabling him to make prints in the Plasticine, but the end results were flawed. Time after time, ‘false’ keys were cut using the impressions as a mould but, time and time again, when Rae was given the new keys to try, they did not open the vault.

It was a twist of fortune which allowed a solution to be found. When a bank colleague left to go on annual leave, he passed on his set of keys to the apprentice teller Rae. That gave him the opportunity to sneak those keys out of the bank during breaks and to ferret them away to Gray – rendezvousing in a local baker’s shop – for the more experienced criminal hands to have a try. Still it was not an instant success. Rae was given nine keys to try as a result of the renewed attempts but just one of those turned a lock on the safe and, even then, only partially. What had started with great expectation had turned into apparent folly.

With frustration building, Gray decided to enlist the services of William Mercer – a foreman joiner with experience of working with locks. Mercer attempted to adjust the set of false keys which had been fashioned but conceded defeat and told his associates that he would need the originals to start from scratch with. Rae came good, the keys were provided and the job was eventually done. A set of working copies was created and Gray’s crew had access to the vault. They also had access to the bank building itself – a key for the mortise lock on the front door was found in Gray’s possession. They were all the tools the gang required to make their move and pull off the immaculate raid.

The plot did not end there, however. Realising that the finger of blame would immediately point to members of the branch staff and perhaps sensing Rae’s vulnerability to police pressure, Gray decided he needed to disguise the roots of the operation. He sought out an experienced safe blower who was tasked with entering the bank after the money had safely been removed and using explosives to hide the fact the robbers had gained entry with keys. That element of the blueprint had to be ripped up when he turned up at the allotted time to discover the bank’s cleaner had reported for duty that evening, rather than in the morning as was the usual routine. He had no option but to walk away, leaving behind the crime scene in unaltered form, as well as thousands of pounds which he was due to pick up as payment.

The other members of the gang worked hard to ensure they had alibis in place, making sure they were seen and heard at various locations in the city centre and at Glasgow Airport. Every angle was covered – the only thing they could not take care of was ensuring the secrets of the raid stayed within the circle of trust.

It was late in June 1959 that it all came to a head with the five arrests. The indictment against Alexander Gray, Patrick Rice, Jean Rice and Hugh Mannion alleged that they carried out the robbery while acting with William Rae and Samuel ‘Dandy’ McKay – who was still at large at the time of the eventual trial after escaping from the hospital wing of Barlinnie shortly after his initial arrest. It was another twist in an eventful story.

McKay was described in Evening Times reports of the time as a ‘big-time gambler, owner of two betting clubs’ and a ‘high-living fugitive from justice’. Following his arrest, he had attempted to do a deal with police, telling detectives that, if they let him go free, he would lead them to £30,000 of the missing cash within two days. It did not work and he reverted to plan B – hatching his escape arrangements with outside help.

Just as the Plasticine plot was akin to something from a film script, so too was McKay’s escape. Ropes were used to allow him to abseil from the prison grounds, after the bars had been removed from the window by sawing through the metal. It is believed he fled first to Canada and also spent time in the US before returning, via Glasgow and London, to build a new life in Ireland with his wife and two young children. He used an assumed name and was said by neighbours to lead a quiet life as a doting dad. That happily-ever-after script was ripped up when, in the summer of 1960, ten detectives surrounded the bungalow he had bought in a village near Dublin and he surrendered without a fight to face the music back in Scotland.

Around a year prior to his arrest, there had been a fresh impetus in the case when £5,000 of the stolen cash was recovered when a member of the public surrendered an attache case packed with the money after mistakenly being handed it at the left luggage desk at St Enoch Station. Detectives kept watch on the left luggage department and soon identified another individual who claimed he had received a case in error. Matching the two together, they swooped to question that second man. Samuel McKay’s brother, John McKay, was charged with resetting £5,175 from the alleged haul. Like his fellow accused, he denied the charge levelled against him and the trial began in October 1959.

Rae turned Queen’s evidence ahead of the trial and stood in the dock to reveal the intimate detail of every stage of the plan. At the end of the High Court trial there was a 10-year prison sentence for Gray, with his three fellow accused – Patrick Rice, Jean Rice and Hugh Mannion – acquitted.

Gray, cutting a stocky figure in the dock, gave evidence in his own defence, claiming he had been framed and that police were desperate to pin responsibility for the heist on him. He also suggested the fact Samuel McKay was on the run had an influence on witnesses, insinuating they would have been frightened of recrimination if they had implicated the absentee. He said he ‘presumed’ that Rae had been ‘terrorised’ by McKay and this had shaped the evidence Rae had given during the court proceedings.

A key fitting the front door of the Shettleston bank had been found in a drawer in Gray’s home but he was relaxed in his explanation, insisting he knew nothing about it and he must have inherited the key when he moved into the property a year earlier. Either that, he said, or it was one of the many keys and locks he had collected during 15 years as a joiner. Despite his best attempts, the jury were not convinced and found him guilty.

John McKay was jailed for three years. Samuel McKay was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison for his part in the robbery plus a further two years for his initial escape from Barlinnie.

There was a footnote to the whole episode. The publicity at the time of the court case and during the investigation around the fact the crew responsible for the robbery had used ‘false’ keys to gain access, to both the building and the vault, appeared to have sparked something of a trend. The Shettleston raid marked the start of a spate of similar incidents in the city in the middle part of 1959. In June, two months after the first attack, the British Linen Bank branch on the Gallowgate was hit when thieves using false keys walked in and promptly attempted to blow open the safes. They failed and fled empty-handed.

Days later, the Royal Bank of Scotland was on the receiving end – this time at Charing Cross. Again false keys were the order of the day but the modus operandi varied somewhat in that it was not the bank branch which was unlocked. Instead, the gang used their specially created key to open a dentist’s surgery located above the RBS premises, cut their way through the roof and dropped 15 feet by rope into the heart of the bank. After failing to blast open the main safe, they turned their attention to the vault containing the night deposits and succeeded in making away with thousands of pounds in cash. The haul was described as ‘infinitesimal’ in comparison to what it could have been if the plan had been 100 per cent successful but police still pointed towards the expertise of the plotting and elements of the execution as they began their hunt for the culprits in what was the latest in a series of episodes. As one chapter closed with the conclusion of the Shettleston case, many more opened for Glasgow’s boys in blue.