How Ronnie Biggs carried out Wandsworth’s most audacious escape: A minute by minute retelling of the Great Train Robber’s iconic flight to freedom involving a red removal van with an extendable tower hidden inside – and two rope ladders
- In April 1964 Ronnie Biggs was sent to Wandsworth to serve 30 years in jail
- Daniel Khalife has escaped by strapping himself underneath a delivery van
When Daniel Khalife escaped from Wandsworth Prison on Wednesday morning by strapping himself to the underside of a delivery van, his brazen breakout was strikingly reminiscent of an incident at the same jail 58 years earlier, when the prison service was left similarly red-faced.
In April 1964, Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Biggs was sent to Wandsworth to serve 30 years for his part in the notorious Great Train Robbery when £2.75 million in cash (around £100 million today) was stolen from the Glasgow-to-London mail train.
The driver, Jack Mills, was hit over the head with an iron bar and never fully recovered. As far as the public was concerned, Biggs was a bit-player in the gang who had been foolish enough to leave his fingerprints on a tomato sauce bottle in their hideout. But by the end of the summer of 1965, everyone would know his name.
How Ronnie Biggs carried out Wandsworth’s most audacious escape
Portrait of Ronnie Biggs, the head of the gangsters who committed the attack in Glasgow-London postal train on August 8, 1963
July 8, 1965 2.30pm
Ronnie Biggs and the other men of Wandsworth Prison’s B-Block file into the exercise yard to begin their daily hour-long dose of fresh air. The yard is just beside the prison wall.
Biggs was sent to Wandsworth in April 1964 after he lost his appeal. The judge said the train robbery was ‘warfare against society and an act of organised banditry touching new depths of lawlessness’.
Some of Britain’s most dangerous criminals are locked up in Wandsworth. But its high level of security hasn’t stopped Biggs from smuggling in cans of lobster and crab meat; he even listens to pop music on a small illegal radio. Biggs wrote in his autobiography: ‘An Australian pop group, The Seekers, had a hit at the time which was my inspiration: it contained the line “There’s a new world somewhere, they call the promised land.” Biggs is determined to escape.
2.45pm
In the exercise yard, four prison officers are watching the convicts enjoy the summer sun. Fourteen of the prisoners are on a ‘Special Watch’ list: the men most likely to escape. Biggs is on that list, as one of his Great Train Robbery accomplices has already managed it.
In August 1964 three men walked into Charlie Wilson’s cell in Winson Green Prison in Birmingham, having robbed the guards of a master key, and led him through the jail, up a rope ladder, over the prison wall and into a waiting car. Wilson was naked except for a vest.
He’s still on the run, living with his wife and daughter in the South of France. (Wilson will be captured in January 1968.) As a result of Wilson’s audacious escape, the humiliated Home Office told Wandsworth governor Michael ‘Gusty’ Gale to keep a close eye on Biggs. A warder was always placed outside his cell, much to the robber’s irritation.
3pm
In Bedfordshire, Biggs’ wife Charmian and their two small children Nicky and Christopher are admiring the animals in Whipsnade Zoo.
The couple met on a commuter train to London Bridge in 1957 when she was just 17 and Ronnie, a carpenter and petty thief, was 27. Charmian’s father, a primary school headmaster, strongly opposed the relationship, so in 1960 they eloped.
She supported her husband all through the trial and today is on edge as she has been instrumental in organising a risky prison break for her husband and an armed robber called Eric Flower. Biggs and Flower have been friends since they were young inmates together in Lewes Prison in 1949.
3.01pm
A green Ford Zephyr followed by a bright scarlet removal van make their way slowly down a narrow street on the north side of Wandsworth Prison, past a sign that says ‘Private Road’. On the other side of the street is a row of bungalows built for prison warders and their families. Warder’s wife Winifred Williams, 46, looks out of her kitchen window at the large van. ‘I thought nothing of it. I just thought someone was moving.’
At the steering wheel of the van is Paul Seabourne, a friend of Ronnie Biggs recently released from Wandsworth. Inside the van he has built a scaffolding tower that can be winched up through a sliding panel in the roof. Seabourne has brought shotguns, two rope ladders and an axe, and for £2,500 apiece has hired two accomplices.
The whole plan has been paid for with £10,000 from Charmian Biggs.
The escape car used by Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs during his escape from Wandsworth Prison in London
3.02pm
Winifred Williams is expecting the local baker’s van to drive along the road and when she hears an engine, she grabs her handbag and dashes outside to buy a loaf — but it’s not the baker. It’s the removal van and the Zephyr reversing down the road towards her.
The van stops with one side just inches from the 25ft-tall grey stone prison wall. Paul Seabourne, with a black silk stocking pulled over his face, gets out of the cab. The stocking is tied at the top of his head and Winifred thinks it makes him look like a coconut. Her next thought is: ‘It’s a springing! They’re going to get someone out!’
Another man gets out of the Zephyr wearing a stocking mask and holding a shotgun. Winifred said later: ‘I thought, “This is where I go in.” I went in very quickly and shut the door and bolted it.’ She contemplates hiding under her bed.
In the exercise yard, Ronnie Biggs hears the van get into position.
3.03pm
Seabourne and his two accomplices notice they are being watched by 17-year-old prison warder’s son Peter Head, who has been working on a motorcycle in his garden. They grab Peter at gunpoint and force him into his father’s shed. He watches events unfold through a crack in the door.
In case any passer-by tries to call the police, Seabourne has ripped out the telephones from all the phone boxes close to the prison.
3.04pm
The three men go to the rear of the van and pull up its door. Inside they flick a switch and the sliding panel in the roof opens. They winch up the scaffolding tower until it reaches the top of the prison wall.
Seabourne and an accomplice climb up holding rope ladders, followed by the man with the gun.
3.05pm
The four prison warders are stunned to see two masked men peer over the wall and then throw down two rope ladders. The warders blow their whistles and run to the base of the wall.
Biggs and Flower knew the warders could stop their escape, so two prisoners named Brian and Jock, who have been promised £500 each, start to fight the warders.
3.06pm
Biggs is first to reach the top of the ladder where he’s met by Seabourne, who greets him: ‘Hello, you big ugly b*****d!’ Biggs gives him a slap on the back. He later wrote, ‘I looked down at the melee in the prison yard. My boys were hanging on to the screws as if they loved them.’ (Brian and Jock will get an extra year added to their sentences for their actions.)
Flower is scaling a ladder not far behind Biggs. The prison siren sounds and off-duty warders start running out of their houses.
3.07pm
Across the road from the prison, Winifred Williams has plucked up the courage to look out of her bedroom window and sees Biggs and Flower on the wall. The two men step onto the scaffolding tower and then jump down onto a pile of mattresses on the floor of the van.
Back in the exercise yard, two prisoners named Robert Anderson and Patrick Doyle think this opportunity is too good to miss and they, too, start to climb the ladders.
Watching the van through the shed door, Peter Head is terrified, as his mother is due back home. ‘I was afraid of what the men might do if she came along.’
3.09pm
Flower and Biggs run to join Paul Seabourne and his two accomplices in the Ford Zephyr.
Just as Seabourne is about to pull away, Anderson and Doyle knock on the window hoping for a lift. ‘Let ’em in!’ Biggs yells, even though that means there are now seven men squeezed into the car.
The Zephyr speeds off and the removal van is left behind. Seabourne had hoped to torch it, but he ran out of time.
In the back of the cramped car, Biggs and Flower quickly change clothes. Back in the exercise yard reinforcements arrive and the prisoners are taken back to their cells.
4pm
Driving home from Whipsnade Zoo, Charmian hears on the car radio that four convicts have escaped from Wandsworth Prison.
Meanwhile, her husband and the other escapees have swapped the Zephyr for a second getaway car and are now in Dulwich in South-East London, where their safe-house is located.
Seabourne and Biggs don’t want Anderson and Doyle to know where the house is, so they park a short distance away. They let Anderson and Doyle take the car and the two evade capture for three months.
5pm
In an upstairs flat in Dulwich, Biggs, Seabourne and Flower toast their success with champagne.
Meanwhile, the streets around Wandsworth Prison are full of reporters and TV vans. Detective Chief Superintendent Dick Lewis, leading the investigation into the escape, says to the press: ‘It was engineered without a doubt, with collusion inside the prison.’ Winifred Williams is telling a film crew what she saw. ‘I’m still petrified. It was so well-organised.’
Midnight
Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice is at Wandsworth Prison listening to Michael Gale describe in humiliating detail how four hardened criminals managed to escape from his prison in broad daylight. To Gale’s relief, Soskice will tell the House of Commons: ‘I can find no reason to think any blame attaches to the Prison Service.’
Ronnie Biggs, Great Train Robber flexing his muscles on the Copacabana beach wearing an England shirt in Rio, Brazil, 1977
Aftermath
The following day the Mail described the escape as ‘a fantastic operation which in a few seconds made nonsense of massive top-security precautions’.
While Biggs and Flower hid in Dulwich, the police responded to every tip-off in dramatic fashion. Some 150 policemen, armed with rifles, revolvers and tear gas, raided a deserted country house in Surrey. A few days later, assisted by a Royal Navy helicopter, they surrounded a stately home in Dorset. Biggs was nowhere to be seen.
In late August 1965, Biggs moved from London to Bognor Regis, where he was finally reunited with Charmian. That same month Paul Seabourne was arrested and later sentenced to four and a half years for helping Biggs to escape.
In October 1965, Biggs and Flower made their way to Paris where their faces were changed by plastic surgery. Under the name ‘Terence Furminger’, Biggs settled in Adelaide in Australia, joined by Charmian and their children.
Eric Flower lived in Sydney until he was captured in 1969 and sent back to Wandsworth to finish his 12-year sentence.
With the police closing in on him, in 1970 Biggs flew to Brazil on a false passport. After fathering a child with another woman there, he and Charmian divorced.
In 2001, after evading capture for 36 years, Biggs was arrested and sent to London’s high-security Belmarsh prison where he once again became Prisoner 002731, the same number he was given in April 1964 when he entered Wandsworth. He was released on compassionate grounds in 2009 and died in 2013.
Jonathan Mayo is the author of The 1966 World Cup Final: Minute by Minute. Published by Short Books.
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