Great Gold Robbery

The robbers comprised four men, two of whom—William Tester and James Burgess—were employees of the South Eastern Railway (SER), the company that ran the rail service.

They were joined by the planners of the crime: Edward Agar, a career criminal, and William Pierce, a former employee of the SER who had been dismissed for being a gambler.

They emptied the safes of 224 pounds (102 kg) of gold, valued at the time at £12,000 (approximately equivalent to £1,416,000 in 2023), then left the train at Dover.

The police and railway authorities had no clues as to who had undertaken the theft, and arguments ensued as to whether it had been stolen in England, on the ship crossing the English Channel, or on the French leg of the journey.

[2] Periodically the line would carry shipments of gold from bullion merchants in London to their counterparts in Paris; these could be several hundredweights at a time.

The agents who arranged the carriage of the gold, including collecting the bullion from the three companies and delivering it to London Bridge, were Chaplin & Co.

[3][4] At Boulogne the bullion boxes were collected by the French agents Messageries impériales before being transported by train to the Gare du Nord and then to the Bank of France.

[5] The originator of the plan was William Pierce, a 37-year-old former employee of the SER who had been dismissed from its service after it was found that he was a gambler; he worked as a ticket printer in a betting shop after leaving the company.

[11] William Tester was a well-educated man who wore a monocle and had a desire to improve his position; he was briefly employed after the robbery as a general manager for a Swedish railway company.

He worked in the traffic department at London Bridge station as the assistant to the superintendent, which gave him access to information about the carriage of valuable goods and the guards' rota.

[16] After being dismissed from the SER, Pierce continued to drink in the pubs and beer shops around London Bridge in which railway employees also drank.

They realised that for any theft to succeed, they needed the assistance of a guard travelling in the van with the safes, and an official with access to the staff rotas and who knew when the bullion shipments were to be made.

[21] In May 1854 Pierce and Agar travelled to Folkestone to watch the process involved at that end of the line, particularly the location and security surrounding the keys.

[28] Agar collected the package from the SER office and watched while the company's superintendent retrieved the safe key from a cupboard at the back of the room.

In April and May 1855 Agar would travel along the Folkestone route when Burgess was on duty—seven or eight trips in total—and would hone the keys until they worked smoothly and without effort.

They then left the van and entered the main part of the train, passing through until they reached first class, where they sat until it arrived in Dover.

[32][37][38] When the train reached Dover, Pierce and Agar alighted, collected their carpet bags full of gold from the guard's van, then went to a nearby hotel for supper.

[40][f] When the steamer carrying the gold arrived in Boulogne, one of the crew saw that the bullion boxes were damaged, but, as staff at Folkestone had not mentioned it, saw no cause for concern.

[41][g] The three bullion merchants demanded recompense for the lost gold—most of Abell's gold was insured through the SER, but the company denied any culpability, claiming that the robbery must have taken place in France.

Relations between Agar and Kay deteriorated around this time, and he moved out of their house to stay with Pierce while they continued to process and dispose of the bullion.

[45][56] Appearing at the Old Bailey in September 1855 on the charge of "feloniously forging and uttering an order for the payment of 700L [£700], with intend to defraud",[l] Agar was found guilty and sentenced to penal transportation for life.

Desperate for money, Kay went to see John Weatherhead, the governor of Newgate Prison, and told him that she knew who was involved in the SER bullion robbery.

In the interim, Agar had heard that Pierce had not kept his word and so, angered by the deceit of his erstwhile partner, he turned Queen's evidence and gave Rees the full details of the crime.

Agar gave evidence against his former colleagues again, and told the court he was, in Thomas's words, "a self-confessed professional criminal who had not made an honest living since the age of eighteen".

It is obvious ... that he is a man of extraordinary talent; that he gave to this and, perhaps, to many other robberies, an amount of care and perseverance one-tenth of which devoted to honest pursuits must have raised him to a respectable station in life, and considering the commercial activity of this country during the last twenty years, would probably have enabled him to realise a large fortune.

Pierce, as he was not a member of SER staff, was given the lighter sentence of two years' hard labour in England, three months of which would be in solitary confinement.

[77] Tester and Burgess were transported on board the Edwin Fox convict ship on 26 August 1858; the destination was the Swan River Colony in Western Australia.

[85] On 25 December 1960 the television anthology series Armchair Theatre dramatised the crime under the title The Great Gold Bullion Robbery.

Adapted by Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice from a play by the lawyer Gerald Sparrow, and directed by John Llewellyn Moxey, it starred Colin Blakely as Pierce, James Booth as Agar, Henry McGee as Tester and Leslie Weston as Burgess.

"[88] A feature film based on the novel, The First Great Train Robbery (1978), presents a highly fictionalised version of the event, portraying Pierce (played by Sean Connery), as a gentleman master criminal who eventually escapes from the police.