Ronnie Biggs: How the Great Train Robber Escaped Wandsworth Prison in 1965
At approximately three o'clock on the afternoon of 8 July 1965, a bright red furniture van approached the perimeter wall of Wandsworth Prison in south-west London.
It was an ordinary enough sight. People moved furniture. Vans came and went. Nothing about the afternoon suggested that one of Britain's most notorious criminals was about to disappear over a prison wall.
Within minutes, Ronnie Biggs and three other prisoners were gone.
Biggs had served barely fifteen months of a thirty-year sentence for his part in the Great Train Robbery.
His escape would keep him beyond the reach of British justice for almost thirty-six years.
The remarkable part was how little time the operation required.
The Great Train Robbery and the Thirty-Year Sentence
On 8 August 1963, a gang of robbers stopped a Glasgow-to-London Travelling Post Office train near Leighton Buzzard, Buckinghamshire.
The operation was carefully planned. A railway signal had been interfered with, forcing the train to stop. The gang boarded, assaulted train driver Jack Mills and moved the train to Bridego Bridge, where sacks containing millions of pounds in used banknotes were transferred to waiting vehicles.
The haul exceeded £2.6 million.
The robbers subsequently gathered at Leatherslade Farm, where they made the unfortunate decision to leave behind enough forensic evidence to interest Scotland Yard.
Fingerprints recovered from the hideout helped investigators identify members of the gang.
Biggs was not its mastermind. His involvement was relatively limited, but the courts were in no mood for leniency.
In April 1964, he received a thirty-year sentence.
For a man who had never demonstrated much enthusiasm for institutional discipline, the prospect was distinctly unappealing.
3:05pm: The Escape from Wandsworth Prison
The escape began during the prisoners' afternoon exercise period.
According to a contemporary report published in The Guardian on 9 July 1965, an accomplice wearing a stocking mask appeared above the prison wall and lowered a rope ladder and a tubular steel ladder into the exercise yard.
Biggs and three other prisoners immediately made for them.
Several inmates obstructed the prison officers attempting to intervene.
Outside, the red furniture van had been positioned against the wall. A raised platform on its roof allowed the escaping prisoners to descend from the prison perimeter onto the vehicle.
They then disappeared into the waiting transport.
A green Ford Zephyr was also involved in the operation, along with other getaway vehicles.
One witness, Winifred Williams, the wife of a prison employee, initially assumed the furniture van was simply making a delivery. She became rather more concerned when she noticed masked men and a firearm.
By the time the alarm spread, the escapees had vanished.
The Home Secretary visited the prison that evening, while police began investigating what appeared to be an operation assisted by people with knowledge of the prison's routines.
It was an astonishing embarrassment for the authorities.
Four men had escaped from a major London prison in broad daylight, using ladders and a removal van.
Not exactly the sophisticated technological future of criminal enterprise.
From a Paris Surgeon to the Beaches of Brazil
Biggs's escape was only the beginning.
He reached France, where he underwent expensive plastic surgery intended to alter his appearance. New identity documents helped him continue his journey.
He eventually travelled to Australia, living under assumed names and attempting to establish an ordinary existence.
His wife Charmian and their children joined him, but the arrangement could not last.
When investigators began closing in during 1969, Biggs abandoned Australia and fled to Brazil.
There, his life took an increasingly peculiar turn.
Rather than disappearing quietly, he became a minor international celebrity, granting interviews, posing for photographs and cultivating the image of a cheerful fugitive enjoying the sunshine.
British detective Jack Slipper travelled to Brazil in 1974, but legal obstacles prevented Biggs's return.
In 1978, Biggs even recorded with the Sex Pistols, appearing on their single No One Is Innocent.
The transformation was complete.
A convicted criminal had become a novelty attraction, somewhere between a tabloid celebrity and an embarrassing reminder that the British authorities still wanted him.
Why the Escape Became Bigger Than the Robbery
The public mythology surrounding Biggs often obscured the original crime.
The Great Train Robbery was not a harmless adventure. Railway workers were threatened and assaulted, and driver Jack Mills suffered serious injuries.
Yet Biggs's extraordinary years abroad gradually displaced the robbery itself in the popular imagination.
His escape also belonged to a troubling period for British prison security.
Other high-profile breakouts, including those of fellow train robber Charlie Wilson in 1964 and Soviet spy George Blake in 1966, contributed to a major review of the prison system.
The resulting reforms helped establish the modern classification of prisoners according to security risk.
Biggs eventually returned voluntarily to Britain in May 2001, suffering from serious health problems.
He was imprisoned again, released on compassionate grounds in 2009 and died in December 2013, aged 84.
By then, the robbery had become a familiar piece of British criminal folklore.
But the moment that made Ronnie Biggs famous was not the theft of millions from a Royal Mail train.
It was a red furniture van parked beside a London prison wall.
And an afternoon when the British establishment discovered that thirty years could be reduced to fifteen months with a sufficiently determined accomplice and a ladder.
Explore Hellwood's Ronnie Biggs T-Shirt, inspired by one of Britain's most notorious criminal fugitives.
For more stories from the darker corners of British history, visit the British History T-Shirt Collection and the True Crime T-Shirt Collection.
Another notorious British criminal whose story reached the cinema appears in Hellwood's McVicar T-Shirt, celebrating the 1980 film starring Roger Daltrey.
RONNIE BIGGS T-SHIRT
Thirty years inside. Thirty-six years on the run.
A Hellwood tribute to Ronnie Biggs, the notorious Great Train Robber whose extraordinary escape from Wandsworth Prison transformed him into one of Britain's most recognisable criminal fugitives.
Featuring a vintage police identification-style portrait and distressed lettering inspired by the newspaper headlines of the era.
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