The Great Train Robbery Part 1

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY.

by MICHAEL CRICHTON.

To Barbara Rose

Satan is glad--- when I am bad, And hopes that I--- with him shall lie In fire and chains--- and dreadful pains.

-Victorian child's poem, 1856

"I wanted the money."

-Edward Pierce, 1856

Introduction.

It is difficult, after the pa.s.sage of more than a century, to understand the extent to which the train robbery of 1855 shocked the sensibilities of Victorian England. At first glance, the crime hardly seems noteworthy. The sum of money stolen--- 12,000 in gold bullion--- was large, but not unprecedented; there had been a dozen more lucrative robberies in the same period. And the meticulous organization and plan of the crime, involving many people and extending over a year, was similarly not unusual. All major crimes at the mid-century called for a high degree of preparation and coordination.

Yet the Victorians always referred to this crime in capital letters, as The Great Train Robbery. Contemporary observers labeled it The Crime of the Century and The Most Sensational Exploit of the Modern Era. The adjectives applied to it were all strong: it was "unspeakable," "appalling," and "heinous." Even in an age given to moral overstatement, these terms suggest some profound impact upon everyday consciousness.

To understand why the Victorians were so shocked by the theft, one must understand something about the meaning of the railroads. Victorian England was the first urbanized, industrialized society on earth, and it evolved with stunning rapidity. At the time of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, Georgian England was a predominantly rural nation of thirteen million people. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the population had nearly doubled to twenty-four million, and half the people lived in urban centers. Victorian England was a nation of cities; the conversion from agrarian life seemed to have occurred almost overnight; indeed, the process was so swift that no one really understood it.

Victorian novelists, with the exception of d.i.c.kens and Gissing, did not write about the cities; Victorian painters for the most part did not portray urban subjects. There were conceptual problems as well--- during much of the century, industrial production was viewed as a kind of particularly valuable harvest, and not as something new and unprecedented. Even the language fell behind. For most of the 1800s, "slum" meant a room of low repute, and "urbanize" meant to become urbane and genteel. There were no accepted terms to describe the growth of cities, or the decay of portions of them.

This is not to say that Victorians were unaware of the changes taking place in their society, or that these changes were not widely--- and often fiercely--- debated. But the processes were still too new to be readily understood. The Victorians were pioneers of the urban, industrial life that has since become commonplace throughout the Western world. And if we find their att.i.tudes quaint, we must nonetheless recognize our debt to them.

The new Victorian cities that grew so fast glittered with more wealth than any society had ever known--- and they stank of poverty as abject as any society had ever suffered. The inequities and glaring contrasts within urban centers provoked many calls for reform. Yet there was also widespread public complacency, for the fundamental a.s.sumption of Victorians was that progress--- progress in the sense of better conditions for all mankind--- was inevitable. We may find that complacency particularly risible today, but in the 1850s it was a reasonable att.i.tude to adopt.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the price of bread, meat, coffee, and tea had fallen; the price of coal was almost halved; the cost of cloth was reduced 80 percent; and per-capita consumption of everything had increased. Criminal law had been reformed; personal liberties were better protected; Parliament was, at least to a degree, more representative; and one man in seven had the right to vote. Per-capita taxation had been reduced by half. The first blessings of technology were evident: gaslights glowed throughout the cities; steams.h.i.+ps made the crossing to America in ten days instead of eight weeks; the new telegraph and postal service provided astonis.h.i.+ng speed in communications.

Living conditions for all cla.s.ses of Englishmen had improved. The reduced cost of food meant that everyone ate better. Factory working hours had been reduced from 74 to 60 hours a week for adults, and from 72 to 40 for children; the custom of working half-days on Sat.u.r.day was increasingly prevalent. Average life span had increased five years.

There was, in short, plenty of reason to believe that society was "on the march," that things were getting better, and that they would continue to get better into the indefinite future. The very idea of the future seemed more solid to the Victorians than we can comprehend. It was possible to lease a box in the Albert Hall for 999 years, and many citizens did so.

But of all the proofs of progress, the most visible and striking were the railroads. In less than a quarter of a century, they had altered every aspect of English life and commerce. It is only a slight simplification to say that prior to 1830 there were no railroads in England. All transportation between cities was by horsedrawn coach, and such journeys were slow, unpleasant, dangerous, and expensive. Cities were consequently isolated from one another.

In September, 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened and began the revolution. In the first year of operation, the number of railway pa.s.sengers carried between these two cities was twice the number that had traveled the previous year by coach. By 1838, more than 600,000 people were carried annually on the line--- a figure greater than the total population of either Liverpool or Manchester at that time.

The social impact was extraordinary. So was the howl of opposition. The new railroads were all privately financed, profit-oriented ventures, and they drew plenty of criticism.

There was opposition on aesthetic grounds; Ruskin's condemnation of the railway bridges over the Thames echoed a view widely held by his less refined contemporaries; the "aggregate disfigurement" of town and countryside was uniformly deplored. Landowners everywhere fought the railroads as deleterious to property values. And the tranquility of local towns was disrupted by the onslaught of thousands of rough, itinerant, camp-living "navvies," for in an era before dynamite and earthmovers, bridges were built, tracks were laid, and tunnels were cut by sheer human effort alone. It was also well recognized that in times of unemployment the navvies easily s.h.i.+fted to the ranks of urban criminals of the crudest sort.

Despite these reservations, the growth of the English railroads was swift and pervasive. By 1850, five thousand miles of track crisscrossed the nation, providing cheap and increasingly swift transportation for every citizen. Inevitably the railroads came to symbolize progress. According to the Economist, "In locomotion by land... our progress has been most stupendous--- surpa.s.sing all previous steps since the creation of the human race.... In the days of Adam the average speed of travel, if Adam ever did such things, was four miles an hour; in the year 1828, or 4,000 years afterwards, it was still only ten miles, and sensible and scientific men were ready to affirm and eager to prove that this rate could never be materially exceeded; ---in 1850 it is habitually forty miles an hour, and seventy for those who like it."

Here was undeniable progress, and to the Victorian mind such progress implied moral as well as material advancement. According to Charles Kingsley, "The moral state of a city depends... on the physical state of that city; on the food, water, air, and lodging of its inhabitants." Progress in physical conditions led inevitably to the eradication of social evils and criminal behavior--- which would be swept away much as the slums that housed these evils and criminals were, from time to time, swept away. It seemed a simple matter of eliminating the cause and, in due course, the effect.

From this comfortable perspective, it was absolutely astonis.h.i.+ng to discover that "the criminal cla.s.s" had found a way to prey upon progress--- and indeed to carry out a crime aboard the very hallmark of progress, the railroad. The fact that the robbers also overcame the finest safes of the day only increased the consternation.

What was really so shocking about The Great Train Robbery was that it suggested, to the sober thinker, that the elimination of crime might not be an inevitable consequence of forward-marching progress. Crime could no longer be likened to the Plague, which had disappeared with changing social conditions to become a dimly remembered threat of the past. Crime was something else, and criminal behavior would not simply fade away.

A few daring commentators even had the temerity to suggest that crime was not linked to social conditions at all, but rather sprang from some other impulse. Such opinions were, to say the least, highly distasteful.

They remain distasteful to the present day. More than a century after The Great Train Robbery, and more than a decade after another spectacular English train robbery, the ordinary Western urban man still clings to the belief that crime results from poverty, injustice, and poor education. Our view of the criminal is that of a limited, abused, perhaps mentally disturbed individual who breaks the law out of a desperate need--- the drug addict standing as a sort of modern archetype for this person. And indeed when it was recently reported that the majority of violent street crime in New York City was not committed by addicts, that finding was greeted with skepticism and dismay, mirroring the perplexity of our Victorian forebears a hundred years ago.

Crime became a legitimate focus for academic inquiry in the 1870s, and in succeeding years criminologists have attacked all the old stereotypes, creating a new view of crime that has never found favor with the general public. Experts now agree on the following points: First, crime is not a consequence of poverty. In the words of Barnes and Teeters (1949), "Most offenses are committed through greed, not need."

Second, criminals are not limited in intelligence, and it is probable that the reverse is true. Studies of prison, populations show that inmates equal the general public in intelligence tests--- and yet prisoners represent that fraction of lawbreakers who are caught.

Third, the vast majority of criminal activity goes unpunished. This is inherently a speculative question, but some authorities argue that only 3 to 5 percent of all crimes are reported; and of reported crimes, only 15 to 20 percent are ever "solved" in the usual sense of the word. This is true of even the most serious offenses, such as murder. Most police pathologists laugh at the idea that "murder will out."

Similarly, criminologists dispute the traditional view that "crime does not pay." As early as 1877, an American prison investigator, Richard Dugdale, concluded that "we must dispossess ourselves of the idea that crime does not pay. In reality, it does." Ten years later, the Italian criminologist Colajanni went a step further, arguing that on the whole crime pays better than honest labor. By 1949, Barnes and Teeters stated flatly, "It is primarily the moralist who still believes that crime does not pay."

Our moral att.i.tudes toward crime account for a peculiar ambivalence toward criminal behavior itself. On the one han , it is feared, despised, and vociferously condemned. Yet it is also secretly admired, and we are always eager to hear the details of some outstanding criminal exploit. This att.i.tude was clearly prevalent in 1855, for The Great Train Robbery was not only shocking and appalling, but also "daring," "audacious," and "masterful."

We share with the Victorians another att.i.tude--- a belief in a "criminal cla.s.s," by which we mean a subculture of professional criminals who make their living by breaking the laws of the society around them. Today we call this cla.s.s "the Mafia," "the syndicate," or "the mob," and we are interested to know its code of ethics, its inverted value system, its peculiar language and patterns of behavior.

Without question, a definable subculture of professional criminals existed a hundred years ago in mid-Victorian England. Many of its features were brought to light in the trial of Burgess, Agar, and Pierce, the chief partic.i.p.ants in The Great Train Robbery. They were all apprehended in 1856, nearly two years after the event. Their voluminous courtroom testimony is preserved, along with journalistic accounts of the day. It is from these sources that the following narrative is a.s.sembled.

M.C.

November, 1974

PART ONE :

PREPARATIONS : May - October, 1854

Chapter 01.

The Provocation

Forty minutes out of London, pa.s.sing through the rolling green fields and cherry orchards of Kent, the morning train of the South Eastern Railway attained its maximum speed of fifty-four miles an hour. Riding the bright blue-painted engine, the driver in his red uniform could be seen standing upright in the open air, uns.h.i.+elded by any cab or windscreen, while at his feet the engineer crouched, shoveling coal into the glowing furnaces of the engine. Behind the chugging engine and tender were three yellow first-cla.s.s coaches, followed by seven green second-cla.s.s carriages; and at the very end, a gray, windowless luggage van.

As the train clattered down the track on its way to the coast, the sliding door of the luggage van opened suddenly, revealing a desperate struggle inside. The contest was most unevenly matched: a slender youth in tattered clothing, striking out against a burly, blue-uniformed railway guard. Although weaker, the youth made a good showing, landing one or two telling blows against his hulking opponent. Indeed, it was only by accident that the guard, having been knocked to his knees, should spring forward in such a way that the youth was caught unprepared and flung clear of the train through the open door, so that he landed tumbling and bouncing like a rag doll upon the ground.

The guard, gasping for breath, looked back at the fast-receding figure of the fallen youth. Then he closed the sliding door. The train sped on, its whistle shrieking. Soon it was gone round a gentle curve, and all that remained was the faint sound of the chugging engine, and the lingering drifting gray smoke that slowly settled over the tracks and the body of the motionless youth.

After a minute or two, the youth stirred. In great pain, he raised himself up on one elbow, and seemed about to rise to his feet. But his efforts were to no avail; he instantly collapsed back to the ground, gave a final convulsive shudder, and lay wholly still.

Half an hour later, an elegant black brougham coach with rich crimson wheels came down the dirt road that ran parallel to the railway tracks. The coach came to a hill, and the driver drew up his horse. A most singular gentleman emerged, fas.h.i.+onably dressed in a dark green velvet frock coat and high beaver hat. The gentleman climbed the hill, pressed binoculars to his eyes, and swept the length of the tracks. Immediately he fixed on the body of the prostrate youth. But the gentleman made no attempt to approach him, or to aid him in any way. On the contrary, he remained standing on the hill until he was certain the lad was dead. Only then did he turn aside, climb into his waiting coach, and drive back in the direction he had come, northward toward London.

Chapter 02.

The Putter-Up

This singular gentleman was Edward Pierce, and for a man destined to become so notorious that Queen Victoria herself expressed a desire to meet him--- or, barring that, to attend his hanging--- he remains an oddly mysterious figure. In appearance, Pierce was a tall, handsome man in his early thirties who wore a full red beard in the fas.h.i.+on that had recently become popular, particularly among government employees. In his speech, manner, and dress he seemed to be a gentleman, and well-to-do; he was apparently very charming, and possessed of "a captivating address." He himself claimed to be an orphan of Midlands gentry, to have attended Winchester and then Cambridge. He was a familiar figure in many London social circles and counted among his acquaintances Ministers, Members of Parliament, foreign amba.s.sadors, bankers, and others of substantial standing. Although a bachelor, he maintained a house at No. 12 Harrow Road, in a fas.h.i.+onable part of London. But he spent much of the year traveling, and was said to have visited not only the Continent but New York as well.

Contemporary observers clearly believed his aristocratic origins; journalistic accounts often referred to Pierce as a "rogue," using the term in the sense of a male animal gone bad. The very idea of a highborn gentleman adopting a life of crime was so startling and t.i.tillating that n.o.body really wanted to disprove it.

Yet there is no firm evidence that Pierce came from the upper cla.s.ses; indeed, almost nothing of his background prior to 1850 is known with any certainty. Modern readers, accustomed to the concept of "positive identification" as an ordinary fact of life, may be puzzled by the ambiguities of Pierce's past. But in an era when birth certificates were an innovation, photography a nascent art, and fingerprinting wholly unknown, it was difficult to identify any man with certainty, and Pierce took special care to be elusive. Even his name is doubtful: during the trial, various witnesses claimed to have known him as John Simms, or Andrew Miller, or Robert Jeffers.

The source of his obviously ample income. was equally disputed. Some said he was a silent partner with Jukes in the highly successful firm that manufactured croquet equipment. Croquet--- p.r.o.nounced "croaky"--- was the overnight rage among athletically inclined young ladies, and it was perfectly reasonable that a sharp young businessman, investing a modest inheritance in such an enterprise, should come off very well.

Others said that Pierce owned several publican houses, and a smallish fleet of cabs, headed by 'a particularly sinister-appearing cabby, named Barlow, with a white scar across his forehead. This was more likely true, for the owners.h.i.+p of pubs and cabs was an occupation where underworld connections were useful.

Of course, it is not impossible that Pierce was a wellborn man with a background of aristocratic education. One must remember that Winchester and Cambridge were in those days more often characterized by lewd and drunken behavior than serious and sober scholars.h.i.+p. The most profound scientific mind of the Victorian era, Charles Darwin, devoted most of his youth to gambling and horses; and the majority of wellborn young men were more interested in acquiring "a university bearing" than a university degree.

It is also true that the Victorian underworld supported many educated figures down on their luck. They were usually screevers, or writers of false letters of recommendation, or they were counterfeiters, "doing a bit of soft." Sometimes they became magsmen, or con artists. But in general these educated men were petty criminals of a pathetic sort, more deserving of public pity than condemnation.

Edward Pierce, on the other hand, was positively exuberant in his approach to crime. Whatever his soues of income, whatever the truth of his background, one thing is certain: he was a master cracksman, or burglar, who over the years had acc.u.mulated sufficient capital to finance large-scale criminal operations, thus becoming what was called "a patter-up." And toward the middle of 1854, he was already well into an elaborate plan to pull the greatest theft of his career, The Great Train Robbery.

Chapter 03.

The Screwsman

Robert Agar--- a known screwsman, or specialist in keys and safe-breaking--- testified in court that when he met Edward Pierce in late May, 1854, he had not seen him for two years previously. Agar was twenty-six years old, and in fair health except for a bad cough, the legacy of his years as a child working for a match manufacturer on Wharf Road, Bethnal Green. The premises of the firm were poorly ventilated, and the white vapor of phosphorous filled the air at all times. Phosphorous was known to be poisonous, but there were plenty of people eager to work at any job, even one that might cause a person's lungs to decay, or his jaw to rot off--- sometimes in a matter of months.

Agar was a matchstick dipper. He had nimble fingers, and he eventually took up his trade as screwsman, where he was immediately successful. He worked as a screwsman for six years and was never apprehended.

Agar had never had any direct dealings with Pierce in the past, but he knew of him as a master cracksman who worked other towns, thus accounting for his long absences from London. Agar had also heard that Pierce had the money to put up a lay from time to time.

Agar testified that their first meeting occurred at the Bull and Bear publican house, on Hounslow Road. Located at the periphery of the notorious criminal slum of Seven Dials, this well-known flash house was, in the words of one observer, "a gathering place for all manner of females dressed to represent ladies, as well as members of the criminal cla.s.s; who could be seen at every turning."

Given the infamous nature of the place, it was almost certain that a plainclothes constable from the Metropolitan Police was lurking somewhere on the premises. But the Bull and Bear was frequented by gentlemen of quality with a taste for low life, and the conversation of two fas.h.i.+onably dressed young bloods lounging at the bar while they surveyed the women in the room attracted no particular attention.

The meeting was unplanned, Agar said, but he was not surprised when Pierce arrived. Agar had heard some talk about Pierce lately, and it sounded as though hg might be putting up. Agar recalled that the conversation began without greetings or preliminaries.

Agar said, "I heard that Spring Heel Jack's left Westminster."

"I heard that," Pierce agreed, rapping with his silverheaded cane to draw the attention of the barman. Pierce ordered two gla.s.ses of the best whiskey, which Agar took as proof that this was to be a business discussion.

"I heard," Agar said, "that Jack was going on a south swing to dip the holiday crowd." In those days, London pickpockets left in late spring, traveling north or south to other cities. A pickpocket's stock in trade was anonymity, and one could not dip a particular locale for long without being spotted by the crusher on the beat.

"I didn't hear his plans," Pierce said.

"I also heard," Agar continued, "that he took the train."

"He might have done."

"I heard," Agar said, his eyes on Pierces face, "that on this train he was doing some crow's peeping for a particular gent who is putting up."

"He might have done," Pierce said again.

"I also heard," Agar said with a sudden grin, "that you are putting up."

"I may," Pierce said. He sipped his whiskey, and stared at the gla.s.s. "It used to be better here," he said reflectively. "Neddy must be watering his stock. What have you heard I am putting up for?"

"A robbery," Agar said. "For a ream flash pull, if truth be told."

"If truth be told," Pierce repeated. He seemed to find the phrase amusing. He turned away from the bar and looked at the women in the room. Several returned his glances warmly. "Everybody hears the pull bigger than life," he said finally.

"Aye, that's so," Agar admitted, and sighed. (In his testimony, Agar was very clear about the histrionics involved. "Now I goes and gives a big sigh, you see; like to say my patience is wearing thin, because he's a cautious one, Pierce is, but I want to get down to it, so I gives a big sigh.") There was a brief silence. Finally Agar said, "It's two years gone since I saw you. Been busy?"

"Traveling," Pierce said.

"The Continent?"

Pierce shrugged. He looked at the gla.s.s of whiskey in Agar's hands, and the half-finished gla.s.s of gin and water Agar had been drinking before Pierce arrived. "How's the touch?"

"Ever so nice," Agar said. To demonstrate, he held out his hands, palms flat, fingers wide: there was no tremor.

"I may have one or two little things," Pierce said.

"Spring Heel Jack held his cards close," Agar said. "I know that for a ream fact. He was all swelled mighty and important, but he kept it to his chest."