Stuff You Should Know - SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: How The Great Train Robbery Worked

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

In 1963, 15 men got together in England to pull off one of the most daring heists in history. The Great Train Robbery was the crime of the century, capturing the public's attention and leaving them torn on who to root for - the cops or the robbers. Learn all about England's greatest heist in today's episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone, and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, season two, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe saved my life twice. Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff.

Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Jemma Spag, host of the Psychology of Your 20s. This September at the Psychology of Your 20s, we're breaking down the very interesting ways psychology applies to real life, like why we crave external validation. I find it so interesting that we are so quick to believe others' judgments of us and not our own judgment of ourselves. So according to this study, not being liked actually creates similar pain levels as real life physical pain. Learn more about the psychology of everyday life and, of course, your 20s this September. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for making it through our true crime playlist.

We're rounding this one out with a good old-fashioned train robbery, for which we head across the pond to visit our friends in the UK. Back in 1963, one of the all-time great hold-ups was carried out by a huge gang of men who relieved a British mail train of a massive amount of money, and they did it without guns. Most of the robbers were eventually caught, but most of the money has never been found. All aboard for the last episode in our playlist on The Great Train Robbery. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from How StuffWorks.com. Choo! And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.

There's Jerry. And you put all of us together with a couple of microphones, a crummy IKEA lamb, and a headful of nose juice. You get stuff you should know. That's right. Stuff you should know is juice. Oh, grow. How's it going, buddy, besides the obvious under the weatherness of you? I predict this is the last one.

Great. I'm going to be back to good as new by the next time we record. Yeah, we're going to Vancouver and you'll get some of that good Canadian air. Air. Pine air. It's healing properties. I'll get pine and flannel and ocean like in my face. And moose.

Yeah. Moose hair. Yeah. That's good. All that stuff. If you want it all into a ball and sniff it, it'll, it takes care of everything. That's right. What in the world are we talking about?

I don't know. we're talking about trains we're talking about a specific train Chuck we're talking about a specific train at a specific moment and place and time that all came together to become known as the great train robbery that's right

did you know did you commission this article I did not did you know about it already some yeah I mean a little bit but not as like obviously as much after I researched and I watched a couple of documentaries and was looking for a great, awesome movie, but I don't think there really is a great awesome movie about this yet.

Which is surprising. I think they did, like BBC did one, and I think Sean Connery did one that was loosely. I think other things were loosely based, but... Like the Taking of Pelham, one, two, three? Yes, exactly. That was a good movie. Did you...

The original, of course. Yeah, did you watch The Tale of Two Thieves? Is that one of the documentaries you watched? No, I don't think that's out to the public yet, unless I just haven't seen it. Okay. I think it's new this year. Yeah, it seems like it's 2014.

Yeah. I want to see it. But there are no shortage of YouTube BBC docs because they love it. And I learned a lot of new words watching them. Yeah, like what? Oh, like instead of crooked, someone is bent. Like a bent solicitor, I figured out was a crooked solicitor. And a kosh is like a billy club.

And you can kosh somebody. Oh, wow. Like the train conductor was koshed. Yeah. Yeah, there were just a bunch of cool terms that I had to kind of figure out what they meant in American. Gotcha.

In my English. Yeah. So I had heard the words Great Train and Robbery together, but I didn't know anything about it. I think there was another one, an older Great Train Robbery from the 1800s. There's one in 1855

where a train traveling from London to Paris or vice versa had a bunch of gold bullion on it. and it got hit. That was legendary. But apparently this was the biggest train heist since then. Yeah. More than 100 years later. Yeah.

Yeah, it was a big deal. And it was sort of Jesse James style. That's why it became one of the crimes of the century in England for sure. I mean, it was huge in the press. And these guys that knocked off this train became these kind of weird working class heroes. Well, one of them became the symbol for the anti-examination. Establishment. Which one?

What was his name? The one who made off for years and years. Oh, yeah, yeah. Biggs. Yeah, he was on the lamb for like 30 years, so he was super famous. Yeah, and they knew where he was, and they couldn't get to him, which we'll talk about, but he became like this folk hero of the anti-establishment. He sang vocals on lots of punk records and stuff like that.

Yeah. Yeah, I saw in both documentaries. They had a bunch of interview, like on the street interviews from the time, like, with regular upstanding citizens, like, whose side are you on? And a lot of them were like, well, I feel a shame to admit this, but I kind of think these guys really took it to the cops on this one. Yeah. And they thought they were ingenious.

And even though the plan, as we'll get to, really was pretty uncomplicated. Yeah. It wasn't nearly as clever as it was made out to be. Right. Well, let's talk about the plan. So there was this idea. Who had the original idea? I believe his last name was Fields.

He was the guy who originally had the idea and approached several people, criminals, for partnership. And they all turned him down except for this Ace Safecracker by the name of Goody. Okay, so Goody had a friend who was, his name was Bruce Reynolds. And I guess he originally funded the whole thing? Yeah, well, they were in a gang called the Bowler Hat Gang

in London, I know, right? I don't think we've said this. We've made reference to, like, the Wild West and train robbers and everything. This is the 1960s. Yeah, like the early 1960s that this is going on. Yeah, and the Bowler Hat gang was, they dressed in bowler hats and suits,

and they had done some crimes, and they were mainly career criminals, and they actually even, they had the press's attention, and they actually tried to rob a train at first, but it didn't work so well, and they got away. But they had sort of a, not a trial run, but they legitimately tried to knock off another train.

So is that when they realized that they needed to expand their rank and file? Yeah, they realized that we don't know trains and we don't know how to stop them, so we need to get some train guys. Right, so the Bowler Coast gang, who is, I guess, led by Bruce Reynolds, right? Yeah, Buller Hat.

The Buller Hat gang. They got with the South Coast gang, I think. Yeah, the South Coast Raiders. So they, and this is, I mean, those are some great, gang names by the way. Totally great. But the Bowler Hat gang and the South Coast Raiders who were led by

a dude named Buster Edwards, right? Yeah, and Tom Wisby, he was one of the main guy, or Wisney sorry. So those guys all got together and they said, we've got this great idea. We need your people to come help us. We're going to rob a train. And not just any train.

There was one specific train that this gang targeted, and for good reason, it was called the Up Special. And the Up Special had been running since the 1830s between Glasgow Scotland and London, right? Yeah. And it had run every night. And it was basically like a mail sorting facility on wheels.

Yeah. Like it was pretty clever. They thought, well, we'll take all the mail from Glasgow that's going to London and we'll sort it along the way. So there was 12 cars in the Glasgow special, or the up special, and a diesel engine. So it was a pretty simple train. Yeah. And it had run for years and years without incident.

For like 150, almost 150 years. Yeah, and it wasn't loaded with guards and cops. I mean, it was a bunch of postmen, basically. Which is a really, it's really weird then that the banks would trust their money that were moving from Glasgow to London to this postal train. Yeah. That had like no security. no armed guards, no alarms until the early 60s

on the train cars themselves. But yet every night, the banks would empty their accounts into this train and say, good luck getting to London. Like here's a bunch of huge sacks of money. We're going to put it on the train, and you're going to sort it along the way. Exactly. They had an inside man who,

and this is one of those weird stuff, you should know things. You know how there's all these weird correlations in the news? I picked out this article two days ago, and two days ago it was announced who the identity of the inside man was. Yeah, the last great mystery of this thing from the 60s was just unraveled like two days ago.

And I didn't even know it at the time. I found out afterward, but the code name was Ulster Man, and it was always believed to be someone on the inside of the, of the train and post industry to give him information. Like, you know, the train is super loaded

on this particular night because of a bank holiday. Right. And he was named by Gordon Goody as Patrick McKenna. Yeah, in that documentary, A Tale of Two Thieves, they hand a picture of Patrick McKenna

to Goody and say, is that Ulsterman? Apparently, he kind of, like, gets visibly uncomfortable because he's kept this guy's identity secret. He was the last. person alive for 50 years who to know who this person was there were two other people who knew they both died before goody Patrick McKenna died years back and there was just this one man who swore he would take the secret to his grave

and he named them he fingered him these guys were really good at keeping secrets over the years they wore bowler hats for goodness so McKenna's family was super surprised to hear all this police never suspected them and They basically think that this guy felt bad afterward and never even spent the money and gave it to the Catholic Church slowly over the years. Oh yeah?

His cut is what the family is saying. But yeah. It sounds like an Ulsterman kind of thing to do. Yeah, you know, Ulsty. Right. He's a good guy. Well, before he had his change of heart, he was the inside man that helped the gang figure this out.

Yeah, he actually recommended they change the date to get a bigger take. Yeah. And it was, and it worked. Can you explain this to me? So a bank holiday, and it's the same thing here in the U.S. It's like a day the banks are closed. They have official bank holidays.

There is a banking act in the U.K. from the 19th century that designated certain days as bank holidays. What I don't understand is why is there's so much more money the day after a bank holiday? It's like everybody waited to do their banking business that they would have done on Monday, on Tuesday. Like, there's so many more people or so many more transactions that didn't get to be done on that Monday that were carried out on the Tuesday

that that's why there's so much more money? I don't know. Maybe it's that the, because of the holiday, they didn't do their deposits and, like, make the money leave the bank like they normally would, so it was compounded. I guess.

So there was, like, double the amount of money as usual because they didn't do their drop on the holiday or something. Yeah, but they didn't conduct any business on the holiday, so there wouldn't have been more money to accumulate than usual. You know what I'm saying? Well, if it came after a weekend, though, maybe it was like all of that weekend's deposits had gathered up.

Okay. I don't know. That's a good question. Okay, the point is that... There's a lot more money than usual. A lot more. Usually this train car, the Ups special, carried about 300,000 pounds between Glasgow and London each night.

Yeah. On this particular night, the night of August 8th, 1963, which was Thursday, early wee hours of a Thursday, it was carrying something like 2.6 million pounds, which today in dollars would be worth about 50 million. I think it's, I looked that up and it was like double that. A hundred million? Well, yeah, because you're going from 1963 to 2013 and from pounds to dollars. Yeah. I might be off, but I got 69 million pounds today, or 111 million dollars US.

Let's go with that, that's way better. Either way, 2.6 million pounds was a ton of money for a high spec then. Yeah. It was like really, really a lot of dough. Even splitting it among 15 guys. Yeah, and they didn't even necessarily split it evenly. There were the core gang who were carrying this thing out,

and they all got even splits, but they're also accomplices. In addition to Allsterman, there was Mr. One, Mr. Two, and Mr. Three. Yeah, and those are their name so, because they were never brought to justice. There were three that just got away with it. Even though they knew who they were, supposedly, they didn't have evidence to go pick them up. So, like, the identities of the three guys that got away, they think they knew who they were the whole time. Really? I mean, one of them's named John Weeder. He got away? I'm not sure. Was he one of the one, two, or three?

He was, yeah, he was the one who got the safe house for the gang. Yeah, well, he worked with Fields to get the safe house. Well, let's back up here. Okay. We're so excited. We're getting ahead of ourselves. So we mentioned that they recruited another gang that knew how to work with trains, knew how to stop trains. And what they did was they brought this guy on board who had this elderly man who was a train driver.

His name was Peter. And Peter's job, once they stopped the train, was to get it to where the drop point, the exchange point was in case. because the train stops at the red light which they very awkwardly wired the red light to turn on and they just covered the green light with some gloves but it worked they stopped the train and still needed

to get it down the track to the exchange point and this old man gets on board and he's like I don't know how to undo this new handbrake so he was useless and so the guy Biggs who became this criminal legend for evading the law for so many years apparently his only job was to find

somebody who could drive the train. And he failed at that. And he screwed it up. Yeah. So the guy who was supposed to drive the train got thrown off the train and they got the original train engineer, the one whose job it was to actually drive the train under normal circumstances and made him drive another mile and

a half to this bridge. Yeah, and that was Jack Mills and this is a very important detail. He was, like you said, the conductor and two guys jumped on the train at the very front there and coshed him, which smacked him on the head a bunch with this billy club i thought it was a crowbar oh well it's an iron

kosh which is english for crowbar i guess and um this was a big point because um for a lot of reasons one in that it was why the the justice ended up coming down so harshly on them because they were apparently way more violent than they needed to be with this guy yeah and the public perception of these guys as working class heroes doesn't jive with the violence because they They weren't, you know, the English still aren't really into violence as a whole. No, especially if you're the bowler hat gang. Yeah, like you dressed nicely and you conducted your business, your criminal business like gentlemen.

Right. And you didn't need to beat this old guy up. He was elderly nearing retirement. And his family says, the robbers still say today that, like, he wasn't beaten up nearly as bad as they say. And the family was like, no, he never fully recovered. Yeah. And died of cancer, but...

About seven years later, I think he died of leukemia. Yeah, but they say he had headaches for the rest of his life and he was just not the same man. Yeah, you can't do that to somebody. You can't do that to someone. And like you said, that changed absolutely everything. Goody, the guy who's really the brains behind this whole operation, he wrote a book a few years back before he died.

And he said it was either Buster Edwards or a guy named James Hussie, who was the one who costched the poor conductor. Yeah, and supposedly Hussie, who was brought in as a heavy, is some muscle. Supposedly at his deathbed, he said that it was him who coshed the guy. But there are other people that say, including Jack Mills' son,

who said, no, my father told me who it was and it wasn't him. This guy is just doing that robber thing where you still cover for your people. So like on his deathbed, he was still trying to cover for the real guy. And I don't know if we'll ever know for real if it was him or the other dude.

Wow, lying on your deathbed. Yeah. That's not okay. No, that never happens. Yeah, that's where you're supposed to be the most truthful, right? Sure, like, yeah, I mean, they take deathbed confessions, like, as, like, completely legitimate in courts. Yeah, that's where you're supposed to look at your wife and say, I never really loved you. Wow, that's terrible, Chuck.

Could you imagine? I think that was in a movie once. You thought it was going to be some tender moment, and he was like, I never really loved you. I think I know what you're talking about, the War of the Roses, where, like, they're both laying there dying and Michael Douglas. goes to, like, put his arm around Kathleen Turner, and she flicks it off. It's a great movie. No, I don't think anybody's done that.

Oh, okay. So Roger Cordry is the guy's name who came up with the idea to fix these train signals. And he was an associate of Buster Edwards, and if you had ever seen the movie Buster with Phil Collins? Oh, is that who it's about? That's who it's about.

Oh, yeah. Sort of like a working class Criminal. Like criminals back then were kind of revered In certain circles in England, it's weird. Two hearts Beating in just one mind. Was that from that movie?

Mm-hmm. Okay. Great song. All right. So after this break, we are going to talk a little bit more about how it went down and what happened right after. Smokey the Bar

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Not just something that happens to us I'm Bridget Todd, host of the Tech and Culture podcast There Are No Grows on the Internet. There Are No Grows on the Internet is not just about tech. It's about culture and policy and art and expression and how we as humans exist and fit with one another. In our new season, I'm talking to people like Emile Dash, an OG entrepreneur and writer who refuses to be cynical about the Internet. I love tech. You know, I've been a nerd my whole life, but it does have to be for something. Like, it's not just for its own sake.

It's a fascinating exploration about the power of the Internet for both good and bad. They use WhatsApp to get the price of rice at the market that is often 12 hours away. They're not going to be like, we don't like the terms of service, therefore we're not trading rice this season. It's an inspiring story that focuses on people as the core building blocks of the Internet. Platforms exist because of the regular people on them, and I think that's a real important story to keep repeating. I created There Are No Girls on the Internet because the future belongs to all of us. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Listen to There Are No Girls on the Internet on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcast. I just think the process and the journey is so delicious. That's where all the good stuff is. You just can't live and die by the end result. It's scary putting yourself out there, especially when it's something you really care about and something that you hope is your passion in life and you want people to like it. Let's get delicious and put ourselves out there. I'm Simone Boyce, host of The Bright Side, and those were my recent guests, comedian Phoebe Robinson, and writer Aaron Foster. On this show, I'm talking to the brightest minds in entertainment, health, wellness, and pop And every week, we're going places in our communities, our careers, and ourselves. It's not about being perfect.

It's about going on a journey and discovering the bright side of becoming. Few people know that better than soccer legend Ashlyn Harris. It's the journey. It's the people. It's the failures. It's the heartache. It's the little moment. These are our moments to laugh, learn, and exhale.

So join me every Monday. And let's find the bright side together. Listen to The Bright Side on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, we've got the Bowler Hat Gang and the South Coast Raiders coming together for one huge heist that's worth about $100 million in today's money. Yeah, or half that. They're hitting the Up special, just this crotchety old 12-car train, moving along through the night from Scotland to London. right yeah and so the the gang messes with the lights yeah they put a glove around the green light and manage to turn on the red light so the train comes to the stop they all board the train yeah

they hit the conductor over the head huge mistake yeah uh they bring on the guy who's supposed to drive the train find out he can't drive the train throw him off stand the conductor back up probably give him a handkerchief for his head yeah and say we need you to drive this another mile and a half to the drop point, which is called the Bridigo Bridge. Yeah, was it like a bridge overpass? And the guy does that, and they start offloading the loot. Yeah, they got 120 of the 128 sacks of cash money onto, they had this big lorry and a couple of land rovers.

Yeah, could it be, could this be any more stylish? Yeah, it was pretty stylish. They had land rovers as getaway cars. Yeah, it's pretty cool. You see why people bought into all this stuff and thought it was cool, because I think it's cool right now. Yeah.

And so what they did, they had prearranged a hideout, and this was Fields' job as well, was he bought this farm and farmhouse. Leather slayed farm, right? Yeah, to, and it was sort of ingenious, but ended up screwing them in the end because the idea was,

within 30 minutes of this robbery, they have effectively disappeared off the face of the earth. Well, they stopped the train, and got it to the bridge and offloaded more than a ton of money. Yeah, two tons, I think. Two and a half tons of money

in 15 minutes. Yeah, and they were back in their hideout in another 15. So by the time this thing was reported, they were gone in this farmhouse like with the windows shut and the shades drawn. Okay.

But it also kind of screwed them because before they left the train, they said, all right, no one moves for 30 minutes. And so the cops, hear this and they went oh well that they're probably within a 30 mile radius then and so they put this out on the news we know that they're within a 30 mile radius and we're going to start canvassing the area they get word of this they're within 28 miles and they go well crap they're going

to find us and they also said it was sort of a city boy's move to think you can hide out in the country like that and this one guy in the documentary was like now out in the country you get noticed right if you're 15 guys in a farmhouse That was their undoing. A neighbor said, there's a lot more people at this old, rambling old farm, and they're all wearing bowler hats for some reason, or at least half of them are. There's something fishy going on. So when the word got out that this train had been hit, this guy came forward and said,

you guys should go check this farm out. Yeah. Well, the guys weren't only at this farm for the half hour after the heist. They'd been there for like eight days, waiting for the day to come. getting ready, eating things that required ketchup, playing Monopoly. Yeah. Played a lot of Monopoly with their real money.

Yes, they did. I guess they thought that was just a fun thing to do, you know? Hilarious. Yeah. And they did go to the trouble of wiping down a lot of the stuff, but they left a lot of stuff behind, including the Monopoly game, including the ketchup bottle, and a lot of other stuff that had prints on it.

Well, yes, because Fields was supposed to get a guy to go torch the place. Yeah, that's what I thought. I was like, why wouldn't you just Burned the place down. That was the plan, and apparently the guy never did it, and they ended up getting out of there a few days early. They left five days into it because they obviously heard the news that they were canvassing the area.

So they left quicker than they wanted to, and like you said, left a lot of stuff behind because they thought it was going to be torched. Their plan was to lay low there for a few days? Yeah, to keep laying low. But when they found out they were basically making their way to them little by little, they got the heck out of Dodge quicker. That probably kept them from getting caught sooner.

Yeah. But in, so the public is being treated to this incredibly daring train heist. These people got away without a trace for at least the first week. Finally, within a week, this leather slayed farms has been identified as the place where these guys were hiding out. Yeah, they found the trucks. And they got at least one person within eight days of the, of the, of the, height. yeah and all of a sudden people start falling there's 15 people and on the case is called the flying squad who are like the best of the best that Scotland Yard has to

offer to combat these some of the best of the best criminals that that Great Britain has had to offer at the time yeah chief superintendent detective Tommy Butler was the head of the flying squad and like you said this was so sensational because it was the top robbers and the top cop, it was, I guess, it's sort of like the Elliot Ness of the day going after Al Capone. It was just a huge story.

And like you said, they started getting nicked one by one, and it came out later that there was an informant by the name of Mickey Kehoe, supposedly. Scotland Yard said, this guy Mickey Kehoe was telling us all about it because it was well known within the criminal underground, like what was going on, and started naming names,

although the robbers to this day, still say, nah, wasn't Mickey Kehoe. We know that guy. He didn't even know us that well. He wasn't giving up names. Yeah. But, I don't know.

Scotland Yard says he was, so I don't see why they'd make that up. I could see them making it up to protect somebody else. Especially if they didn't like Mickey Kehoe in the way he looked. That's true, but you're right. They started to go down one by one.

There was a pretty short list of people who they thought it was. It wasn't like some great mystery. Plus, once they started peeling away one and catching one here or there, Others started falling. Others, did anyone who was caught name names? Did you get that impression?

No, most of them were pretty tight-lipped. In fact, one guy, Charlie Wilson, he was the treasurer of the gang. They called him the silent man because he literally said nothing. He just didn't speak at all during the trial. Right. He went on to become a US congressman who waged a proxy war against Russia and Afghanistan in the 70s. I don't think so.

I think that's a different, Charlie. Charlie? Okay. Tom Hanks. Yeah, right. So, consider this from the public's point of view. There's a daring robbery, right? Words getting out. Within a week, you got your first guy caught, but there's still tons more people on Lamb, which gave the press tons of fodder. They had so much to write about. There was a capture of one of the guys that involved rooftops. Like the guy was running and jumping from roof to roof with the police and chase, you know. And finally, Finally, by August, all these guys are rounded up. 12 of the 15, I think, were rounded up.

Yeah. And they started to stand trial in January. They were caught. They're being quiet. The public is just totally in awe. And finally, this trial starts. And right out of the gate, the judge found out that Biggs had a criminal past, so he shouldn't be tried with the rest of him because it could taint the jury against all

these other guys unfairly. So Biggs got spun off to his own trial, and these guys stood trial, the other four, or the other 11th, no, 10 of them stood trial. One of them managed to have a lawyer. He was there because his prints were on the, no, the Monopoly game. Yeah, there were prints on ketchup and Monopoly and pots and pans, and some of the guys wore gloves the entire time, and they were smart ones, yeah. But Biggs was the one. Remember, Biggs' one job was to bring the train engineer, and he screwed that up. his prints were on the ketchup bottle.

So he screwed that up too. But there was another guy whose prints were on the Monopoly game and his lawyers managed to show that those could have gotten there long before the crime and that it didn't necessarily mean he had anything to do with it.

He got set, he was acquitted during this trial. He was the only lucky one. Everybody else had the book thrown at them. Yeah. I mean, there was a lot of them were saying that they cooked up a bunch of evidence because they knew it was them,

but they just didn't have the evidence. So the big Lorry truck, they had painted, hastily painted yellow, and the goodie, one of the main two guys was, supposedly some of his evidence was that they found yellow paint on a shoe. And he was like,

I didn't paint in those shoes. And it was funny because years later, he's like, oh, I did it. And yeah, I painted that truck yellow, but I wasn't wearing those shoes. They planted that evidence on me. Is that right? Yeah, and apparently there was false confessions.

There was another great British word for that. I can't remember what they called it. Chabra-dabba? Chabber-dabbing. False confessions were big at the time in England, and there was a lot of reports from these robbers that they were using false confessions and planning evidence. And again, even though they did it, they were like,

yeah, but if you don't have evidence, you can't convict this. All right. So I don't think we'll ever know if they cooked up some of this evidence or not. Well, there was one guy named Bull, William Bull, who... Oh, that poor guy. He apparently had nothing to do with it. Well, he received money in payment from a debt from, I think, that goody owed him. No, it was Biggs.

Oh, Biggs! Biggs again! He was a friend of Biggs, and when he got out, helped him kind of lay low, but he had nothing to do with the robbery. He got 14 years. No, I'm sorry, it was Cordry. It wasn't Biggs. Okay, Cordry. I know, I feel bad for Biggs. We're just dragging his name through the mud.

Yeah. But it was Rob Cordry. It wasn't Rob Cordry, but... It was his dad. It was his great-grandfather Cordry. And he was Bull's friend. He helped him lay low, and he wanted... Cordy was actually the first one to get pinched

because he and Bull helped him rent a garage and they paid in like the same banknote bills for like three months in advance in cash. And the lady. said, eh, this is a little suspicious. Turned him in, Bull got wrapped up, and because all these guys were saying we're innocent, they couldn't come out and say,

well, he really is innocent. Right. So they kind of had to take this guilt with him to prison. So, Bull got 14 years. For doing nothing, really. Yeah, and for just basically knowing the wrong guys and hanging out with the wrong guys, he died in prison.

I know. I'm not laughing because it's just tragic. It is tragic. So his family's, like, trying to mount a campaign now to get a posthumous pardon at least yeah but he uh he and the guy who got hit over the head the conductor are really the two big victims and all of this yeah and one of them there was only one guy that um turned in his cut of the money and actually pleaded guilty uh out of the rest that was cordy i think yeah that was cordy so even he he says yes i did it here's my 80 grand the guy who

who he associated with still got 14 years. And died in jail. Yeah, that's so sad. So you'll notice that we're talking about 12 of the 15. Biggs, by the way, after he stood trial separately, was also found guilty, and got things like, these guys were getting like 20 years, 30 year sentences. This is enormous sentences for this train robbery.

Yeah, generally 30, which was double the harshest penalties for robbery that they've ever seen. Right, which is really strange because the judge in the case he had actually reduced another robber in a completely separate robbery where a man had been shot and killed during the commission

of the robbery. Oh, wow. Someone who was involved in that robbery had his sentence reduced from 15 years to 10 years because that judge thought it was excessive. That same judge was handing out 30-year sentences to these guys where no one got killed. Yeah, that was Justice Edmund Davies. I think because it was such a high-profile case,

he felt he could make his name. Had to be. You know? So he was making his name, though, against public sentiment because a lot of people were very much saw these guys as folk heroes. None more, though, than Biggs.

And the reason why Biggs was a folk hero was because he evaded capture so long. And we'll talk about that right after this. Stuff you should know. The internet is something we make, not just something that happens to us. I'm Bridget Todd, host of the Tech and Culture Podcast, There Are No Grows on the Internet. There Are No Gros on the Internet is not just about tech. It's about culture and policy and art and expression, and how we as humans exist and fit with one another.

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Listen to the Bright Side on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Stuff you should know. All right, so some really interesting things happen after they were sentenced. Charlie Wilson escaped prison, which was pretty cool. A couple of them escaped prison in the way that it was very cute. could escape prison back then, like, let's put a ladder by the fence and climb up and jump over into a truck and speed away. It turns out that the Benny Hill show was basically a docu-drama at the time. Another one escaped when he, I think he had some guys infiltrate the prison and help

him escape. Yeah, in a furniture truck. Yeah. That was Biggs, I think. Yeah, it was a lot easier to escape prison back then. And some of these were maximum security for what it's worth, you know? Yeah, well, yeah, one of them was Britain's version of Alcatraz. They say Wandsworth Prison, and that Biggs escape from there. When he escaped and went on the lamb, he went to Australia and then eventually moved on to Brazil. But first, he stopped off at one of the worst human beings to ever walk the planet's office,

the very same cosmetic surgeon who redid the faces of Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of World War II. Really? Yes. That's who his plastic surgeon was. Yes. Yeah, he, he, so Biggs got his face redone a little bit, went to Australia, made it to Brazil, and he had a family in Australia, which he left behind there, and then went on to Brazil, got a girlfriend, and she was pregnant with their child when the authorities, the British authorities found him in Brazil, and he said, oh, turns out under Brazilian law, you can't extradite the parent, of a Brazilian citizen.

Oh, crazy. So for many, many years, Ronald Biggs lived openly as this felon escapee in Brazil. And there are things that he couldn't do in Brazil. Apparently, he couldn't go to bars. He couldn't be out after 10 p.m. He couldn't associate with anybody

with a criminal record or anything like that. But he wasn't imprisoned by the Brazilian authorities and he couldn't be extradited to Great Britain, which drove Great Britain crazy. Oh, I'm sure. And there was this one very famous detective who was on this case, who made his own name. His name was Jack Slipper. Yeah, I get the feeling that he and Biggs, it was sort of like the Les Miserables, like

Jean Valjean. You know, they had this lifelong pursuit. Smoking in the Bandit. Sure. It's a very old story. Yeah, it is. And Biggs and Jack Slipper were playing it out in real life, so much so that Jack Slipper in 1974 showed up on Biggs's doorstep.

I guess just to rattle him, just to say, I know where you are and I can get to you. And Big said, yeah, but you really can't do anything to me. Yeah, and some of the other guys evaded police for a little while for a number of years, but I think by 1969 they were all caught except for the three that they couldn't finger with good evidence.

Yeah. But even the main mastermind was able to evade the police for four or five years. I think he went down to Mexico. Buster. He turned himself in after living on the lamb for three years.

Yeah, and Bruce Reynolds, I think he was on the lamb for a while too. Yeah, he got caught in Canada, I think. One of the guys, well, I guess it was Bruce Reynolds. When he changed his name

when he went on the lamb, he changed his family's last name to Firth. Oh, really? And he had a wife and son. Colin? He changed his son, Nick's name to Colin Firth.

Shut up. Is that the guy? No, no. Oh. Totally coincidental. Okay, I thought you were going to say. Wouldn't that be amazing if Colin Firth was the son of Bruce Reynolds and it was all an alias that he turned into a stage name? That would be awesome, actually.

So one of the fun things that the prime minister tried to do because he was so upset about this was he tried to, at one point, or he didn't try to, he had the idea to reissue every bank note in England. so their money would no longer be good. So from what I understand... And they were like, yeah, you can't do that. From what I understand, most of the money was never recovered. Yeah, 400 grand out of the 2.6 million was recovered. Right. So there was a lot of that out there still. Oh, yeah.

But apparently England went to a different type of decimal currency by like 1970, I think. And that means that that money that was out there automatically became worthless. Well, apparently they laundered it pretty quickly afterward, so I don't know how much that affected them. Okay. Like through bookies and stuff

like that, they made it new money. However, all of the robbers ended up saying, like, even if they got their cut, like, it was a curse and they didn't live this rich lifestyle in Mexico and Spain, like a bunch of them moved to these places. Right. And serve shorter sentences

because I think parole was brought in after they were sentenced. It wasn't even like a thing in England until then. Right. But retroactively they were able to get out in like,

you know, 10 or 14 years. And then, you know, supposedly he had some of this money still hidden away, but most of them ended up like one guy committed suicide. One guy died in a medical trial

that he signed up for. One guy was murdered. Yeah, by a hitman on a bike in Spain. Yeah, so, like, most of them have these awful sort of ending stories, and they didn't live that out, like, sexy beast, like, Ray Winstone on the Spanish River era. Yeah. I think some of that might have been influenced by, some of that movie might have been influenced by this.

I think a lot of Great Britain's love of gangsters was influenced by these guys. Yeah, they were definitely looked up to, and it's pretty interesting. I've got a little more on Biggs, the Ballad of Biggs. of a bigsy. So he, I mean, he really is like a folk hero in, in, against, or with anti-establishment types in the UK, um,

in part because he was, you know, living openly in the face of, you know, British authority. And it irked the British enough that a group of ex-British military in 1981 kidnapped him from Brazil and put him on a boat and got as far as Barbados. where they had boat trouble. Wow. And they were picked up by the Barbados and authorities.

And it turns out Barbados doesn't have an extradition treaty with the UK either. So he got sent back to Brazil. And supposedly these ex-military were saying that they planned on, I guess, getting some sort of reward from the British crown for bringing this guy back. Right. But it's also been supposed that that was actually a plausible deniability cover, that it was actually like the British really tried to have. have this guy kidnapped.

That wouldn't surprise me. Yeah, he finally turned himself in and died in 2009, but he turned himself in in like 2000. He started having failing health. So he's like, I guess I'll go live out my life in jail for some reason. And I think he went to like an old man's hospital jail. Back in the UK.

And not all of them at, you know, gross untimely demise as several of them just kind of retired or went back to their work as florists. Yeah, Cordry. Sort of retired with her family in Sussex or London or sort of around England but apparently

none of them got rich off this or they're not talking if they did yeah still well good good yeah goods wrote a book

so there you go there you have it if you want to know more about the great train robbery a great place to start is the search bar at how stuff works dot com

and since I said search bar it's time for listener mail I'm gonna call this horse milk in our animal domestication podcast we talked about horse milk and I can't remember what I said I probably said it was gross or something oh I think we said like we want to hear from people who've had it and I figured we'd hear from a couple people but I'm blown away by

how many people have had a brush with horse milk a lot of people liked it too this is not one of them hey guys just listen to the podcast on animal domestication I wanted to tell you about the revolting drink called Kumis from Kazakhstan that's K-U-M-I-S Mila Kumis. Mila Kumis. It is similar to the more familiar product, Kiefer, which we talked about that in something else, right? Yeah, that's like...

It's like Balke's version of sour milk. It's Bulgarian, I think. Yeah, he said it's made from horse milk. Because horse milk has more natural sugars than cow, sheep, or goat milk, Kumas ends up being mildly alcoholic after fermentation. Crazy. Imagine the sourness of raw yogurt mixed with the bite of a shot of vodka. Whoa.

And round it all out with the disgusting tang. of horse milk and you've got kumas well i don't understand that last part like i don't have anything to equate that with horse milk vodka check sour like fermented yogurt but you don't know that disgusting tang no and i want to know now you know in Toronto when I was there my friend Chris from let's drink about it ate horse meat like in front of you no I was supposed to go to dinner with them but I was sick and after we recorded they went out and the next day he was like dude I ate horse meat yesterday I went they go to IKEA no they went to some one of those adventurous restaurants and I was like Josh would have been all over that

but not me no thank you yeah you'd eat horse meat right you try it out probably but not horse milk only if the horse died of old age so Greg says I drank it sleep well that's what they said they supposedly all of them they're called uh what do you call them uh Barbarians something horses like uh old dead horses no basically there were horses that died of natural causes they called them like senior senior horses no No, like, uh... Golden Age horses? No.

There's a word. There's a lot of words. I can say them all. So Greg drank it in Kazakhstan, and he said it was served in a bowl, what he would describe as a bowl, and you get cocktail peanuts. Like, you would get cocktail peanuts in. It's awesome. Instead of a bowl of peanuts, it's a bowl of this disgusting drink.

Wow. I've lived in the caucuses for four years now. I've had my share of questionable foods. The only thing I found more disagreeable than a saucer of kumas was a pickled rooster comb. Oh my gosh. He said it was all skinning cartilage. It felt like I was eating an ear. Wow.

Man, that is from Greg. That's called using every part of the animal. Yeah, Greg, you just blew my mind. Same here, man. I wish I could think of the horses. Not like freedom horses, but it was something like that. Freedom horses. It's a word.

The horses that want you to eat them. Yeah. Donor horses? No. Well, we'll find out. and tell everybody next time, okay? Yeah, the essential is their horses that died of natural causes. They weren't killed for their meat.

They got you. If you want to let us know about an experience you had that is fascinating or amazing, you can tweet it to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com slash Stuff You should know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at How StuffWorks.com, and you can hang out with us at our home on the web, the internet clubhouse known as Stuff You Should Know, com

for more on this and thousands of other topics visit how stuff works.com It's important that we just reassure people that they're not alone and there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast Season 2 takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

September's National Suicide Prevention Month. So join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. One Tribe, save my life twice. Welcome to season two of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, it's Gemma's Begg, host of the psychology of your 20s. This September at the psychology of your 20s, we're breaking down the very interesting ways psychology applies to real life, like why we crave external validation. I find it so interesting that we We are so quick to believe others' judgments of us and not our own judgment of ourselves.

So according to this study, not being liked actually creates similar pain levels as real-life physical pain. Learn more about the psychology of everyday life and, of course, your 20s. This September, listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jenna Lopez, and in the new season of the Over comfort podcast, I'm even more honest, more vulnerable and more real than ever. Am I ready to enter this new part of my life? Like, am I ready to be in a relationship? Am I ready to have kids and to really just devote myself and my time? Join me for conversations about healing and growth, all from one of my favorite spaces, The Kitchen.

Listen to the new season of the Overcomber podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.