8 August: Ronnie Biggs

Born this date in 1929: Ronald Biggs, British criminal, known for his minor role in the Great Train Robbery of 1963. 10 things you might not know about Ronnie Biggs:

1. He was born in Lambeth, London, and grew up in Brixton during the second world war. He was evacuated as a child and spent some time living in Flitwick, Bedfordshire and Cornwall.
2. He joined the RAF in 1947, but was already a petty criminal by then and was handed a dishonourable discharge for desertion after two years after breaking into a chemist's shop. A month later he was convicted of stealing a car and sentenced to prison. After release, Biggs took part in a failed robbery of a bookmaker's office in Lambeth and wound up back in prison again. He met the leader of the great train robbery gang, Bruce Reynolds, while he was an inmate at HMP Wandsworth.
3. During a brief attempt to go straight, Biggs trained as a carpenter and got married to a woman named Charmian Powell, a headmaster's daughter.
4. As Biggs was trying to work out how to get enough money to buy a house for his wife and family, he happened to be working on a house belonging to a train driver who was about to retire. This driver, whose name is unknown, though referred to as "Stan Agate", "Old Pete" or "Pop", was already involved in Bruce Reynold's plot to rob a train and Biggs became involved through him. Biggs was given the job of arranging for Agate to move the train after it was held up.
5. The great train robbery happened on Biggs's 34th birthday, 8 August 1963. Having told his wife he was going logging, he set off to help rob a train. However, it all went a bit wrong through a lack of forethought. The train they held up wasn't one that Agate knew how to drive. Hence Agate and Biggs had no part to play and were told to go and wait in the getaway car. It was while they were waiting that the driver, Jack Mills, was coshed with an iron bar to force him to move the train, an injury from which he never quite recovered and probably contributed to his early death. Biggs and Agate weren't the only ones who screwed up. Another accomplice failed to completely destroy evidence by burning down a farm the gang had used. The police found Ronnie Biggs's fingerprints on a ketchup bottle and along with 11 others, Biggs was arrested and sent to prison for 30 years.
6. After two years, Biggs famously escaped from HMP Wandsworth. While other prisoners created a diversion during daily exercise, Biggs used a rope ladder to scale the wall and escape in a waiting van. First he fled to Paris where he blew a fair bit of his £147,000 share of the train robbery proceeds on plastic surgery and fake passports. His wife joined him there with their two sons, even though she'd been having an affair with another man and was pregnant. She chose to stand by her husband and had an illegal abortion before flying out to join him.
7. The family moved to Australia where he went by the names Terry King and Terry Cook. He worked as a TV set builder and also ran a boarding house. Despite moving around Australia, Biggs knew the police were catching up with him and fled to Brazil, which at the time had no extradition treaty with the UK, leaving his family in Australia. While he couldn't be extradited from Brazil, he was still known as a criminal and wasn't able to get a job. He was also subject to a 10pm curfew. Which was a problem since he'd blown most of the robbery proceeds by then. He supported himself by hosting parties and charging tourists to attend and hear his story. One of the people who visited him was football legend Sir Stanley Matthews. Another source of income later on was the son he had by his Brazilian girlfriend Raimunda de Castro, Michael. Michael became a child star on a children's TV show in Brazil and later was a member of a band. Charmian divorced him when she found out he'd fathered a child with someone else. She was allowed to remain in Australia and sold her story in order to buy a house. She later obtained a degree and became a journalist. Her sons still live anonymously in Australia.
8. Ronnie Biggs had a fairly successful recording career, recording vocals for punk bands such as the Sex Pistols, a German band called Die Toten Hosen and the Argentinian punk band Pilsen. Some of the songs he sang on were No One is Innocent (a.k.a. The Biggest Blow (A Punk Prayer)/Cosh The Driver), Belsen Was a Gas, Police on My Back and Carnival in Rio. He also collaborated with a group of Jazz musicians to record a musical narrative of his life called Mailbag Blues, which was finally released in 2004.
9. There were a couple of occasions when he almost ended up back in Blighty. He was arrested in Rio de Janiero in 1974 by Chief Supt Jack Slipper, of Scotland Yard, but managed to wriggle out of being sent home because he had a girlfriend and son in Brazil. In 1981, a bunch of bounty hunters who'd served in the British military, kidnapped him in the hope of getting him back to the UK and collecting a reward, but the kidnap went wrong when their boat broke down off Barbados and had to be towed into the harbour. Barbados had no extradition treaty with the UK either and Biggs was able to return to Brazil. In 1997, the UK and Brazil made an extradition treaty and the UK government duly requested Brazil should hand Biggs over. The extradition request was rejected by the Brazilian Supreme Court, giving Biggs the right to live in Brazil for the rest of his life.
10. Biggs didn't choose to do that in the end. In 2001, he announced that he was ready to go home. While many assumed his reason was to get healthcare, the reason Biggs himself gave was that he wanted to "walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint of bitter". The Sun newspaper arranged a private jet stocked with Curry, Marmite and Beer to fly him home. He was arrested on arrival and became prisoner 002731. He suffered a series of strokes and was released on 6 August 2009, two days before his 80th birthday, on 'compassionate grounds'. This was usually reserved for prisoners with less than 3 months to live but Biggs survived, albeit in hospitals and nursing homes, until 2013. The last times he was seen in public were at the launch of his book, Odd Man Out: the Last Straw, and at the funeral of one of the other train robbers. Biggs died hours before the first broadcast of a two-part BBC television series The Great Train Robbery, in which Biggs was portrayed by actor Jack Gordon. He was cremated and had requested that his ashes be spread between Brazil and London. His coffin was covered with the Union Flag, the flag of Brazil and a Charlton Athletic scarf. An honour guard of British Hell's Angels escorted his hearse to the crematorium.

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