At half past six in the morning it was still dark when our train wheezed to a halt and deposited us, complete with luggage and golf clubs, at the small wooden platform that was Obuasi station. A driver and car from the gold mine had been sent to meet us and we were driven straight to one of the mine’s guest bungalows. Neither of us had slept well on the train and we were glad to get into a real bed for a few hours’ proper sleep.
At ten in the morning, a loud banging on the door of our temporary abode awakened us. John Ogilvie, George’s friend who was also the mine manager, had arrived to greet us and treat us to breakfast in the mine cafeteria. After introductions over breakfast, John arranged for one of his foremen, a Welshman called Gareth Williams, to show me around the mine. John and George had their golf routine already set up and they both headed straight for the course. In the meantime I got kitted out in the full mining kit: big boots, white overalls, hard hat, battery-operated light and I was ready for the big drop into one of the deepest gold mines in Africa.
Before I went to Obuasi, I had visions of pulling nuggets of gold out of the walls of the mine, like you see in some of the old cowboy pictures. But long before I actually got there, I had learned that the Ashanti Goldfield at Obuasi, the richest gold mine in West Africa, only produced something like ten to twelve grams of gold for every ton of ore that they processed. There were no nuggets of gold there. It was the diamond mines all over again. But I had known this all along. I knew I was kidding myself about getting my hands on any gold, even if there had been nuggets. It was just another imaginative, idle dream.
Being so deep underground was an almost eerie experience. It grew cooler as we dropped and by the time we hit level fourteen, the working level at that time, it was almost cold. I don’t know how far we walked along the long, dimly lit tunnels, but I felt as if I was walking inside the body of some gigantic monster. And in the distance, growing louder as we approached, I could hear the steady throb of machinery, like the heartbeat of a living thing.
Once we reached the workface, Gareth got the culling-machine operator to demonstrate his skills, but the flying dust and debris was so thick I could hardly breathe. After an increasingly red-eyed look around, I was glad to head back to the surface. Above ground I was shown round the smelting sheds, ending up in the vault where the finished gold bars were kept before being transported to the treasury in Accra. This was an experience in itself and my last chance to earn. They have an old custom at Obuasi which says that, if you can pick up one of their gold ingots with one hand, you can keep it. Every visitor gets a try at becoming rich, but they only say that because it is impossible to lift the ingot. In the first place, they weigh twenty-eight pounds apiece and, in the second place, with their tapered sides, they are the wrong shape to grip properly. As well as that, pure raw gold has a greasy feel to it, which means that the harder you grip, the quicker you squeeze it out of your grasp. It is impossible. It is just a game for visitors. It adds a bit of spice to their visit and they can always say, like me, that a fortune literally slipped through their fingers.
Later on I met up with George and John and the rest of the weekend was passed either in talking about golf or playing golf. And of course drinking. I tried a round of golf myself on the Sunday, but John Ogilvie couldn’t put up with my slow play and I was politely left behind. I enjoyed my weekend at Obuasi, even if I didn’t manage to pick up the ingot of gold. It is another experience I will never forget.
A few days after we arrived back at Takoradi, a job turned up for me. Not long after we visited the gold mine, the London office of Gill and Duffus telexed the Accra office to report that they had received several complaints from customers about the condition of the cocoa butter being delivered to them. The problem had been traced to ships’ loading officers stacking the packages of butter too high in the holds of their ships. The cardboard cartons were sturdy enough to allow stacking up to seven cases high. But the loading officers were filling the cargo holds to their limit, sometimes as high as twelve cartons in each stack. This over-stacking meant that the lower cartons were buckling under the weight, crushing the hard butter into crumbling lumps, which severely reduced the quality of the product.
Gill and Duffus were well aware of their packages’ limitations and actually paid for the empty cargo space above the agreed height. This was to avoid the crushing and to maintain the high quality of the butter. However, the loading officers, being on a tonnage bonus, were ignoring the instructions and stacking the cartons as high as they could, gaining space for extra cargo. What George wanted me to do was go down to Takoradi harbour when they were loading the boats and check that they were stacking the cartons to the correct height.
I was pleased to be of some use and after being issued with my harbour pass, I became a regular visitor to the docks when a ship was being loaded with our cocoa butter. As a result of this, I became friendly with ships’ officers and on two or three occasions I was invited to stay on board their craft for a free cruise down to Nigeria, usually returning on the same ship a few days later.
On one occasion, owing to berthing problems at Port Harcourt and again at a place called Burutu, I was away for three weeks. It was a great experience, steaming at full speed upriver to the inland ports, some as far as a hundred miles from the coast. On one of these trips, I experienced a couple of incidents I will never forget. Waiting mid-river for a berth at Port Harcourt, the ship’s captain, a German called Meyer, lowered the painter’s cradle into the water so I could swim off the side of the ship.
I quite enjoyed this break in the monotony until, one day on the bridge, I picked up a pair of powerful binoculars and saw that what I had taken to be canoes pulled up on the beach were actually a row of basking crocodiles! I was assured that these monsters never ventured mid-river, but I thought, Fuck that! Crocodiles! And that was the end of my swimming.
A few days later, in a river port called Sapele, I was being ‘taxied’ ashore from our mid-river anchorage in a native canoe. I suddenly became aware of a terrible, rotten stench. It was really bad and I made a pinched nose sign to my ‘driver’. Immediately he veered off to the right and approached an odd-looking lump sticking up out of the water. He bumped alongside it and although the stink was making me screw up my face, I was curious to know what it was. As we drifted past the floating object, I realised it was a pair of water-swollen human buttocks. As I stared in amazement, I saw that they belonged to a headless corpse. I was a little stunned to say the least, but the boatman was unperturbed. ‘He be t’iefman,’ he told me, pushing at the buttocks with his paddle. ‘He be catched. They chop him for head, then he go for river.’
Well, thiefman or not, I felt that I should report this discovery to Captain Meyer and instructed the canoe owner to take me back to the ship. I really felt quite excited about it – my first dead body! ‘Captain Meyer, Captain Meyer,’ I gabbled as soon as I had rousted him out on to the bridge. ‘Look!’ I said, pointing dramatically at the floating buttocks.
‘Ja, ja,’ Captain Meyer looked over the side for a few seconds. ‘What about it?’ He looked at me with a faintly puzzled expression on his face.
‘It’s a dead body,’ I repeated. ‘Look! Floating in the water. It’s got no head.’
‘Ja, ja, ja,’ he said, making an irritated gesture with his hand. ‘So?’
‘Well.’ I was nonplussed by his offhand attitude to the most dramatic moment of my life to date. ‘Shouldn’t we report it to someone?’
‘This is not my business,’ he told me, shaking his head as he turned away to return to his comfortable cabin.
‘I’m going to report it to the harbourmaster,’ I said, thinking this was pretty important.
‘You do what you want,’ the captain told me. Then he raised his eyebrows and gave me a little smile. ‘But if you do report this body, it will cost you £75.’
‘What?’ I turned back to him. ‘Why’s that?’
‘In this country, James,’ he said, his smile widening, ‘it is wh
at the English call finders keepers. If you report finding the body, it becomes your responsibility. You will have to pay for its recovery and burial.’ And with that he left the bridge.
It was two days before the bloated body finally disappeared, either sunk or eaten by crocodiles. Apparently it was not an unusual thing to find a body in the water at Sapele and certainly no one was going to pay £75 to have the corpse of a t’iefman buried. Mind you, I made a mental note not to be tempted by anything during my stay.
Back in Takoradi, my social life had picked up considerably. George had got used to the idea of me going out on my own once or twice a week and I spent many a pleasant night dancing in the Zenith and Jamboree clubs in Takoradi. Of course, I met local girls in these places who were quick to show that a romance would be welcome and it would have been easy to chalk up trophy after trophy, but I had to restrain myself in that area. Takoradi was a small town and whereas my visits to the nightclubs would be tolerated, fraternising with the local girls would soon cause gossip within the European community. I soon found out I wasn’t alone in my nocturnal activities. Most nights I was out I would spot familiar white faces tucked away in smoky corners, enjoying the company of some local beauty. Sometimes we would exchange a nod or a smile but, largely by tacit agreement, we mostly pretended not to see one another.
Although I was enjoying my stay in Ghana and lacked for nothing, socially or materially, I was quite conscious of the fact that I wasn’t actually making any money. What I was ‘paid’ by George was really only pocket money and to be honest it was all I was due. After all, the work I did was no more or less than I would have done even if I had been out there as a bona fide guest. At the back of my mind I knew I was really just marking time and I didn’t want to go back home at the end of things and find myself in exactly the same position I had been in when I left. I wasn’t interested in asking for official recognition and payment for my cargo inspections. Besides, I had entered Ghana on a visitor’s visa and was not supposed to do any paid work at all. So I had to try and figure out some way of making and saving a few pounds for when I went home.
One of the first things I had noticed in the cocoa mill was a huge stack of fifty-gallon oil drums. They took up most of the large forecourt in front of the processing plant and seemed to be serving no purpose at all that I could see. One of the times when I was gossiping in George’s office, I asked him why they were there.
A couple of years earlier there had been a scare within the company when the Ghanaian government announced its intention to suspend imports on certain small manufactured items. The government stated that in order to provide more jobs for the people, they intended to produce certain goods themselves. The list of embargoed goods included manufactured cardboard cartons and this caused concern in the offices of Gill and Duffus.
As a result of these new proposals, the Ghanaian customs authorities had held a shipment of cartons back. This caused a panic at West African Mills and Mr Sloot had to make hurried decisions regarding alternative means of packaging the cocoa butter. In Ghana there were not a lot of choices. One idea he came up with was to buy up a huge stock of fifty-gallon oil drums that were no longer needed by the military. However, once they were purchased, it was soon discovered that although the liquid cocoa butter could be poured into the drums easily enough, once hardened inside it became, short of hacking the heavy steel containers to pieces, impossible to get it out again. The oil drums were unusable and Mr Sloot’s apparently brilliant idea came to nothing.
So the huge oil drums basked in the sunshine of the factory forecourt, leaving the workers to enjoy their shade during meal breaks. I dare say they even thought that they had been placed there for that very purpose. In the meantime, no one dared mention the embarrassing oil-drum stockpile to Mr Sloot. No one, that is, but me.
I suppose it was because I was not connected in any way to the company, but old Theodore seemed quite amused when I asked him about the oil drums. He told me the story, adding that just shortly afterwards the government had given exemption to West African Mills regarding the importation of cardboard cartons.
‘What’s going to happen to them, then?’ I asked.
Mr Sloot, a phlegmatic Dutchman, pulled a face and held up both hands. ‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘There’s nothing I can do. No one wants them.’
‘What about scrap value?’
‘I thought of that,’ he admitted. ‘But it’s not worth the dealer’s time coming to pick them up. Too bulky for the weight, they say. I’d have to pay the dealers to take them away and I don’t think G & D would like that. Anyway, it doesn’t cost anything to leave them in the yard.’
I already had the glimmerings of an idea for the oil drums, but I wasn’t really sure if it would work.
‘What if I could sell them?’ I asked. ‘Would you let me have them on the cheap?’
‘But they are worth nothing to the company now, James. The accountant wrote them off a long time ago. If you can get rid of that damn mountain, you can have them for nothing. I’ll be only too happy to see them gone.’
‘OK then,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got an idea, but I’ll have to see if it will work out.’
‘You go ahead and do what you like, James,’ he assured me. ‘You’ve got a free hand as far as I am concerned.’
So I became the proud owner of about two thousand fifty-gallon oil drums. Now, what was I going to do with them?
I had noticed that most of the water supply in Takoradi was drawn from outside stand pumps. This meant that the women were constantly going to and from the pumps, drawing water into plastic buckets or similar containers and, with limited storage facilities, this was often a timely inconvenience. I had the idea that the women of Takoradi would welcome the opportunity to buy the fifty-gallon drums for use as home reservoirs, which they could keep topped up at their own convenience.
I spread the word out around the factory workers that the oil drums were available for sale at ten shillings each to the public, while the workers themselves could buy them at a bargain five bob. In this way I hoped the word would spread around and the local people would come looking for them. I was right enough. Within a day or two townsfolk and villagers from further afield, were arriving at the factory gates with handcarts, bikes and even prams to carry away the large, prized containers.
When Mr Sloot saw that there was indeed a good chance of getting rid of his embarrassing oil drums, he helped to speed up the process by allowing me two labourers and the use of a forklift to manhandle the goods. Day by day, Mr Sloot’s folly shrank away until finally the last of the oil drums was loaded on to a creaking handcart and disappeared along the dusty factory road. Out of more than 2,000 drums, I sold over 1,700 at ten shillings each, 60-odd to the mill workers at half price and the rest I gave away because, for one reason or another, they were too damaged to ask money for. I dare say the locals who got the free leaky ones found some use for them. Less than four weeks after I had spoken to Mr Sloot, the drums were gone.
All good things come to an end, but I think I would have stayed even longer in Ghana if George hadn’t been taken seriously ill. He had been complaining about back pains for months, even before I arrived there, he told me. But suddenly the pains became severe and he had to go into hospital. They investigated for all sorts of things before finally discovering that two vertebrae of his spine were crumbling and needed specialist treatment. His employers immediately booked him into the Rowley Bristow Orthopaedic Hospital in Kent and my ‘job’ in Ghana came to an abrupt end.
George was still able to hobble about and was allowed out of hospital for the week or so before we caught the flight home. By this time we had become good friends and he was a little concerned about my future, mainly because I had told him about my past and he was afraid I would revert to my old ways once I was back home. Of course, he knew all about my success with the oil drums and I had quite impressed him with my business acumen.
It was George who suggested that I use some of the mo
ney I had made to buy a selection of woodcarvings and other African craftwork items and have them shipped home for resale. It wasn’t a bad idea either. The local wood carvers turned out some excellent work – really attractive and very ornamental carved heads, tribal masks and animals, as well as a wide range of hardwood coffee tables and Ashanti stools. I was offered free transport home for them by one of the shipping companies Gill and Duffus used and the mill workshop would pack and crate them for me. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea and I became quite enthusiastic.
The prices seemed ridiculously cheap to me, but the locals were happy enough to sell, so I went ahead and bought up literally hundreds of carvings. The coffee tables and stools were by far the dearest items, but even those were inexpensive. Solid mahogany tables with inlaid palm trees for under a fiver? They had to sell back home.
My African interlude was over, but I was looking forward now to trying my hand at business.
Chapter Seventeen
The Great Train Station Robbery
Once I got back to Glasgow, I began preparing to run my business. I knew that simply selling the African stuff wouldn’t be enough, so I decided to open up a small welding shop where I could produce things like door grilles, gates and railings. That gave me an idea of what to call the business: Crafts & Curios. I rather liked the name. I rented a double-fronted shop in High Street, in the Townhead district of Glasgow as a retail outlet and a workshop in Forbes Street, Bridgeton, to produce the gates and railings.
Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery Page 17