The Great Train Robbery

On the morning of May 22 at London Bridge station, the Scottish guard, McPherson, arrives at work to find a black-clad servant woman crying next to the luggage car of the Folkestone train. With her is a wooden casket outfitted with a bell that rings if the corpse moves—a common Victorian practice so that people could avoid being buried alive. The narrative provides a brief history of these bells, calling them “Bateson’s belfries.” McPherson comforts the woman, who tells him that the guard, Burgess, will not let her load the coffin onto the train until McPherson has searched it. McPherson offers to see to the coffin, but before he can do anything, McPherson’s uncle (the train dispatcher) and the men from the bank arrive and load the gold onto the luggage car.

After the gold is loaded, the dispatcher tells McPherson that he must open and check the coffin before it is loaded onto the train. At that moment, the coffin’s bell rings. The servant woman goes wild trying to open the coffin, believing that her brother Richard may still be alive. When the coffin is open, though, all they see is a stinking, decaying cholera-ridden corpse. It is loaded onto the train, and the dispatcher locks the van, never noticing Pierce in the station.

After the commotion, Barlow, who is disguised as Pierce’s manservant, loads five heavy satchel bags onto the luggage car while the dispatcher is distracted. Then, Pierce asks the “servant woman” (Miriam) if she would like to join him on the train. At that moment, Henry Fowler arrives and announces, to Pierce’s chagrin, that they should all sit together on the train. Once everyone is on the train, Pierce begins smoking a cigarette, making the servant woman cough until Fowler escorts her to his first-class cabin. The train leaves the station.

In the luggage car, Burgess helps Agar out of the coffin. Agar opens the safe, replaces the gold with lead shot, and puts the gold in the five bags. He tells Burgess that Pierce will climb over the top of the train to unlock the outside padlock.

During the trial that takes place after the heist, Pierce admits that he has no knowledge of mountaineering. However, he says that he mistakenly thought the moving air over the tops of the cars would hold him down and prevent him from falling off—a principle known as Bernoulli’s Law. For this reason, he went ahead with his plan.

On the day of the heist, Pierce climbs out the window and onto the top of the train. He crawls to the luggage car, uses a rope to hang over the side and pick the padlock, and finally climbs through the ventilation flap into the luggage car.

Pierce is dirty from the coal smoke and exhausted. He makes Agar give him his clean clothes so that he can change. Then, they throw the satchels of gold out of the luggage car. As Pierce climbs out the ventilation flap and begins to make his way back, the train is slowing down for its approach to Ashford Station. He sprints across the tops of the cars and makes it back into his train cabin just as the train pulls into the station.

About half an hour later, the train pulls into Folkestone station. Pierce is smelly, dirty, and wearing Agar’s ill-fitting clothes. Fowler, now walking with the servant girl, sees Pierce on the platform and says that he looks terrible, but Fowler isn’t suspicious because he believes that Pierce gets trainsick. Pierce leaves the station while Miriam makes sure that her “brother’s” coffin is unloaded. She is picked up an hour later by a cab driven by a man with a scar (Barlow). They pick up Pierce at the end of the road.

Meanwhile, the safes are transported to Ostend, where authorities from the French bank of Louis Bonnard et Fils discover that they are full of lead shot, not gold. They send a telegraph the next morning (May 23 at 10 am) to inform the bank of Huddleston & Bradford of the theft.

The bankers at Huddleston & Bradford initially believe that the French are merely mistaken. By early afternoon, however, it becomes clear that the gold has indeed been replaced with lead shot. The various French and British authorities bicker via telegraph about who is responsible. That evening, the bankers decide to contact Scotland Yard. Over the next few days, a reward is offered for the arrest of anyone involved, and the public begins to speculate about what happened. On June 17, the safes are analyzed and show evidence of tampering. On June 19, a warrant is put out for the arrest of the guard, Burgess, but he has disappeared, along with his family. Throughout the summer, the papers breathlessly report on the Great Train Robbery. However, without further breaks in the case, public interest wanes by October.