Great Train Robbery (1965): Biggs escapes Wandsworth

Driver Jack Mills and secondman David Whitby were the railway staff on the locomotive. Mills was assaulted and later became a lasting public symbol of the night; this page records that he was injured and does not dwell on wounds. The gang used Leatherslade Farm in Buckinghamshire as a hideout. Buckinghamshire Constabulary and Scotland Yard's Flying Squad found the farm after a tip and a search — a discarded Monopoly set and fingerprints became folklore, but the convictions rested on a wider forensic and witness file.

At Aylesbury in 1964, Mr Justice Edmund Davies sentenced several men, including Ronald 'Buster' Edwards, Charles Wilson, Roy James and others, to terms of up to thirty years. Bruce Reynolds, the planner, was caught in 1968. Ronnie Biggs escaped from Wandsworth in 1965, reached Brazil and became a tabloid exile until he returned in 2001. The case is convicted: names, a sum and a court. Much of the cash was never recovered.

A mail train, a farm and a thirty-year tariff The Great Train Robbery is Britain's most retold cash theft: a dated sum, a named bridge, an Aylesbury dock and a cultural afterlife that outran the missing notes. The Travelling Post Office moved registered mail and high-value packets between Glasgow and London. The 8 August train carried used notes being returned to London — a fact later used to explain both the size of the haul and why serials were hard to spend. The official £2.6 million is the figure this atlas uses; later inflation comparisons belong in money notes, not in the 1963 line.