The Forbes Street workshop was about the size of a four-car garage and had storage and office space above the ground floor. There was a large workbench with vices already fitted and another small office right next to the entrance. With a concrete floor and double sliding doors opening right on to the pavement, it was ideal for wrought-iron work. William, who was working as a welder with a metal fabrication company, introduced me to a first-class blacksmith, Nat Wilson, who jumped at the idea of joining me in setting up a small business, especially as all he had to put into it was his labour and experience.
Three weeks after I had arrived home, I received a letter from the shipping agents telling me that my goods were waiting for collection at Newcastle docks. By this time I had everything prepared in Glasgow. The High Street shop had been freshly painted, the name skilfully written above the frontage, the interior decorated and carpets fitted. All I had to do was stock it out and we were ready for business. I hired a large van and brought my stuff up from Newcastle and the following day approached the labour exchange for a female employee to run the shop.
I started the first woman I interviewed, a Mrs Alice Taylor. She seemed a perfectly capable woman of about forty years of age and I didn’t fancy interviewing a string of people. The shop was easy enough to manage so, other than dropping in on her for a few hours every day, I left her to it, while Nat and I carried on in the Forbes Street workshop.
As it turned out, it was the metalwork side of things that proved to be the most successful. There was always a steady demand for gates and railings and the other ornamental ironwork in which we specialised. We even got in the occasional heavier job, such as putting up guard rails or erecting corrugated iron barricades along the roof of a factory to prevent children climbing up. However, although we were doing all right, we were not, by any standard, making a fortune. I found myself now with a full workshop of tools and a small van; it wasn’t long before other opportunities arose.
Springburn had at one time been a highly industrialised area with locomotive factories, railway repair sheds and running yards and the large cable manufacturing company in Flemington Street. But by the mid-sixties all these factories were gone and Springburn was an industrial black spot with, statistically speaking, the highest unemployment rate in Scotland, if not the whole of the United Kingdom. A lot of men turned to petty thieving and crime in order to try and sustain some sort of life for themselves and their families. Because of my past I had a reputation of being a bit of a villain and I was always being invited on jobs, or being asked my opinion on one criminal scheme or another. I wasn’t really interested but, inevitably, a job came up that was too good to miss and I gave in to it.
One of the lads in the pub had worked on a suburban railway station that did a big trade in weekly and monthly commuter tickets. Most of these tickets were sold on Fridays and the cash was held in the ticket-office safe over the weekend for Monday morning banking. Every week you could expect there to be several hundred pounds in the safe, but on the first weekend of each month, when salaried workers bought their more expensive monthly passes, this money was greatly increased. An acquaintance of mine who I’ll call Harry came up with the idea of breaking into the ticket office and forcing open the safe.
The trouble was, Harry didn’t know anything about cracking safes. I did, so he asked me if I was interested in trying to open the safe, or if I could advise him on how to open it himself. From his description, I was pretty certain the safe was an old ‘ripper’, but I wanted to make sure before committing myself. Harry assured me that it could easily be seen from the platform and one afternoon we wandered along to the station to case the joint.
One look through the ticket-office window was enough. I even recognised the make of the safe – a John Tann. And if ever there were safes that could be ripped open, the old John Tanns were market leaders, their solid, almost impregnable-looking construction was really only thin sheet metal riveted on to an internal angle-iron frame. These old safes could easily be torn open by tipping them face down on the floor and forcing any thin, flat-edged tool into the joint or seam on the back to open up a gap. When the gap was wide enough, a heavier jemmy could be pushed in and used to force the metal over the heads of the rivets, ripping the back panel clean off. After the back had been removed, a layer of loose fireproofing material had to be scooped out, exposing a thin inner box that actually held the contents of the safe. This was easily forced open and the contents removed – all pretty routine stuff.
I reckoned the job would take about fifteen minutes and Harry was delighted by my diagnosis. He was even more pleased when I told him I would take on the job myself and what’s more, because it was close to the end of the month, it could be done the following weekend.
I wasn’t particularly excited about the forthcoming job – I knew it would be dead easy and put it out of my mind. Preparations would be minimal: I already possessed the few tools we would need and there was my van – or, even better in my opinion, plenty of public transport just a hundred yards from the station. Harry, however, was totally consumed by the job ahead. In the week preceding, it was his constant topic of conversation. I don’t know how many times he brought the subject up, anxiously seeking reassurance that I was definitely going ahead with it, that I definitely had the tools, that the safe was definitely a ‘ripper’, that I could definitely open it and a hundred other questions.
Every moment we were alone he would talk about the job, bolstering his confidence with repeated reassurances from me that everything was going to be all right. This lack of confidence and need of reassurance was one of the flaws I was to find with most of the guys I worked with in Glasgow. Whatever they were up to, they all seemed to have an uncontrollable compulsion to talk about it, as if they were actually talking themselves into doing the job.
I managed to keep Harry calm in the last few days before we actually went on the job, then on the Friday night he sprang a surprise on me. Although I had pressed on him the necessity of keeping quiet, I guessed he had told his best pal Brian about our plans. This apparent need to tell someone was and still is, another common flaw among the criminal fraternity in Glasgow. However, because I knew Harry and Brian had been involved in lots of petty crime together, I wasn’t too bothered about this lapse. On the Saturday night, about half-an-hour before we were due to leave the pub and go ahead on the job, Harry gave me a shock. Admittedly he was a little embarrassed and avoided my eyes as he told me that he had invited Brian along on the job.
I just shook my head and asked him, ‘What for?’
‘Well…’ he said, staring into his pint, not wanting to look at me. ‘He’s skint,’ he finally muttered. ‘And he’s my mate.’
‘But we don’t need an extra man on the job,’ I told him. ‘What’s he going to do?’
‘He can cop-watch for us.’
I sighed in exasperation. ‘Cop-watch! On a closed railway station on a Saturday night?’ In those days, pubs in and around Glasgow closed at half past nine and from then on until the small hours of the morning, every cop on duty was busy either trying to contain running gang fights or attempting to control the Saturday-night domestic violence that was endemic to the city and surrounding areas. A cop watcher on a Saturday-night break-in would be about as much use as binoculars to a blind man. I was annoyed at Harry for issuing his invitation as if the job was some sort of open event, but it was too late to start arguing over it; Brian was officially declared ‘in’.
By a quarter past ten that night, the station had closed down, the last train from the town centre having deposited its cargo of Saturday-night revellers and chugged on its way to its next stop. There was nothing to it. A railway station must be one of the easiest places to break into in the world. For all anyone knew, we might just as well have been three drunks who didn’t know the train times as we wandered up the drive to the station forecourt. Brian took up position at the end of the small station building, leaving Harry and myself to vault over a low wooden fence dir
ectly on to the deserted platform.
I didn’t waste any time. The window of the ticket office was, more or less, just the same as a house window. I placed a folded cloth over one of the glass panes and gave it a hard punch, leaving a fist-sized hole with cracks running in every direction. It’s a funny thing, but the faster and harder you strike a pane of glass, the less noise it makes when breaking. Pulling out the spiky pieces of broken glass is always dodgy as they can easily fall away and often cause bad cuts to the hand and wrist, but I had no problems and within about two minutes of entering the station, I was climbing into the ticket office.
Harry was a bundle of nerves as he handed in my tool bag and I told him to wait until I had a look at the safe. I went over to see if it was either bricked in, fitted to the floor, or loose and perhaps light enough to be taken away. Sometimes, even though a safe is fairly heavy, it can still be carried or dragged away to a place where it can be worked on under safer conditions. The first thing you do with an unopened safe is to try the door handle – it wouldn’t be the first time a safe had been left unlocked. I’ve never actually been lucky enough to come across this situation myself, but on this occasion I was even luckier: the keys were dangling from the keyhole!
Hardly believing my luck, I opened the safe and immediately saw the leather bank pay-in bag. I grabbed the bag and stuffed it in beside my now superfluous tool kit; then I spent another five minutes or so searching around and opening desk drawers to check their contents – it’s surprising what you can sometimes find. Satisfied there was nothing of any value in the office, I made my way back over to the window and began to climb out on to the platform again.
‘What’s up?’ Harry’s worried voice hissed at me from the darkness.
‘Nothing,’ I replied, pushing him out of my way as I stepped through the broken pane. ‘I’ve got the money.’
‘What!’ His exclamation was loud with surprise. ‘You… you’ve not done the safe already?’
‘Aye, it’s done. No bother.’
‘But… but…’ he stuttered, totally stunned at my apparently superhuman performance. ‘You were only in there about five minutes.’
By this time I was on the platform and walking towards the fence. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the money, let’s go.’
Harry stumbled along beside me, still speaking in awed tones. ‘You’ve done it? You opened the safe?’
‘Aye,’ I told him, truthfully enough, ‘I opened it. It was easy.’ I had decided by this time not to tell him exactly how easy.
‘But, but how?’ he stuttered in amazement. ‘How did you do it so quickly? You were hardly in the place five minutes.’
I ignored him and clambered over the fence, landing beside the startled Brian. He too was stunned at our sudden reappearance and immediately grew agitated, thinking something had gone wrong. ‘It’s OK,’ I told him, as he anxiously spun this way and that, trying to see the danger. ‘Job’s done.’
Both Harry and Brian were totally stunned by my seemingly miraculous performance, staring at one another and then back at me with astonished expressions on their faces. They looked so perplexed that I almost gave the game away by laughing out loud, but I kept my face straight and walked off towards the road.
It would be great to be able to say that when we got back to Harry’s house and cut open the locked leather bag, a large bundle of notes fell on to the table. The truth of the matter is that when we cut open the bag we found seven one-pound notes, a single ten-shilling note and that was it! So much for all the money from weekly and monthly ticket sales. I was disappointed, but not half as much as Harry and Brian, who were severely downcast at the result. I’m pretty certain there was no police investigation after the station robbery. I think what happened was that either the police had decided not to waste time over such a paltry theft, or the station staff kept quiet about the break-in to save someone getting the sack for negligence. If there had been an investigation the police would have got on to me almost immediately, because there was no way Harry or Brian could keep quiet about what they thought had happened. The first time they showed up in the pub my ‘performance’ became their main topic of whispered conversation. But naturally they never disclosed the pitiful amount of money stolen; that would have taken the gloss of their story. Instead, they spent their five quid on a couple of rounds of drink, making veiled hints that it had been a ‘good wee turn’. My reputation as a safecracker was sealed.
I had discovered that being self-employed made a tremendous difference in my attitude to work. I know that I suited myself as to what time I started in the mornings, but I certainly worked a lot harder and longer hours knowing that whatever money I made off a job was divided between Nat and me.
When things were quiet at Forbes Street, I took to the road and did door-to-door canvassing, finding out in the process that I was a good salesman. I remember leafleting the whole of Bishopbriggs, a large suburb of Glasgow, advertising a locking screw for window catches. Afterwards, I went round and knocked on the doors showing off my sample. I got a lot of orders for our ‘anti-burglar’ screws, nearly getting arrested a couple of times when suspicious residents thought I was a burglar myself! Later on, Nat would go round drilling the windows and fitting our devices. It was a good little number that we could depend on for an income when things were otherwise slack.
Another series of jobs I drummed up was burning the points off spiked railings. There were always accidents happening with these dangerous spikes that were in widespread use throughout the city’s tenements’ backyards. Then, inevitably, a child slipped while climbing over them and was killed. The newspapers caused a hue and cry, demanding the removal of all pointed spikes and following the publicity I went round every factory and office in the city offering our immediate services. For weeks afterwards, Nat and I could be seen driving about with our oxyacetylene gear making the spikes safe.
To be honest, I was disappointed in the lack of ambition in most of the Glasgow criminals I met. They all had big reputations, but it’s a matter of record that there was very little real villainy – by which I mean money-earning crime – going on in the city. Certainly there were plenty of nutcases who would batter, stab or slash both friend and enemy alike for nothing more than a sideways look, or over the score of a football match, but when it came to earning ability, you were scratching. There were admittedly three or four landmark jobs carried out in Glasgow during the fifties and sixties, but they were really very few and far between. I can only think of a few jobs worthy of mention: the bullion hijack in Bellahouston; Edwards the Jewellers, a quality city-centre shop who had their alarm brilliantly circumvented and lost most of their best stock; Gordon’s shoe shop, where the owners kept a large amount of cash hidden in shoeboxes; the Shettleston bank job, where the thieves had obtained keys to the premises and safe inside; the Beauly bank job (outside the city, but carried out by Glasgow men), where they blew open the safe and got away with the cash and one or two other banks done by the same little firm. I can only think of one decent payroll robbery, the City Cleansing Department in Polmadie Road. And once, a lorry load of whisky was hijacked – that made headline news for days!
In terms of big city crime, there was very little serious stuff going on. No one was into blagging, nobody had ever held up a bank and tie-ups were practically unheard of. Most of the Glasgow Police Force’s time was spent investigating factory break-ins, household burglaries and countless crimes of mindless violence
There was plenty of information coming my way, but it was nearly always petty stuff of little interest or temptation to me. Now and again, though, something half reasonable would turn up and if I had been skint or desperate for money I would probably have taken them on. But because I had a steady income from Crafts & Curios, I could afford to pick and choose what jobs I did.
Needless to say, out of the many jobs I was approached about, one finally surfaced that sounded good. One of my friends, John Thornwood, came up with a guy who had recently le
ft employment in a large city-centre department store. The important part of the information was that the store banked its takings every day, but because the banks did not open on Saturdays it meant that all the store’s takings, from Friday afternoon until closing time on Saturday, were locked in a safe in the cashier’s office over the weekend. It was obvious from the informant’s description that the safe was fairly new and would not therefore be a ‘ripper’. But the key point in this story, if you will forgive the pun, was that a complete set of duplicate keys for the entire premises was kept in an old safe in the manager’s office.
Of course, we asked the obvious questions. How did he know the keys were in the safe? The answer to that important question was that if ever a key was lost, or an employee in charge of a key failed to arrive at work, all you had to do was to go to the manager’s office and a duplicate key would be produced from the safe. Our man had been in the office several times and seen rows of keys hanging inside the safe. Did he know for certain that duplicate keys for the cashier’s safe were kept in the safe? At least our man was honest enough about that and told us that he didn’t know for absolute sure, but all the indications were that they must be there. After all, there was certainly a duplicate of every other key in the safe.
It sounded all right, but how would we gain entry to the premises? That was really easy. The worker himself was prepared to ‘do a sleeper’ – hide himself somewhere inside the store until after closing time, then emerge from his hiding place to admit us through a wicket gate in the goods entrance. Once locked inside, we would have the run of the store. It sounded too good to miss and we decided to go ahead.
Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery Page 18