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THE RONNIE BIGGS QUIZ BOOK
12 November 2013
• Finally, with Christmas looming, news of the perfect gift for any friend who aspires to appear on Mastermind with Ronnie Biggs as their special subject. Published this week: The Ronnie Biggs Quiz Book, by Mike Gray. So how would you fare on the 200 questions? Such as question 34: in which city did Ronnie Biggs have plastic surgery? Or question 62: a famous footballer and comedian met Ronnie for lunch in Brazil, who were they? Go to the top of the class if you got Paris, Bobby Moore and Kenny Lynch. Something to enthral the family after the scoff-fest and the Queen's speech.
The Guardian
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FORGET RONNIE BIGGS, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBER. REMEMBER THE MEN WHOSE LIVES HE RUINED
This morning a spokeswoman for Ronnie Biggs, the former Great Train Robber, announced he had passed away. He was 84. You’ll be hearing a lot about him on the news today.
Someone you’ll be hearing a little less of is another man connected to the Great Train Robbery. He passed away in February 1970 and was called Jack Mills. Jack Mills was 65, and to my knowledge didn’t have his own press spokesperson.
He was the driver of the Class 40 diesel locomotive that Biggs and his gang hijacked in the early hours of Thursday 8 August, 1963. Mills saw a faulty signal light – it had been deliberately disabled – and pulled his train to a halt at a place called Sears Crossing, near Ledburn. His colleague, fireman David Whitby, got out to see what was wrong, was grabbed, and hurled down the pitch black railway embankment.
At the same moment several other members of the gang rushed into the drivers cab from opposite sides of the track. Mills attempted to push them back, and was struck brutally on the back of the skull by an axe handle.
At this point a gang member specifically hired for the task was supposed to drive the train to a more secure location, where the mail bags containing £2.4 million in used bank notes could be unloaded. But the man chosen for the task was not sufficiently proficient in the working of that type of locomotive. So the gang forced the semi-conscious and bleeding Mills back in front of the controls, and ordered him to drive them a further half a mile to bridge number 127. In those days it was known as Bridego Bridge, but is now known as “Train Robbers' Bridge”, in their honour.
When the train was successfully relocated, the gang then stormed what was known as the High Value Carriage, assaulting postal supervisor Frank Dewhurst and assistant railway inspector Thomas Kett. They then removed 120 of the 128 mailbags in the High Value Carriage, and made good their escape.
Jack Mills, a working man all his life, finally felt well enough to return to his job nine months after the assault, even though he continued to suffer from severe headaches. He was placed on light duties, and served for a further year and a half. He was then diagnosed with shingles, a common stress-related illness, and went on sick leave for a further year. He returned to work for the final time in 1967, and then retired for good the following Christmas. He died three years later from an illness unconnected to the robbery.
David Whitb, was 25 at the time of the raid, and though he also returned to work, he never properly recovered from his experience. In August his sister recounted to the Crewe Chronicle how he was allowed to drive the train past the spot of the robbery on his first shift after returning. She told the paper “He said there was no way he was going to stop. He said he went through there at about 90 miles an hour”. Whitby was just 34 years old when he died of a heart attack, two years after the death of Jack Mills. I haven’t been able to find any reference to what happened to Thomas Kett or Frank Dewhurst after the raid.
It’s easy to find references to Ronnie Biggs. According to Christopher Pickard, his biographer, he was “one of the great characters of the last 50 years". Pickard added that “he was kind and generous", and “the first product of the "media age", a man who "inherited fame while running around the world". At least part of that’s true.
What’s clear is Biggs found his fame – others may call it infamy – highly lucrative. Following his escape from Wandsworth prison in 1965, and flight to Brazil, he admitted he squandered his £147,000 proceed from the raid within three years. Thereafter, he told Nick Campbell, he’d been "living on my name only”.
Biggs did express regret for the attack on Jack Mills, but said he had no regrets about the raid itself. "I'm totally involved in vast greed, I'm afraid”, he admitted.
Jack Mills and his colleagues didn’t receive the same financial benefits from their own unwitting notoriety. Mills received £250 compensation for the raid. An appeal by The Daily Mail to allow him to move into a larger house after his retirement secured £34,000, but he died shortly after moving in.
Meanwhile, the celebrity of Biggs and his colleagues grew and grew. Their crime, initially called the Cheddington Mail Van Raid, was formally elevated to “Great”. Bruce Reynolds and Ronnie Biggs published a book “The Great Train Robbery 50th Anniversary”. Which sat neatly alongside Biggs' other literary works “Odd Man Out”, (1994), “Keep On Running”, (1996), “Ronnie Biggs – The Inside Story” (2009), “Odd Man Out: The Last Straw” (2011), and “The Ronnie Biggs Quiz Book” (2013).
Then there were the films. Stanley Baker starred in the 1967 film “Robbery”, which also attracted the interest of Steve McQueen. Phil Collins starred as Buster Edwards in the imaginatively entitled “Buster”. There was an ITV miniseries called “Mrs Biggs”, which focused entirely on Biggs's wife, and her life on the run. To my knowledge, no books were written by Jack Mills, nor were their any films produced about him, or members of his family.
Tonight, the BBC will present the first of a two-part docudrama on the robbery. One, called the “Copper's Tale”, focuses on the efforts of the police to catch the perpetrators of the crime. The second, “The Robber's Tale”, shows things from the perspective of Biggs and his colleagues. I presume it was done that way in the interests of balance. I also suspect there will not be a third episode “The Railway Worker's Tale”.
I’ll probably watch tonight, though. It sounds interesting. And as I do, I’ll recall the old warning abut how “crime doesn’t pay”. As he lay in his deathbed, I wonder what Ronnie Biggs thought of that saying. Come to think of it, when his time came, I wonder what Jack Mills thought of it too.
The Telegraph
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18 December 2013
This year was the 50th anniversary of the Great Train Robbery and the deluge of books, documentaries and films is finally coming to an end. There is even a Ronnie Biggs quiz book out just in time for the Christmas rush, in which you can find out everything from which famous footballer he had lunch with in Rio de Janeiro (Bobby Moore) to where he had his plastic surgery done when he was on the run (Paris).
The Guardian
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THE LIFE OF RONNIE BIGGS
Written by Jack Burt on December 5, 2013 in Local History - No comments
Jack Burt takes a journey through the life and experiences of Lambeth-born Ronnie Biggs with the assistance of Mike Gray.
We can safely say that everyone has heard of the Great Train Robbery of 1963, when a group of 15 gangsters led by Bruce Reynolds attacked a train and successfully made off with £2.6 million.
But how much do we know of those involved in the robbery dubbed by the media as “the crime of the century”? What were their lives like? Brixtonite Mike Gray, who has an unusual admiration for Riggs, has now written numerous books about the man. I had a few questions to ask him about his friendship with Biggs.
Ronnie Biggs, prominently known for his involvement in the robbery, was born in Lambeth in 1929 and grew up in Brixton during the Second World War. He was evacuated to Bedfordshire for a period of time. In 1947, after the war, he would joined the RAF before eventually being dishonourably discharged for desertion after having served only two years with the military. Biggs married Charmian Powell in 1960 and they had three sons.
What occurred later would skyrocket Ronnie Biggs and others into a position of fame and history. On August 8 1963, Ronnie Biggs and 14 others led by Bruce Reynolds attacked a Royal Mail train heading from Glasgow to London in the early hours of Thursday morning. Although unarmed, they had managed to escape with a total of around £2.6 million.
Mike Gray is one of Biggs’s greatest defenders, describing him as “a very ordinary humble man” going on to say “He was not and never has been a violent criminal, he only got involved in the train robbery because he knew a retired train driver, and Biggs’s best mate was the mastermind of the robbery, Bruce Reynolds. None of the great train robbers had ever heard of Biggs before, he is just like your family granddad, his whole life has been of a working class background and hes had to fight for every penny/dollar offered to him.”
Gray first contacted Biggs in September 1989, when Biggs was living in Rio De Janeiro. At the time, there was no extradition treaty between Brazil and the U.K, which meant that legally Ronnie Biggs could not be extradited from Brazil by the British government.
Gray was struck by case from the very beginning and became obsessed with finding Biggs while he was on the run. He collected as many clippings about the man as he could, mainly – bizarrely – from the publication Loot, which had an edition in most countries of the world at that time. What he really wanted was to get in contact with the man himself. And eventually he got hold of his address and sent him a letter. It was the start of a real friendship.
Gray and Biggs began to send letters and photographs back and forth to each other for around a month until Biggs gave him his telephone number. They would speak to each other roughly every month until Biggs’ voluntary return in May 2001 when he was imprisoned. Gray would visit him in prison too.
When asked why he would want this generation and those ahead to know about Ronnie Biggs and The great train robbery, Mike responded “First of all, crime does NOT pay.” then adding “All the great train robbers lost out on years of life, lost family, had the majority of the money stolen from them while they served 30 year prison sentences, etc, But from the historical point, it was Britain’s biggest cash robbery, then 2.6 million, but today some 55.2 Million.”
“The police did a great job of tracking the robbers and the courts obviously sided with the police and handed down severe draconian sentences of 14 to 30 years, and in those days (1964) parole was not Home Office legislation.”
“The Great Train Robbery Quiz Book”, “The Ronnie Biggs Quiz Book”, and “101 Interesting Facts on Ronnie Biggs and The Great Train Robbery”, all consisting of quiz like questions and facts about Ronnie Biggs and the robbery itself.
It’s clear throughout my research of Biggs and his life, that he was a man who quickly obtained the skill of being able to circumvent the British law enforcement for a long period of time, though sometimes out of sheer luck. It is interesting how the crime was conceived, conducted, and what it resulted for its participants. But we must never confuse this interest with the fact that it was indeed a crime.
Brixton Blog
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THE RONNIE BIGGS QUIZ BOOK
Tenerife News (Tenerife Newspaper)
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A fascinating publication.
Nicola Jordan, Kent Online (Senior Reporter)
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Such an interesting and amazing book.
Rita Sobot, Tenerife News (Chief Reporter)
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-- Radio and TV
A very enjoyable quiz book, very informative and challenging, if anyone knows Ronnie Biggs, it's Mike Gray.
Keith Nicol (CostaBlanca TV Producer)
Another Ronnie Biggs book to look forward to.
Exite 93.1 FM (Costa Blanca Radio Station)
Another interesting book from someone who knows Ronnie Biggs so well.
Liam Galvin, Film Producer and Director