If it’s 15 May, it can only be the 168th anniversary of the Great Gold Robbery, inspiration for Michael Crichton’s book and film, The First Great Train Robbery.
Although a lot of the details were changed, it’s remarkable how many of them are true. The mastermind of the scheme was indeed an outwardly respectable middle class man and secret criminal.
Edward Agar, according to Donald Thomas’ The Victorian Underworld (1998) may not have been as much a part of high society as Connery’s character Edward Pierce, but after years on the stock exchanges of America and Australia, he was loaded.
With his domestic comforts and servants, his silk hat and frock-coat, he seemed a quiet man of substance who fitted easily into this affluent suburb. Like his neighbours, he managed stock market investments with prudence and foresight. Those neighbours might have been amused by anyone who suggested that Edward Agar had been a professional thief since the age of eighteen. He did not look like a thief, any more than they. He did not behave like one. What need had he of theft? Thieves, as the court reports of the morning and evening press assured them, were pickpockets, housebreakers and their kind. The new arrival in Cambridge Villas was certainly none of those.
He lived in Shepherd’s Bush “with a mistress fourteen years his junior” (which also sounds like Connery, but I digress), and had brought “the art of safe-breaking to near-perfection”. So he decided to bring this skill to bear on the South Eastern Railway.
Confusingly, though, what I think Crichton did with this historical figure was to split him in two, giving his surname, Agar, to the Donald Sutherland character, and making Connery ‘Edward Pierce’. So it may not help to picture either of them.
Anyway, Agar was joined in the biggest job of his life by another apparently well-to-do Victorian, James Townshend Saward, a barrister with chambers in the Inner Temple — and a sideline as ‘Jem the Penman’, one of the most notorious fraudsters of the age.
A co-conspirator, William Pierce, was a former South Eastern railway clerk who’d been fired a few years earlier, and it was he who supplied the intelligence that great quantities of gold were being moved by bullion merchants from London to Paris via boat train.
(Yes, that seems to be where Connery’s character’s surname comes from. Also confusing.)
One of the true details which makes it into the film, incidentally, is that all this cash is supposed to be paying the wages of soldiers fighting in Crimea. Also, the gold was, indeed, locked away in railway safes which needed two keys each, and which were themselves locked in the guard’s van. So, they needed a wrong ’un in the van, too.
Enter James Burgess, long-term employee of South Eastern, but one whose income had suffered after the railway boom passed its peak. Finally, there was William Tester, described in Fergus Linnane’s London’s Underworld (2004) as
a well-educated young man with a monocle who [as assistant to the traffic department superintendent at London Bridge] seemed destined for higher things.
Tester later moved on to those higher things by becoming general manager at a Swedish rail company, but his desire to enjoy the spoils of a high-flying career before actually having one eventually caught up with him — and with the others. Well, most of them…
Pierce and Agar, by various means, managed to get hold of the keys they needed and take wax impressions of them. (This detail from the film is also true, although the exact circumstances were… less exotic in real life.)
Once the keys were ready, Tester used his position to make sure Burgess was on duty the next time a gold shipment was happening. Burgess signalled to a watching Agar that the game was afoot by leaving the station for a moment and wiping his face with a handkerchief.
Agar and Pierce boarded the train, asking the guard to look after their remarkably heavy carpet bags, but only Pierce took his first class seat. Agar was in the guard’s van under Burgess’ overalls. When the train set off, Agar got his keys out… and found he’d only needed one, because the man who’d locked the safe had only bothered to do half the job.
He then replaced the gold with the lead shot which explained why his carpet bags were so bloody heavy. This was a little complicated, because he had to replace a wax seal to make it look as though the bullion boxes hadn’t been broken into. He’d worked out, though, that they didn’t need to go to the trouble of faking the seal, because Folkestone station was only lit with oil lamps, so any old seal would do. It turned out he was right, and the robbery was not discovered until the ‘gold’ reached Paris. They’d got away with £12,000 (well over £1m today). In Donald Thomas’ words:
The bad news was telegraphed to England. More than a hundred-weight of the gold bullion, belonging to Abell and Co., had been insured through the South-Eastern Railway. Abell demanded compensation. ‘The railway company resisted my claim’, he said sourly, ‘on the ground that the robbery had been committed in France.’ The South-Eastern Railway and the Chemin de Fer du Nord fought one another, as the best means of saving face and money alike. Each, for its own part, denied the bullion merchant’s claims. Collectively, they asserted that the crime was an impossibility.
Then — much like the Brink’s Mat gang — they melted the gold (almost burning down Agar’s nice Shepherd’s Bush house in the process) and fenced it (mostly via dodgy barrister James Townshend Saward).
If Agar hadn’t been arrested for a fraud he didn’t commit, but for which he was convicted anyway, it might all have worked out. Unfortunately, while he was in Pentonville, waiting to be ‘transported’ to Australia, he asked Pierce to give his mistress £3,000.
Fanny Kay (and if you want to picture Lesley-Anne Down here, feel free) needed the money to support herself and her child. Pierce failed to pass the money on, Agar found out, and — in the great tradition of police procedurals — began to sing like a canary.
Pierce, Burgess and Tester were fucking nicked, mate, and convicted on Agar’s evidence, but Agar, as a defence witness, wasn’t charged, so his loot wasn’t seized. The judge, Sir Samuel Martin, almost seemed to admire him.
The man Agar is a man who is as bad, I dare say, as bad can be. But that he is a man of most extraordinary ability no person who heard him examined can for a moment deny … It is obvious, as I have said, that he is a man of extraordinary talent; that he gave to this, and perhaps to many other robberies, an amount of care and perseverance one-tenth of which devoted to honest pursuits must have raised him to a respectable station in life, and, considering the commercial activity of this country in the last twenty years, would probably have enabled him to realize a large fortune.
This may have been because Agar and Fanny had split up, but Agar had still tried to provide for her and the child — whereas Pierce had naffed off with the money… “A greater villain than you are, I believe, does not exist”, Sir Samuel thundered.
He then made a gloriously eccentric judicial decision. Swept away, perhaps, by what he considered Agar’s chivalry towards Fanny, he decreed that she should get Agar’s loot, and off she waltzed with the equivalent of about £250,000.
Part deux
15 May is also the 45th anniversary of the day West Bromwich Albion arrived in China for a five-game tour that gave rise to one of the most splendid footballer quotes ever recorded. One of the best tellings is in Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass:
When China opened its gates to the West in 1978, the England football team was too busy to accept their invitation to a three-week tour of the country. So, sort of second best, they sent West Bromwich Albion. The climax of the media circus that accompanied them was the team trip to Chángchéng, China’s Great Wall, and the televised interview with midfielder John Trewick. When asked for his opinion on the wall, he responded with a flash of socio-political insight that remains to this day the most pithy surmise of all border studies: ‘When you’ve seen one wall, you’ve seen them all.’
To be fair to Trewick, the Grauniad says he was taking the piss, but the “comment … was taken seriously by many and earned him eternal infamy”. Either way, it is a joy that needs to be shared.
