Great Train Robbery exhibition to highlight victims of £2.6m heist

John Maris did not need to think for long before he decided – some 56 years ago – to push through the hedge adjoining the pasture where his cows were grazing to inspect the abandoned farmhouse that had been occupying his thoughts.

As news spread of one of the most enduringly-captivating crimes of the post-war era, he joked to his wife that the men up the road must be the thugs responsible. 

In fact, he had indeed stumbled on the gang’s hideout and his decision to investigate further was to have heavy consequences – from death threats to having to carry a concealed truncheon for years afterwards – that haunt him to this day.

Now aged 90, the then young father-of-two had noticed Land Rovers pulling in and out of Leatherslade Farm for several days in the aftermath of the raid in the early hours of 8 August 1963 on the Glasgow to London mail train.

In the space of a few minutes, the 17-strong gang had escaped with some £2.6m – equivalent to some £54m today. The men went on to live lives freighted with a starry notoriety arising from what many saw as the daring audacity of their deeds. 

But now, more than half a century later, a new exhibition will attempt to drag the spotlight back to the victims of the boiler-suited villains who smashed their way into the High Value Packages (HVP) carriage of the Royal Mail train that night, bludgeoning and terrorising those on board.

Curators at the Postal Museum in London will next month put on display artefacts and documents never previously offered for public view to tell the story of the raw fear and trauma suffered by Royal Mail staff and, famously, the train’s driver, Jack Mills, and his co-driver, David Whitby, whose injuries that night contributed to their premature deaths.

Joanna Espin, the curator of the exhibition, said the archives from the case raise uncomfortable questions about the place reserved in popular culture for the robbers, who had not been afraid to resort to extreme violence to subdue and intimidate those on board the train. As one of the robbers wildly swung an axe inside the money carriage, there were shouts to fetch a gun as sorting workers were beaten into a corner.

Ms Espin said: “The robbery is an event that has tended to be told from the perspective of the robbers and they achieved a certain cult status because of that. We want to ask people if that status was deserved.

“If you read the accounts of the postal workers in the HVP carriage, what they went through was terrifying. People like John Maris also suffered. And yet you cannot help but think the robbers achieved more recognition than anyone who was a victim or investigated the robbery.”

In an interview for the exhibition, Mr Maris has described how his quiet existence was turned upside down by his public-spirited discovery of what was happening at Leatherslade Farm. 

For a lengthy period, the farm worker found himself a front page fixture as he was lauded for finding the dilapidated farm – rapidly dubbed “Robbers Roost” – which contained the clues that would help put 13 of the conspirators behind bars. 

He said: “I thought I’d just go through the hedge and have a look and that’s where I discovered what the hideout was like. The house had its windows blacked out with curtain-type material, which seemed odd for an isolated building on top of a hill surrounded by trees… Straightaway I knew this was the place that the police were looking for. “

Such was the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the robbery that it took two separate phone calls by Mr Maris to police before officers were dispatched and the farm – complete with a cellar full of the ripped bank note packages and the Monopoly board used by the robbers in a game played with their loot – was declared a crime scene.

In return, he received a £19,000 reward (equivalent to £250,000) and an enduring period of anxiety and persecution as he and his family were targeted by a catalogue of threats for his public-spirited role in unravelling the so-called “Crime of the Century”.

Mr Maris, who is due to attend the opening of the exhibition on 11 October, said: “Once the publicity started and it became worldwide, [I] started getting these letters threatening my family and myself, my life and everything else.

“I know my wife was very distraught at the time. I had to take a few precautions because I was working on my own. She sewed a long pocket in the side of my trousers and I made a wooden truncheon and then carried that around with me. I put various wooden staves around the building in case anybody came.”

He added: “ A few years later, my wife told me that one of the letters that she opened had a picture of a coffin with my name on it and that was quite a shock. She didn’t tell me at the time.”

Mr Maris, whose evidence was vital at the trial of key robbers such as Bruce Reynolds and Ronnie Biggs, eventually used the reward money to move himself and his family away from their home close to Leatherslade Farm.

The exhibition will look at the work in the aftermath of the train robbery and other crimes of the Post Office Investigation Branch, the world’s oldest criminal investigation’s body. 

Among the documents gathered were the statements of witnesses to the 1963 heist such as postal worker Leslie Penn, who was beaten with an iron bar after he and a colleague piled mail bags against one of the windows in the HVP carriage in a vain attempt to stop one of the raiders gaining entry. With the aid of a glove and a torch, the robbers had rigged one of the signals to show red at Ledburn in Buckinghamshire, causing the mail train to stop and allow the raiders to uncouple the HVP carriage before breaking in.

Mr Penn said: “He came through that window wielding a bar and saying “which was the bastard which locked the door?’… Another man appeared to my right carrying an axe and at that  time the first man rushed at [another postal worker] and struck him to the ground, after which he came back and commenced to hit me with the bar across the shoulders and arms. I was knocked to the floor.”

The statements suggest that the same robber shouted “get the gun” before the gang began to systematically unload 120 mail  bags containing £2,595,997 contained in 636 packages and make their escape.

Such was the widespread admiration for the gangster’s work that their eventual imprisonment with jail terms of up to 30 years drew some high-profile condemnation. In 1964, the author Graham Greene wrote to The Daily Telegraph, complaining: “Am I one of a minority in feeling admiration for the skill and courage behind the Great Train Robbery? More important, am I in a minority in being shocked by the savagery of the sentences?”

Several of the robbers later expressed regret at the violence, especially the vicious beatings meted out to the driver and fireman. Mr Mills, who was 57 at the time of the robbery, suffered extensive brain injuries but when he died seven years later a coroner ruled that there was no connection between his death and the trauma of that night, despite the driver’s protracted ill-health.

For Mr Maris, his ordeal was not finished even once the robbers were behind bars. 

In an attempt to clear three of the gang members, a group of their friends came up with an alibi that depended on discrediting the farm worker’s testimony and a criminal complaint of perjury was laid against him. The claim was eventually thrown out of court, but only after it had cost Mr Maris £4,000 in legal fees and further months of anxiety.

Looking back, he is chastened but nonetheless unbowed. He said: “I regret the suffering it caused to my wife and my family. But I don’t regret actually notifying the police of what I’d seen.”

The Post Office Investigation Branch was founded in the 1680s and is the world’s oldest investigative authority. Its work today still involves crimes against the postal system from robbery to theft by postal workers.

Tony Marsh, the Royal Mail’s present head of security, describes how he caught his first thief by planting cards with money inside the delivery bag of a suspected postman.

“My own first offender was a postman in Bradford. I made the tests up at 4.30 in the morning to give to the delivery office manager. [The suspect] denied everything, and I said: ‘Get your wallet out and take the cash out. I am going to read you the serial numbers of some £5 notes that were inside birthday cards that I arranged to have put in your delivery this morning.’

“I read out serial numbers and I said: ‘Will you read out serial numbers of your notes?’ He read them and he came to the third one. Frankly, he crumbled.

“This chap I think was a bit of a drinker and wanted more money than he was prepared to earn. I do think it is a nasty, underhand, sly offence. It’s something that ill-behoves an adult really.”