Train robbery sentences which sent shockwaves

It was a sentence which sent shockwaves throughout the criminal community. And it was intended to.

Apparently the judge didn't think that the Great Train Robbery was all a bit of a lark.

On this day, April 16, 1964, seven of the robbers were handed down some of the longest sentences in modern British criminal history at the time.

Mr Justice Edmund Davies said it would be positively evil if leniency were exercised. When a great crime was committed, he said, it called for great punishment, "not for the purpose of mere retribution, but to show that others similarly tempted should be brought to a sharp realisation that crime does not pay."

Taken together with long sentences meted out to five other members of the gang, the total added up to 307 years.

Their crime had already passed into criminal folklore. They had held up a Glasgow to London night mail train carrying used banknotes near Cheddington on August 8, 1963, and got away with £2.6 million, which was a record at the time.

Nobody had been killed, but it was not a victimless crime. During the robbery the train driver, Jack Mills, was coshed.

While the daring of the robbery captured the public's imagination and led to some of the robbers becoming household names, let's take a bit of time out to remember the victim, who after being battered over the head with an iron bar never fully recovered.

He died of leukaemia seven years later at the age of 64. A road was named after him in Crewe, where he had lived, in 2015.

His 25-year-old co-driver David Whitby, also from Crewe, was terrorised by the robbers, but was not hit. According to his sister he was never the same afterwards. He died of a heart attack at the age of 34.

Proceedings at the trial of 12 of the gang held at Aylesbury Assizes in 1964 lasted 58 days.

It was not the end of the story on several counts. For a start, some of the gang were still at large, and were only caught later.

Copping the 30-year sentences on that day were: Ronald Arthur Biggs, 34, a carpenter, of Redhill, Surrey; Douglas Gordon Goody, 34, a hairdresser, of Putney; Charles Frederick Wilson, 31, a bookmaker, of Clapham; Thomas William Wisbey, 33, a bookmaker, of Camberwell; Robert Welch, 34, a club proprietor, of Islington; James Hussey, 30, a painter, of East Dulwich; and Roy John James, 28, a racing motorist and silversmith, of London.

All things considered, they preferred not to serve the full 30-year term, and the train robbers further cemented their place in popular culture and the vague air of glamour associated with them through prison escapes.

Charlie Wilson was only four months into his sentence when several masked accomplices actually broke in to Winson Green prison in Birmingham to free him, coshing a night guard and opening his cell.

He was the first of the robbers to go on the run. During the manhunt speculation was rife that he may have been hiding in a narrowboat on the region’s canal network, and there was a tip-off that he was hiding out in a caravan just outside Wolverhampton.

Wilson was eventually recaptured in Canada in January 1968. After serving the remainder of his sentence he moved to Spain where he was shot dead by a hitman in 1990.

The most famous of the robbers sentenced that day was Ronnie Biggs, who climbed the prison wall of Wandsworth jail in July 1965 and fled to Brazil, where he was able to live openly, leading a playboy lifestyle and giving interviews to the press. As his health began to fail, and impoverished, he returned voluntarily to Britain in May 2001 and went back to prison.

He was freed two days before his 80th birthday in 2009 on health grounds and died in 2013.

One consequence of these escapes was that another of the robbers, Bob Welch, was moved out of Shrewsbury jail where he had been in a special security cell in the main wing for just over 12 months. His move in July 1965 came in the immediate aftermath of Biggs being sprung from Wandsworth.

During his time at Shrewsbury Welch had been a star prisoner who helped children at Condover School for the Blind. Welch, known to the children simply as Bob, was from his cell turning out large hand-printed cards which were being used in an experiment to teach partially blind children to read.

According to information on the internet, Bob Welch is the only member of the train robbers' gang now still alive.

A curious side effect of Wilson's escape was that quick-cooking porridge was introduced for prisoners' breakfast at Shrewsbury – during the escape at Winson Green one of the prison night patrol officers had been busy making porridge the long way.

Thirty years. One final twist. None of those given 30 years this day in 1964 actually served anything approaching 30 years.