by Jim Morris
During Bob’s time away he had surgery on the ligaments in his knee, but it didn’t go well and he was left on crutches for the rest of his days. He had been a very good footballer too, and in his National Service days there was talk of him becoming a physical training instructor.
Bob didn’t have a big criminal record, but for some reason his name came up a couple of times in police circles and intelligence after the Great Train Robbery. Both he and Buster were told to “. . . take a ‘oliday,” and to come back when they were told it was safe to. Bob went to the West Country, but his lady had given birth so he wanted to see his son; and he was nicked. I’ll return to this point later.
Tommy Wisbey left a thumbprint on the bath rail at Leatherslade Farm, the hideout, and part of Bob’s palm-print was found on a beer can. Roger didn’t leave any fingerprints at the farm, but was caught keeping custody of a huge sum of money in Bournemouth. But with all of that, Bob wore three pairs of gloves throughout the stay at Leatherslade Farm.
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The beer can on which Bob’s palm-print was found became the focus of an inquiry, even though he gave a reason for its presence. When the police discovered the farm there was an extremely well-stocked larder – the firm had prepared for a long stay. But the police had announced that they might be looking for military-type vehicles and that they thought the firm might be within a thirty-mile radius of the scene of the robbery (actually, the police said thirty minutes, but the press did them a favour), so they decided to leave earlier than intended.
The huge larder containing soup and beans and Ritz crackers and eggs and lots more besides, including a few large cans of beer was left all ready for the police when the place was discovered. There were other similar empty cans in a pit that had been dug in the garden, and where a fire had been started by the robbers some charred remains of other cans were found. In total the police found nine cans, some full and some empty. This gave them a very fruitful line of enquiry, and although it didn’t lead to a conviction per se, it did block what might have been an effective defence.
Detective Superintendant Maurice Ray and his team of fingerprint officers moved into Leatherslade Farm and virtually hibernated there. Many fingerprints were found, and it was claimed that Tommy Wisbey’s was on the rail of the bath and Bob Welch’s palm-print, or part of it, was on the side of one of the large cans of beer.
So there started one of the best-documented enquiries of the robbery. Where did the cans come from, and could anyone be identified as the purchaser? In the event this didn’t happen, but the police weren’t to know this until later. But it was a very good lead.
I have read the term ‘pipkin’ as a description of the can – it was a “pipkin of ale”. But elsewhere, including in a picture I’m told was from the sixties, the beer has the name ‘Pipkin Ale’.
The Pipkin can on which Bob’s palm-print was found was carefully examined, as were the other cans. The police discovered that the number ‘723’ was stamped on top – it appeared this was separate and quite different to other writing, printing and artwork on the cans. This was a lead, no matter how slender – the cans came from somewhere, and someone had bought them. It also gives an indication of just how thorough the police investigation was.
Bob Welch’s finger and palm impressions were on file at Scotland Yard and they would have been compared with the marks found at Leatherslade Farm. The palm-print was found to be a match to that found on the ‘Pipkin’ can. This particular can had been opened and drunk from but it wasn’t empty, and it had been put back in the cupboard in the kitchen. So this seemed to be evidence to link Bob with the farm, and evidence found at the farm was the main thrust of evidence against the robbers.
But Bob had been told to “. . . take a ‘oliday”, so when his palm-print was found he wasn’t around: he was in Devon on a farm. But his son was very young and Bob came back to see him.
When he came back to London the Flying Squad were waiting, though how they knew he was coming has never been explained. He was first taken to Scotland Yard, where he was interviewed by Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, and then he was taken to Aylesbury on the afternoon of 26 October 1963, and charged.
In total nine Pipkin Ale cans were found at the farm. Some were only really recognisable by their size and shape. The can on which Bob’s palm-print was found was about half full, and it was assumed the can had been opened at the farm. It was found in the kitchen cupboard with two other cans, which were full. As with other cans at the farm, they had the numbers ‘723’ stamped on top. This arrangement of numbers suggested perhaps a batch number or possibly a date, so it was thought that they may have occupied the same shelf or stockroom, or had been in the same warehouse at the same time. And later, if they had been bought together in a retail outlet, then would the cashier remember such a large amount being bought at the same time? And more to the point, remember who bought them?
The first place for the police to look was at the brewery where the beer originated, which was Friary Meux in Guildford, Surrey. It was soon discovered that the beer had a short shelf life of only about four weeks and the number stamped on the lid of the cans was a date stamp that indicated when the can was filled; ‘723’ would therefore have been filled on 23 July. It was also discovered that the colour of the number stamp – mauve – indicated 1963, because the previous year’s date was stamped in black.
The police had been very specific in checking with Mr and Mrs Rixon, who had owned Leatherslade Farm before the robbers bought it, that they had left nothing behind when they moved. Therefore the Pipkins had been brought to the farm at the time of, or after, the robbers had moved in. The police also had to be sure that the beer cans were not stolen, which they did. Finally, as far as they could discover, none of the robbers or those suspected had been employed by Friary Meux, or their distributors. Therefore, it could be fairly confidently assumed that the beer had been bought by a member of the firm or their associates, and taken by them to the farm.
So where did they buy the beer, and was identification of the purchaser possible?
Once the police knew the mark was a date stamp, the next questions to answer were: how many cans carried that date stamp, and where had all the cans gone? They discovered that a huge amount had gone out of the canning department of the brewery at Guildford and been distributed via depots as far as Tewkesbury in Gloucester in the west and to Kent in the east. Some 733 cans remained in Guildford for their own ‘patch’; part of which was the significant Ind Coope depot at Oxford. The remaining cans were dispatched to Chichester (441 cans), Tidworth (199), Aldershot (161) and to the Tyler Group in Woking (596). A questionnaire was created for police officers to take to retailers, in the hope this would allow the police to whittle down possible leads.
Concurrent with this line of enquiry was that of the purchase of Leatherslade Farm. The inquiry centred on the town of Bicester, just over the border from Buckinghamshire, in Oxfordshire. One of the estate agents, Midland Marts, who finally sold the farm had received an enquiry from a Mr Richards, and a receipt for a hotel in Leicestershire made out to a Mr Richards had been found in a drawer at Bob’s house – with Jim Hussey’s, rather than his own fingerprints on it. The police wondered if the two pieces of information were linked.
Detective Sergeant Jack Pritchard, who was part of the initial secondment of Scotland Yard officers, followed this up and interviewed Mr Douglas Fairmaner of Friary Meux Brewery in Guildford. However, no retail purchase of that many cans was made either directly from the brewery or its own retail outlet. But Mr Fairmaner could furnish a list of where the cans had been distributed from Guildford – a questionnaire was drawn up to help officers glean specific information. Little materialised, though.
Ind Coope didn’t technically exist in 1963, because in 1961 it had merged with Ansells and Tetley’s to form Allied Breweries. But its name was still on invoices and some distribution depots were called by the old name: its distribution network was large and it took de
livery of cans from Guildford in bulk and distributed them to sub-depots in Reading, Westerham and Oxford. A senior officer was sent to each distribution centre.
Mr Robert De’Clerck was interviewed at the Oxford distribution centre. He explained that the depot served about a hundred pubs and off licences in Oxford and neighbouring counties. Among a vast amount of other details, he told the officer that twelve cans (in two packs of six) were delivered to the Victoria Wine shop in Market Square, Bicester – this was only nine miles from Leatherslade Farm.
The shop was visited. The manager, Mr Thomas Lapper, told the detectives that between about 9.30 am and 10.00 am on the morning of Thursday 7 August a man had come into the shop and asked for four or more cans of the Pipkin beer; there was a dummy can in the window. Mr Lapper got four cans from his stockroom.
The man asked, “Do you have any more?”
Mr Lapper said he had another six cans, which the man said he would take. He paid and Mr Lapper offered to help him carry the cans out of the shop:
“No. I can manage,” said the man.
And he did – seventy pints of fluid plus the weight of the cans, at a rough guess twenty-five kilogrammes or five and a half stone.
Mr Lapper watched the man walk away across the Market Square car park, but his attention was taken by another customer so he didn’t see him get into a vehicle. But it was an unusual amount to buy in one single purchase.
The man he described was between forty-five and fifty, with brown hair thinning on top and a long face that was clean shaven. He wore a light-blue suit, pale-blue shirt and dark-blue tie.
We shall never know if this was significant, and I could find no record of an identity parade. Mr Lapper had said he would recognise the man again. The problem was the man’s appearance, because the firm had spent a night at the farm the previous night, the raid having been put off until the night of 7/8 August as the load on 6/7 August was reported as light.
It can’t be seen as absolute fact that the cans purchased that morning in Victoria Wine in Bicester were the same cans found at the abandoned Leatherslade Farm. But the prosecution was to suggest just that, and their evidence wasn’t challenged.
There can, of course, be no proof that the man described was one of the robbers either. There are no adequate descriptions of the three men loosely known as Frank Munroe, Alf Thomas or Bill Jennings. And with the best will in the world, the description given by Mr Lapper of the man who had come into his shop wasn’t enough to pin anyone down.
So what the police were left with was a vague description of the man who made the purchase; a collection of similar cans at Leatherslade Farm; and the partial palm-print of a villain whom police had heard through the grapevine was involved but whose criminal record didn’t serve up the type of CV that would fit. (I use the term CV because a criminal record only accounts for the crimes where a conviction has been secured). In short, they had nothing to take into a court that would be of any use in prosecution.
However, to turn the matter on its head, Bob was to describe the situation of the palm-print as innocent access. The story he offered up was that with a couple of his friends – Tommy Wisbey (about as close a fit as any of the known robbers to the description of the purchaser of the cans) and Jim Hussey – he made a trip to a farm ‘somewhere’ outside of London. There, Jim was to deliver some fruit and veg, along with a friend of his, one Ronnie Dark, and Bob went along to give Jim a lift back to London.
When the delivery had been made Bob saw one of the cans. As he was in the licensed trade, he picked up the can to have a closer look. As he did this Tommy used the bathroom (that’s how his thumbprint got on the bath rail). Then the whole entourage left this farm. They had no idea the farm was Leatherslade Farm, or that what they were delivering was fruit and veg to keep the train robbery firm fed for the time they intended to be holed up there.
In court, apparently Ronnie Dark didn’t really convince the jury. Neither did the story Bob and the rest of them gave!
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One mystery is just where Jim Hussey came into the picture. Piers Paul Read puts his affiliations close to Bruce Reynolds and his firm, whereas others have put him closer to the South Coast Raiders. But he can’t have taken too active a part in their earlier work, as he was away until early 1962, and he’d been in “. . . for a five stretch”. Then there is the story of him going to Germany to work the following September – he was to team up with a group of pickpockets for the Oktoberfest, but when their activities were in full swing they were nicked and Jim was deported in December. I think this episode may be part fabrication because of the story of the German connection in Piers’ book. It seemed a convenient way to introduce the German connections into the plot. So Jim’s activities remain a bit of a mystery.
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Another part of the jigsaw was the receipt from the hotel found in Bob’s house. It was dated 22 May 1963 and was for nineteen pounds seven shillings, made out to a Mr Richards, for the accommodation of five men at the Flying Horse Hotel in Nottingham. The aim of the trip, so the police were told, was to try to obtain some black-market FA Cup Final tickets. The bill was for a Mr Richards of 35 Brompton Road, London, which was a false address.
Added to this is another piece of the jigsaw. A man had gone to Midland Marts, the estate agent in Bicester, to enquire about smallholdings or farms in the area and had given his name as Mr Richards. He received details of the only place on the estate agent’s books that fitted his search criteria: Leatherslade Farm.
The palm-print, though, was enough to convict Bob of the train robbery. No evidence was found at the trackside, no evidence of identification – only a partial palm-print on a moveable object found at the robbers’ hideout. Bob was later to say that if a dog had gone up to Leatherslade Farm and left a paw-print then he too would have got thirty years!
Victoria Wine is still with us, though a seven pint-can of beer at 11/- (55p) is long gone. Gone too is the brewery of Friary Meux in Guildford; it closed in the mid-1960s – it had been taken over by Allied Breweries and the brewery buildings were later demolished. Some folk from the area referred to the brew as ‘Friary Muck’.
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Recruiting a second firm for the train robbery was also desirable from the manpower point of view; a bit more muscle was always of use. And as the prize was to be in the low millions, there was enough to set them all up nicely.
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Back-tracking, though, it would be a good idea to explain as far as I can the history of the South Coast Raiders. It would be impossible to list the crimes they participated in; over fifty years have passed since the jobs were pulled off, so it would be a brave man who’d point a finger and say, ‘They did this.’ Instead, it is worthwhile to consider the raids of the time that might fit a particular modus operandi and identify when it became necessary to use a different approach.
Considering the make-up of the firm, it’s not surprising that many different ploys were used.
The surviving members who were identified – Tommy Wisbey and Bobby Welch – both have something of a patchy memory, whether because they genuinely don’t remember details fifty years on, or because one robbery/crime blurs into another, or because they want to give an account that pulls one away from the violence aspect and back to the audacious. So a clear history cannot be considered with any degree of certainty.
It seems that Roger Cordrey has passed away, and the fourth member of the firm was never identified. On a couple of occasions there was some suggestion of a fifth member. So the following has a few ‘ifs’, a couple of ‘buts’ and a ‘maybe’ or three.
In essence, one is looking for train robberies involving three or four men (Roger was usually occupied on the track and a car driver was also identified; they may be one and the same person.) A number of raids were made, so it’s not going to push credibility too far to discuss the raids that were reported and suggest they were the work of the South Coast Raiders – there are common themes.
One raid I c
ould find no report of but it may not have been reported in the daily national newspapers if the prize was either worthless or the firm went to their usual elaborate plans but the yield was zero – I’ll discuss this when the particular raid comes up.
On Thursday 18 August 1960 the term ‘The Great Train Robbery’ was used on the front page. The firm appeared to get away with between £6,000 and £8,000 (£6,000 would be around £120,000 today). The train left Brighton on time at 2.25 pm, heading for London, and the firm pounced after the train left Haywards Heath. The three men casually walked through the train and into the guard’s carriage, where mail was carried. It was reported that perhaps up to thirty people were travelling in the carriage immediately in front of the guard’s carriage, and the police were later hopeful that a description would be forthcoming.
It was described as “. . . one of the coolest robberies in history”. But it can’t have been pleasant for the guard. He was Mr Reginald Scammell from Portslade near Brighton, who was in his mid-fifties. At first, when the door of his compartment opened and he saw a man with a hood on and slits at the eyes, he thought it was a prank. He said in his statement:
“I thought for a moment it was somebody having a bit of fun. It didn’t dawn on me that it was serious until he put his arm – I was sitting sideways at a small table – around my eyes. He said: ‘If you are quiet you wont get hurt.’”
The firm member was then joined by his partners.
“Then in came two more men and threw me on the floor. They laid me on my stomach and tied me up with rope. Then they put some home-made metal handcuffs on my hands behind my back. They put sticky tape around my eyes and pulled my feet up to meet my hands. When we were nearly at the end of the journey they put a gag round my mouth. One of the men told me: ‘We are only working men like you, trying to get a living.’”
There were twelve mailbags in total on the train and they riffled through each until they found what they were looking for: registered packages containing surplus cash from Brighton banks being sent back to head office in London. It was felt the firm had got hold of one of the special keys to open the door from the travelling compartment to the guard’s carriage; Mr Scammell thought they would be easy enough to come by.