FIRST GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
On 15 May 1855 gold bars and coins were stolen from a London-Paris train, in part
when approaching Redhill. Two of the perpetrators were sentenced to 14 years penal
transportation to Australia, another to 2 years hard labour.
On 15 May 1855 three locked, sealed and weighed consignments of gold bars and American
coins – worth £12,000 – were sent in Chubb locked iron travelling safes by train from
London to Paris. When they were opened it was discovered that bags of sporting shot had
been substituted for the gold. A discrepancy in the weights of the safes along the route
suggested it must have taken place on the South Eastern train somewhere between London
and Folkestone. Hundreds of suspects were interviewed and many months of investigations
passed yet the crime remained unsolved.
A man called Henry Agar had been convicted of cashing forged cheques in October 1855
and sentenced to be transported to Australia for life. From there he asked his friend William
Pierce, who was holding a large sum on his behalf, to pass on some of that money to Miss
Fanny Kay, a refreshment room attendant at Tonbridge railway station with whom he had a
child. When it was clear William had kept the money for himself Fanny took her revenge.
She reported her belief that Pierce was involved in the bullion robbery. Agar backed up
Fanny’s claims with details of the crime. Implicating well-respected railwaymen James
Burgess, guard of the van in which the safes travelled, and senior railway clerk William
Tester, who arranged the roster of guards and knew the gold was on-board.
The travelling safes were provided by the railway company for such purposes, the keys
being entrusted to the railway staff. After a fashion, wax impressions of the appropriate keys
were made and counterfiet keys produced. When Tester knew a valuable gold consignment
would be on board he assigned Burgess as guard and alerted Agar and Pierce to act. That
evening, with first class tickets, Agar and Pierce boarded that train. They were in disguise
and carrying heavy carpet bags (of lead shot) that the porter loaded into Burgess’s guard
van. Under cover of darkness they moved into the guard van at a subsequent stop. The
three men opened the safes, broke the wax seals and prised open the metal hooped boxes
and switched the gold with approximately the same weight with lead shot from their bags.
They replaced the metal hoops and created new wax seals. Tester was on board too, and at
Redhill the first bags of gold were passed to him on the platform. Agar and Pierce bagged
the remaining gold, tidied up, and changed carriages at a later station stop. At Folkestone
they collected their carpet bags, spent the night in Dover and travelled back to London the
next night where they met up with Tester. They melted down the gold in their backyard
washhouse and a bedroom, forming small bars they could sell for gold sovereigns. These
were exchanged at a bank for notes.
Agar, the self-appointed brains of the operation, was returned from Australia for the case to
be tried at the Old Bailey in January 1857. He signed a confession and was kept in prison.
Tester, who’d taken a railway job in Stockholm, was brought back to England where he,
Burgess and Pierce all three pleaded not guilty. After all the evidence ws heard the jury took
just 10 minutes of deliberation to find them guilty of larceny. Burgess and Tester, being
trusted railway employees, were given 14 years transportation for breaking that trust and
Pierce, the lesser sentence of two years hard labour.
Having contracted tuberculosis Fanny took herself off to Hastings to recuperate, leaving
her and Agar’s son Edward, and a trust fund, in the care of Pierce’s wife. But she died in
Hastings in 1858, aged 27.
The gold was said to be worth £12,000, just over £1m today in cash terms, but the value
of gold itself has increased hugely from £4 an ounce to £2,400 an ounce since then, which
might equate to over £7m today!
NOTES / LINKS
Historian Lorraine Sencicle’s encyclopedic account of the Great Bullion Robbery (in two parts)
