Jan 4th 2014 | From the print edition

THE year 1963 was something of a watershed in human history. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Pope John XXIII died. Beatlemania really took off with “She Loves You”. And on August 8th Ronald Arthur Biggs, as the Old Bill liked to call him, was one of 16 thieves who stole £2.6m (£50m in today’s money, or $80m) from a Royal Mail train. As it happened, it was his birthday. The heist was the biggest ever seen in Britain at the time, justly christened the Great Train Robbery. And he was the most famous robber of them all.

How it came about was quite a story. He liked to tell it in later years round the pool at his not-so-hideaway villa in Rio, where for £100 a time you could eat barbecue with him, be served caipirinhas by beautifully breasted samba dancers, get the autograph and buy the T-shirt. (“I went to Rio and met Ronnie Biggs…Honest”.) He dined out on it, and got breakfast too.

His part in the actual robbery was small. He wasn’t even on the train. Some called him the teaboy, though he was more than that. He got cut in by the mastermind, Bruce Reynolds, when he went to ask him for £500 to put down a deposit on a house. Reynolds said he didn’t have the cash at the time, but was working on getting some. His, Biggsie’s, role was to find a man who could drive the mail train from where it would be halted and the driver silenced to where the lorry would be waiting to take the haul away. The man he found, as it happened, couldn’t drive the train and nearly gave them all away as they crouched beside the track by lighting up his pipe with a great flare and flame. Biggsie’s most useful role was cook—he always liked cooking—at Leatherslade Farm, where the gang gathered. He did a nice steak and chips with runner beans and, the next day, bacon and eggs. He deserved his whack of £147,000, which amounted (in modern money) to two and a half million quid.

It came home in two canvas bags. The notes smelled a bit dank when he tipped them out on the bedroom floor, but it was a nice big sight, all right. Charmian, the wife, got very excited and was straight off to Bond Street. Unfortunately her loving lord had left his prints at the farm, on a sauce bottle and a Monopoly set, and within a month he was nicked and sent to Wandsworth prison—for the stiff term almost all the robbers got, 30 years without parole.

At least, that was what the screws intended. Instead in July 1965 he nipped over the wall on a rope ladder, dropped into a waiting furniture van, and became a legend. For the next 35 years he was on the lam between Paris, Australia, Panama and, at last, Brazil, where he became the most famous draw after Sugar Loaf Mountain. Brazil had no extradition treaty with Britain, so although he could not work, he could be famous. He found new love with Raimunda, a nightclub artiste, and reporters from the British tabloids lined up to be sent to Copacabana to interview him. For his 70th birthday bash in 1999 “a media benefactor” flew half a dozen of his old robber-chums business class to Rio, where the grog flowed till the early hours and a SWAT team from the Brazilian federal police dropped by to wish him all the best.

A pint of bitter

His poor old dad had always said he would make good one day. Simple, really: he got ahead by doing what he was best at, which was taking things without paying. At 15 that meant nicking a pen refill and a rubber from Littlewood’s; at 20, breaking into a chemist’s; a month later, helping himself to a car without the owner’s permission. Small stuff, but he couldn’t bear to see something he couldn’t have. It all stemmed from being promised a bike when he was little, which never came.

For three years though, after 1960 when he married Charmian, he went straight. He even set up a carpentry business in Redhill. Those were the good years, in retrospect. They were maybe happier than when he had the £147,000 in his pocket, for by 1967 that was all gone. He spent £40,000 on a bad facelift in Paris, and £55,000 on a package deal that got him a good fake passport and airline tickets to anywhere in the world. After that, he scraped, and would have been poor if his son Mike had not become a child pop star in Brazil, and if the press had not been so hungry for his story.

Whenever things got bad, he seriously thought he would turn himself in. He got tired of looking over his shoulder. In 1974 he was tricked by the Daily Express and arrested by Jack Slipper of the Yard, but the Brazilian courts rescued him. In 1981 he was kidnapped, stuffed in a duffel bag and taken to Barbados (luckily, also with no extradition treaty); he always believed that the British government was behind it. Part of him longed for a pint of bitter in England’s green and pleasant land. In 2001 increasing bad health pushed him to come home and the Sun flew him back, voiceless after several strokes and in a red Sun T-shirt, to the eagerly waiting Bill at Northolt.

Eight years later they let him out. They still wanted remorse, especially for the injury done (not by him) to the driver of the train. He objected that he had shown some. But the fact was that he was proud to be a Great Train Robber, one of those “lovable rogues” and “eminent thieves”. Without that little caper, 1963 would not have been half so historic; and he might have ended it as a good boy fixing window frames in Redhill, just as he began.