Poor man, rich man, thief, beggar-man?

Piers Paul Read

ODD MAN OUT by Ronald Biggs Bloomsbury, f14.99, pp. 279 Of the 14 books I have written over the past 27 years, the only one I now regret is The Train Robbers, published in 1978. So far as the book itself is con- cerned, I feel that I made the best of a bad

job. Literary treatment of crime and crimi- nals is mostly restricted to sociological the- ses, tabloid journalism or crime fiction. Coming from a sheltered, middle-class background, I was aware of my limitations in this respect when it came to writing nov- els: here I was offered a chance to examine the lives of 14 professional criminals.

However, I gravely underestimated the sense of outrage many feel when former felons profit from 'cheque book journal- ism'. Also, the new angle to their story that it had been financed by the ex-Waffen SS officer, Otto Skorzeny — turned out to be a hoax. It would take too much space to explain here why we believed 100 per cent of a story that was only two per cent true. The first lesson I learned was not just that criminals are experienced and facile liars, but also that corroboration is virtually impossible to come by because it invariably means self-incrimination. I was punished for my gullibility. The book was a success in England but flopped abroad. Some of the publishers who on my recommendation had paid for the rights felt that I had let them down. I did not write another work of non-fiction for 15 years.

The man who exposed the hoax was Ronald Biggs and as a result I make a brief appearance in his autobiography, now pub- lished by Bloomsbury. It was he who told me when I went to see him in Rio de Janeiro that 'the German connection' was untrue. I described the exchange in my book. Our accounts differ only in detail.

(Read: 'I was silent — aghast, confused and unable to think of anything to say'. Biggs: 'He dropped his head into his hands. "Oh, those bastards! Those dirty bastards!" ').

He writes that he did not like my book and I can return the compliment: I do not think much of his. At the time of my visit to him in Rio in 1976, I described him in my notebook as 'sly, easy-going, oppor-

tunistic — but with none of the compulsive

criminality of the others', and there is noth- ing here to lead me to revise that opinion; indeed, there is nothing in his narrative that would classify as a disclosure. It mere- ly fills in the details of a story that the read- ers of the tabloids will already know.

Briefly, Ronnie Biggs was a small-time crook who had befriended a big-time crook, Bruce Reynolds, in Wormwood Scrubs. When Reynolds was planning the train robbery, Biggs was working as an odd- job man, decorating the bungalow of a shunting driver whom he calls Peter who worked at Redhill Station. Reynolds need- ed a driver to move the mail train from the signal to Bridego Bridge. Biggs recruited Peter and the two men joined the gang in Leatherslade Farm. In the event, Peter could not restart the locomotive and the coshed driver, Mills, was cajoled into doing it instead. Biggs was caught because his prints were on a bottle of tomato ketchup at Leatherslade farm. Peter remained free.

Biggs tells this story and that of his sub- sequent trial, escape and life on the run in a jocular style, as if everyone will be as charmed by him as he is charmed by him- self. Although he is not on a par with the genial Buster Edwards, he unquestionably has a kind of witty, easy-going manner that went down well wherever he went. In Aus- tralia, the former penal colony, he most successfully exploited a latent dislike for the British forces of law and order. In Brazil, too, Biggs managed to present him- self as the victim of injustice. Without doubt he would have been sent back to England if the Brazilian authorities had not felt that the public were on his side.

Indeed, what is interesting in this book are not promised revelations (much of it covers the same ground as Colin Macken- zie's Biggs: The World's Most Wanted Man and Anthony Delano's Slip-up) but its depiction of the symbiotic bond between man and media. It shows that a man with a modicum of notoriety and chutzpah can both use and be used by the world's tele- vision and tabloid press. The stolen money ran out when Biggs got to Brazil. He has been sustained largely ever since by pay- ments from the media, among them the cheque I delivered from W. H. Allen, the publishers of my own book, and now, pre- sumably, by royalties from Bloomsbury.

Another significant factor was the inter- action between Biggs and women. 'Women are drawn to him,' I wrote in my notebook in 1977. 'Biggs said that he would never go back to Charmian . He said that once you had experienced Brazilian women, you couldn't do without them . . . ' The life of a lecherous beachcomber suited him better

than that of a pater familias. As luck would

have it, the young Brazilian Raimunda became pregnant with the baby that

stymied his extradition just as Detective Inspector Slipper flew into Rio de Janeiro, hot on the heels of the Daily Express.

This was hard on Charmian who had stuck by him, sustaining him in Rio with

cheques from the sale of her story to the Australian press. Biggs's life is littered with people who were used and then discarded: Charmian, the old train driver Peter, and the numerous friends who risked arrest to help him in different parts of the world. Paul Seagrove went to prison for four and a half years for planning Biggs's escape from Wandsworth: 'But he didn't care,' Biggs tells us. 'My freedom was and is his reward'.

There are also one or two reminders that dear old Biggsie, if he was only a minor crook himself, did not hesitate to make use of heavier friends:

I nursed a hope [he tells us when describing the period preceding his trial] that my lawyers could arrange for the venue of my trial to be changed — perhaps to the Old Bailey — where friends could possibly 'get at' someone on the jury to hold out for a not guilty verdict.

The men who sprang him from Wandsworth were armed with sawn-off shotguns. After the escape, Biggs tell us, 'Eric noticed the barrel of the shotgun sticking out from a sports coat that Paul was carrying under his arm. Oops!'

That `Oops' says it all. We are meant to fall for Biggsie's Cockney charm but it does not come across in cold print. As I discov- ered while researching The Train Robbers, criminals, however amusing, are never admirable or even nice. Once the book had been published, I scuttled back with great relief to my sheltered, middle-class life.