During his time in prison, Charmian had started an extramarital relationship and was pregnant by the time of his escape to the Continent. He fled to Brussels by boat then sent a note to his wife to join him in Paris where he had acquired new identity papers and was undergoing plastic surgery. Escape and abscondment īiggs served 15 months before escaping from Wandsworth Prison on 8 July 1965, scaling the wall with a rope ladder and dropping onto a waiting removal van. In 1964, nine of the 15-strong gang, including Biggs, were jailed for the crime. Three weeks later, he was arrested in South London, along with 11 other members of the gang. Īfter an accomplice failed to carry out his instructions to burn down Leatherslade Farm to destroy any evidence there, Biggs's fingerprints were found on a ketchup bottle by Metropolitan Police investigators. With their timetable brought forward due to the police investigation closing in, Biggs returned home on the following Friday, with his stash in two canvas bags.
Having unloaded 120 of the 128 mailbags from the train within Reynolds' allotted timetable, and returned to their hideout at Leatherslade Farm, various sources show that the robbery yielded the participants £2.6 million (equivalent to £55.7 million in 2022) Biggs's share was £147,000 (equivalent to £3,147,000 in 2022). Biggs's main task had been to get Agate to move the train and when it became obvious that the two were useless in that regard, they were banished to a waiting vehicle while the train was looted.
#THE LAST MR BIGGS SON DRIVER#
Therefore, the driver of the intercepted train, Jack Mills, was coshed with an iron bar and forced to move the engine and mail carriages forward to a nearby bridge over a roadway, which had been chosen as the unloading point. Agate was unable to operate the main line diesel-electric locomotive because he had only driven shunting locomotives on the Southern Region. The gang then stopped the mail train in the early hours of 8 August 1963, which was Biggs's 34th birthday. On the night of the hold up, Biggs told his wife he was off logging with Reynolds in Wiltshire. Biggs was given the job of arranging for Agate to move the Royal Mail train after it had been waylaid. It was this train driver who introduced Biggs to the train robbery plot, which involved Reynolds. The train driver's real name is unknown, since he was never caught. The driver has been variously identified as "Stan Agate", or because of his age, "Old Pete" or "Pop". In 1963, Biggs, who needed money to fund a deposit on the purchase of a house for his family, happened to be working on the house of a train driver who was about to retire. In February 1960, he married 21-year-old Charmian (Brent) Powell in Swanage, the daughter of a primary school headmaster. Īfter his third prison sentence, Biggs tried to go straight and trained as a carpenter. During his incarceration in HM Prison Wandsworth, he met Bruce Reynolds. On his release, Biggs took part in a failed robbery attempt of a bookmaker's office in Lambeth, London. One month after that, he was convicted of stealing a car and sentenced to prison. He was dishonourably discharged for desertion two years later after breaking into a local chemist shop. In 1947, at age 18, Biggs enlisted in the Royal Air Force. As a child during the Second World War, he was evacuated to Flitwick, Bedfordshire, and then Delabole, Cornwall.
Biggs was born in Stockwell, London, on 8 August 1929.