Life on the Lam; Bruce Reynolds (1931-2013) Highgate East Cemetery

 

Have you seen Bruce Richard Reynolds? He's a man you must detain.
He's wanted for the robbery of the Glasgow / Euston train.
Age thirty-two, height six foot one, eyes grey and his hair is brown
Apprehend Bruce Richard Reynold, he is wanted by The Crown. 

Nigel Denver – Have you seen Bruce Richard Reynolds (1966)

A robber is a bandit, an outlaw, a desperado. A thief is a tea-leaf. A robber ends up at the Old Bailey – the London Palladium of the nation’s courts – and gets a ten stretch. A thief appears before the beak at Old Street magistrate’s court and gets three months. A robber takes the girlfriend off to Longchamp for the weekend. A thief goes home to the wife in Upminster. So why did Bruce Reynolds, a main player in this country’s robbery of the century, choose to call his book The Autobiography of a Thief?

It was, he says, a bit of homage to Jean Genet. The Thief’s Journal was being translated into English just as Bruce and Buster and Charlie were driving £2,631,684 in mail bags to Leatherslade Farm on 8 August 1963, with Tony Bennett singing ‘The Good Life’ on the radio. When Buster Edwards hanged himself last year and I rang Bruce Reynolds for a comment (an explanation, if there can ever be such a thing) he referred me to Alvarez and The Savage God.

Duncan Campbell ‘Tea Leafing’ London Review of Books 19.10.1995

Bruce Reynolds was clearly no ordinary crook, very few of whom while away the tedious hours in their prison cells admiring the collected works of the Jean Genie or leafing through Al Alvarez’s treatise on suicide. When he died in 2013 The Guardian’s report on his funeral made much of the fact that he was being buried just a hundred yards or so away from Karl Marx, “near the tomb of the man who once pronounced, in words doubtless echoed by the robbers, that "the true law of economics is chance’”. As I stood in front of his grave I was struck more by the fact that he is buried directly in front of the plot belonging to William and Alice Shand-Kydd, who died in 1936 and 1929 respectively, than his proximity to Marx; it is an odd coincidence that the mastermind of 1963’s great train robbery now rests next to a family with connections to both royalty and one of the 1970’s great criminal scandals. William and Alice were the grandparents of half-brothers Peter (1925-2006) and Bill Shand-Kydd (1937-2015). Peter is best known for his affair with Frances Ruth Roche, the then young wife of John, the 8th Earl Spencer and then for marrying her following her acrimonious divorce from her infuriated, cuckolded husband. Whilst married, Frances had given birth to five of Earl Spencer’s children, including of course, Diana, Princess of Wales. Peter’s half-brother Bill was, according to his obituary in The Independent a “bon viveur … a businessman, an adrenaline-fuelled sportsman, womaniser, gambler, successful jockey and racehorse breeder”, who also happened to be the brother-in-law of John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, the notorious murderer who disappeared in 1975 after attempting to kill his wife but mistakenly killing his children’s nanny instead. It is difficult for a member of the aristocracy to commit a violent crime without it sounding like the solution to a game of Cluedo (‘It was Lord Lucan, with the lead pipe, in the basement kitchen’); a title somehow manages to both trivialise and glamorise what appears to have been a particularly nasty case of domestic violence, albeit the victim was the ‘wrong’ woman, Sandra Rivett, rather than Lady Lucan. After the murder Lord Lucan left a blood-stained note for his brother-in-law, apparently disclaiming responsibility for it; in it he explained that on "a traumatic night of unbelievable coincidence" he had been driving past the house where his family lived, as he often did when harassing his wife, when he noticed, through the basement window, an unknown aggressor attacking her, in the dark. He stopped his car and went into the house, less perhaps to assist his estranged spouse than to assert his sole right to practice violence on her person, only to find himself, after chasing off the attacker, accused of being the assailant! Bill Shand-Kydd was one of the close group of Lucan’s friends and associates that are suspected of helping him evade the police investigation by disappearing, apparently into thin air. Lady Lucan herself purported to believe that her husband had committed suicide "like the nobleman he was" (wishful thinking perhaps) but everyone else thought he was living under an assumed name in some obscure corner of the globe. In a further irony, on Christmas Eve 1974 the Australian police arrested a man they were convinced was Lord Lucan but, when the toffee nosed pom they had in custody was forced to drop his trousers, he did not have one of the aristocrats distinguishing features, a 6 inch scar on his inner right thigh. Further investigation revealed that the man they had arrested was in fact John Stonehouse, the Labour MP who had faked his own death on Miami Beach a month earlier and was also on the run. 

Bruce, looking more like Michael Caine than Michael Caine, in 1963 with John Daly, the only member of the gang to be acquitted at trial, along with their wives. 

Many rungs down the social ladder from the Shand-Kydd’s he may have been but Bruce Reynolds, who was himself very familiar with the highs and lows of being on the run, now occupies a slightly better plot in the cemetery and has a much better gravestone. He was born in 1931 at Charing Cross Hospital and brought up in south and east London, though in the suburbs of Putney and Gants Hill rather than in the gangster heartlands. His mother died when he was 4 and his father, who worked on the production line at Fords in Dagenham, remarried; Bruce didn’t get on with his step mum by all accounts and was keen to leave home at the earliest opportunity. An attempt to join the navy when he was 14 failed because of his poor eyesight and he spent his teenage years working in various odd jobs and making the acquaintance of various young rogues who were to induct him into a life of crime. This started with breaking into shops and factories and moved onto jewellery thefts from country mansions and robbing a bookie on his way home from White City Greyhounds.  Spells in borstal, Wormwood Scrubs, Wandsworth and Durham cemented him into a career of villainy but his intelligence and ambition lifted him out of petty crime and into the big time of armed robbery.  His first masterminded heist, a security van robbery at Heathrow Airport in 1962, netted £62,000. The loot from his first train robbery, on a Royal Mail train at Swindon, was a disappointing £700. His next adventure was the big one, a 15-man gang headed by Reynolds brought the Glasgow to London mail train to a halt in Buckinghamshire in the early hours of the morning on the 8th August 1963 and successfully made away with £2.3 million in cash (worth around £50 million today). The gang was unarmed and under instructions to use no unnecessary violence; a couple of workers in the mail carriage were gently coshed to get them to cooperate but the train driver was hit in the head and face with a metal bar with more force than seemed strictly necessary. 

Ronnie and Bruce celebrate Ronnie's 70th birthday with their sons Michael and Nick

Reynolds spent 5 years on the run following the great train robbery, moving from Kensington to France, Canada and Mexico with his wife and young son, in an effort to stay one step ahead of the law. The police were breathing down his neck for the entire time; the first member of the gang to be picked up was Roger Cordrey, who was arrested just six days after the heist. Others followed in short order including Ronald Biggs and Charlie Wilson. The 25-year sentences handed out by the courts for the robbery caused some consternation, and not just amongst the robbers. When Biggs and Wilson managed to escape from prison in 1964 Graham Greene wrote to the Daily Telegraph saying: "Am I one of a minority in feeling admiration for the skill and courage behind the Great Train Robbery? More important, am I in a minority in being shocked by the savagery of the sentences?" How proud that must have made Reynolds as he continued to move around the globe in his efforts to evade the police. By 1968 he had spent almost all of his £150,000 share of the profits from the robbery and was back in England looking for further criminal opportunities. He was arrested in Torquay on the 8th November and, like the others, received a 25 year sentence. In the event he served less than half of this and was released from Maidstone gaol on the 1st June 1978, just in time to hear the dreadful ‘No one is innocent’ single released by the Lydonless Sex Pistols and recorded in Rio de Janeiro with his old mucker Ronnie Biggs on vocals.  

Nick Reynolds best known death mask, on Malcolm McLaren's grave in Highgate 

Whilst in prison Reynolds' marriage had collapsed and once released his notoriety made going straight difficult. He took up drug dealing and by 1980 was back in Maidstone prison on a three year sentence for supplying amphetamines. Once released he took whatever legal opportunities his criminal past afforded him, acting as a consultant on the film Buster, writing his autobiography in 1995, and becoming, as he put it himself “an old crook living on handouts from other old crooks.” When the handouts stopped, he found himself living on Income Support in a small flat in Croydon. In his final years he ruefully summed up his life:  

I got what I wanted out of life, what I considered a good life. I wanted to live a life like Hemingway. When I was in Mexico the people I knew were bullfighters and motor racing drivers. But when you're in the position where you can do anything it no longer has the same attraction. You realise it's all tinsel to a degree. I only ever wanted to live in a place that I felt comfortable in, which, ironically I suppose, is about the size of a cell. 

Reynolds died in February 2013. His first funeral took place on a dull grey March day in at St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield. The press photographers present inevitably focussed their lens on the gangster element in the crowd of mourners, Ronnie Biggs of course (who, confined to a wheelchair, and left speechless by a stroke, still managed to steal the show by sticking two shaky fingers up at the gawping pressmen) Kray associate Chris Lambrianou, Freddie Foreman, Dave Courtney (not quite the real thing perhaps) and various anonymous men, built like proverbial brick shithouses and squeezed into dark suits and black raincoats, one of them sporting two gold plated bullets and a knuckle duster strung on a belcher chain around a neck as thick as an ox’s. According to the Guardian “The funeral was organised by Reynolds' son, Nick, who was a diver with the Royal Navy during the Falklands war and is now a sculptor and a musician with the Alabama Three, creators of the theme tune of The Sopranos. He had wanted to get away from the old-style gangster's send-off, so there was to be no floral tribute in the shape of a mailbag, no playing of Frank Sinatra's version of My Way. Instead, there were tales from friends, music from the band and the church's own magnificent choir.”  Reynolds' two grandson’s read poems as did John Cooper Clarke; Clarke’s was self-penned, of course, and entitled ‘Lines Upon the Death of Mr Bruce Reynolds.’ There were tributes from the actors David Thewlis and Ray Stevenson, and the author Jake Arnott, and music from Fauré, Irving Berlin and Nick’s band The Alabama Three. 

The second funeral took place five months later at Highgate Cemetery when Reynolds' cremated remains were buried, along with those of his wife Angela, on a sunny 8th August, the 50th anniversary of the great train robbery.  Once again Ronnie Biggs (who was celebrating his 84th birthday that day), Freddie Foreman and the sons of some of the other train robbers were present. Jake Arnott read a passage from Reynolds' autobiography and Mr Seggs, one of the Alabama Three, sang ‘Too Sick to Pray'. The highlight of the ceremony would have been the unveiling of the memorial featuring Nick Reynolds' death bust of his father and the words C'est la vie (Reynolds response to DI Tommy Butler’s “Hello Bruce, it’s been a long time” when he was arrested in Torquay in 1968).  As well as being a musician Nick Reynolds is an artist who has developed a profitable sideline practicing the ancient art of creating death masks. Highgate has several examples of his work including his most famous, Malcolm McLaren.  

For anyone interested in Nick Reynolds' work I would recommend Hayley Campbell's book 'All the Living and the Dead'  which devotes a very interesting chapter to him. 

Nick Reynolds at Highgate Cemetery with another of his death masks

Communing with the dead; Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, Malet Place, WC1

I thought that an exhibit of a complete human skeleton sitting upright in a giant earthenware pot, would leap out at me when I visited the Petrie Museum.  The museum is small, just two upstairs rooms in an old stable block on Malet Place in the UCL campus, just across the road from the Gower Street Waterstones. Despite its small size it still took me two complete circuits to locate UC14857, as the museums pre-dynastic Egyptian pot burial is officially known.  Part of the problem locating him is that he is placed inconspicuously in a side case at floor level making him easy for an adult to overlook, but at just the right level to startle small children.  To properly examine him anyone over three feet high has to crouch or squat by his glass case.  UC14857 is the mortal remains of a man buried in two large pots about 6000 years ago at what is now the village of Badari in Upper Egypt. Information about the exhibit is printed on a laminated card left propped up against the vitrine; if it had been placed inside the case anyone wanting to read would probably have to get down on their hands and knees to see it. The card says:

The village of Badari is now used to refer to a distinct predynastic civilisation called Badarian. Badarian sites were found by the Egyptian Ali Suefi in 1923 and published by English archaeologists Guy Brunton and Gertrude Caton-Thompson. It is thought to span 4400–4000 BC and is the earliest farming culture in Middle Egypt.

Brunton and Caton-Thompson described this as 'a large double pot burial, in excellent condition, of an adult female'. It is displayed in the position that it was found at North Spur Burial (59). The Petrie Museum also displays other items from Badarian civilisation, including black-topped pots and jewellery, that were often buried as funerary goods.

The skeleton was repaired after damage during World War Two, though some material was further damaged in 1985. In 1995, gynaecologist Mark Broadbent identified the skeleton as male on the basis of pelvis and femur length. He also thought the man was over 6 foot tall. 

This detail about gender and height helps transform the museum object into a real person who lived and breathed. Attitudes to the display of human remains in museums, whether skeletal or preserved (such as mummies), have changed over the last 20 years. Some people find such displays offensive or uncomfortable, while others think they are useful in explaining the past. Should we display the burial in this way?

Crouched in front of the glass, no more than a couple of feet away from UC14857's empty eye sockets, I do my best to reach out across the 6000 years that separate us, I try to connect with him, to humanise him, to visualise the man he once was. I fail dismally. My imagination lets me down and he stubbornly remains an articulated skeleton, a reassembled collection of bones, sitting in a pot. I know nothing about this man, and I know nothing about his world. I don’t know how he dressed, what he looked like, what sort of house he lived in, what he ate, did for a living, how he got on with his neighbours, whether he was married or a father. And I know nothing of the Badari culture to place him in any sort of social context. No real surprise then that I can’t conjure him up in my imagination.

There are more exhibits from Badari in the museum. I was surprised to see that many of them consisted of fine flint tools like scrapers and arrow heads, bone implements like needles and polished pebble beads. I assumed from what I saw that this was a neolithic culture, which seemed astonishing just a thousand years before the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt and the start of the first Pharaonic dynasty.  A bit of further research later revealed that the Badarian culture was Chalcolithic, it belonged to the Copper Age. None of the many objects sitting in their display cases helped me feel any closer to UC14857. Do many people find the sight of skeletons in museums offensive? I really struggle to understand why.

I decided to leave Badari man in peace and had a look at the rest of the exhibits. I was very taken with a display of a couple of hundred or so Shabti figurines, all densely packed into one large case. Apparently, the idea for showing so many of these small clay figurines together originated with Flinders Petrie himself, the display is meant to show the development of Shabtis over time. Shabti (also known as ushebtis or shawabtis) are figurines made from clay or carved in wood or stone that were buried with the dead to act as servants in the afterlife. The bright blue ones are made from faience, a glazed non-clay ceramic material, composed of crushed quartz or sand, with small amounts of lime and either natron or plant ash. The colour comes from a copper rich glaze applied before they were fired. They are very common objects and even now you can buy them for as little as £250.

Also interesting were the examples of funerary stelae, upright monuments set up above tombs. These look exactly like cemetery headstones, often with a curved top edge and carrying images and inscriptions, including the name of the dead. There is no connection as far as I know between the design of 17th century headstones and these ancient stelae, they alighted on the same basic design by chance.

The objects that impressed me most, and which quite unexpectedly gave me my moment of connection with the past were half a dozen Acheulean handaxes. These objects are far more ancient than anything else in the museum, they were made in Egypt almost half a million years ago not by modern humans but by Homo Erectus, our direct ancestors and the longest-lived homo species, they survived for at least two million years, In contrast modern man evolved around 300,000 years ago and we will be lucky if we don’t wipe ourselves out in the next couple of hundred. Hand axes are hefty tools, skilfully knapped from flint or chert, pointed at one end with chipped, sharp edges but smooth at the other to sit in the palm of the hand. No one can be sure exactly how they were used but it seems likely that butchering carcasses, cutting wood and digging were some of the activities they were handy for. I find it difficult not to imagine them being used to bash the brains out of some hapless foe but if Homo Erectus survived for two million years, maybe they weren’t as violent to each other as Homo Sapiens are? After all, very few other species are quite as blood thirsty as we are. It was staring at these ancient objects that I had my sudden moment of temporal vertigo, that half a million years collapsed in on itself and I had a clear vision of a callused hand with thick, strong fingers, and a dark-skinned muscled forearm gripping the hand axe. Maker or user I don’t know, but I felt closer to the hand that had once, 500,000 years ago, held that axe than I did to that member of my own species, the skeleton in the pot burial.

 

'Mummified; The Stories Behind Egyptian Mummies in Museums' - Angela Stienne (Manchester University Press, £20)

 

α My name is... 
                β what does it matter?
          α My country is…
                β And what does that matter either?
          α I am of noble birth…
                β What if you came from the working-class?
          α When I died my reputation was high…
                β What if it had been low?
          α And I now lie here.
                β Who are you and to whom are you telling this? 

                                                              Sepulchral Epigram
                                                     attributed to Paulus Silentiarius 

“The Egyptian mummy is both dead and alive: physically and in the collective consciousness. And yet, so many see Egyptian mummies today and forget about the crucial part: an Egyptian mummy is a corpse. Behind their astonishing preservation, their fine wrappings and ornate cartonnage, behind the beautifully rendered mask, from the golden ones to the Fayum portraits, when we peer at ancient Egyptian mummified bodies, we stare at death.”                                                                                                                                                                                                      Angela Stienne

In January media outlets of every stripe were reporting, as CNN put it, that “some museums in Britain are now using words other than "mummy" to describe their displays of ancient Egyptian human remains. Instead, they are starting to adopt terms such as "mummified person" or to use the individual's name to emphasize that they were once living people.” The Sun, who were one of the first newspapers to pick up on the story, ran it under a typically provocative headline; MUMMY'S A CURSE Woke museum chiefs stop calling embalmed Egyptian dead ‘mummies’. The Daily Mail’s version was Don't use the word 'MUMMY'... it's offensive to ancient Egyptians: Museums stop using age-old expression out of 'respect' for 3,000-year-old dead. Where the tabloids lead these days, the broadsheets seldom fail to follow; The Times reported that “Museums are removing the word “mummy” from labels that describe human remains in their Egyptian exhibitions because it is deemed “dehumanising” and has a colonial past.” It is not difficult to imagine the comments the story provoked amongst readers; “Does anyone have a real job nowadays, or is everyone just paid to worry about how someone might be offended? Although if you're worrying about offending someone who died 3,000 years ago, I fear you've watched one too many Tom Cruise movies”, was the most popular reader comment in The Times. 

Paul Dominique Philippoteaux’s 1891 painting shows the mummy of an ancient Egyptian priestess being unwrapped before members of the French Egyptology Society

The title of Dr Angela Stienne’s book tells you immediately which side of the debate on mummies she is on. The book is an extremely well-argued polemic for not only making changes to the way we describe mummified persons but for rethinking the way human remains are displayed in museums. Dr Stienne is French but has studied and worked in the UK for a number of years and ‘Mummified’ engages equally with both French and British cultural history. Her history of Western engagement with the Egyptian mummy focuses largely on the two centuries that have passed since the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon’s grande armée of soldiers and scholars in 1798. Her central argument is that popular and scholarly engagement with mummified remains shows “a fundamental lack of respect for their status as the remains of human being.” There is, she says a “core idea that bodies could be poked at, studied and made fun of as innocent entertainment – a pretend innocence that masked a political reality. The French and English were colonisers, and colonial activity only makes sense when the colonisers consider themselves superior to the people whose lands and cultures they have decided to control.”

Dr Stienne points to the European fascination with ‘otherness’ and cites the examples of the public displays of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, and Julia Pastrana, the Mexican 'wolf-woman', to argue that “the viewing of real people, dead or alive, in fairs, shows and national exhibitions was not just a morbid curiosity inherited from the anatomy museum: in the nineteenth century, this began to carry an insidious political message. It was to be understood that some people were not just different – they were inferior. And in this sordid display of racism and othering, the Egyptian mummy became a powerful took of persuasion.” She sometimes takes her arguments in unexpected directions. In a chapter entitled ‘The (White) mummy returns’ she moves from a discussion on Flinders Petrie’s involvement, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, in the creation of eugenics to Erich von Däniken’s batty theories that aliens built the pyramids. Despite being discredited both types of thinking, she argues, are as prevelant today as they ever were; “the alien trope is a recurring one, and yet few realise how rooted it is in deep racism and the exclusion of Egyptians from their own narrative” she says. Because there is widespread incomprehension that ancient peoples may have possessed skills and knowledge that we do not possess today there is “the pervasive idea that civilisations evolve and progress and that therefore we are entirely superior today in skills and intelligence to people who lived before”.  

The good doctor contemplates the conundrums in displaying human remains

While Dr Stienne is clear sighted about the past her vision regarding the future is slightly more clouded. Something needs to change in the way human remains, including mummies, are displayed and she looks at some recent developments and initiatives that have tried to tackle the issues she has raised. But she clearly does not find these completely satisfactory; her own fascination with mummified remains seems to stop her from accepting what seems the logical conclusion of her arguments, that if it is fundamentally disrespectful to put human remains on public display then museums should repatriate the remains in their collections to their place of origin, where they should be buried again. Instead, she says we are faced with the ‘mummy conundrum; a displaced body that forces us, from within its glass case, to bear witness to a body that is dead, and yet has survived incredible times’ and which represents ‘the rare opportunity, to go and visit death, time after time.’ She argues that ‘these silent bodies are an invitation to have new conversations. Perhaps this is an imperfect future: one where we share uncomfortable conversations but also moving stories”. In her Epilogue she tells us how moving she found the 2021 Pharaoh’s Golden Parade where with great ceremony the Egyptian government moved 22 Royal mummies from their then home in the old museum in Tahrir Square to their new home at the national Museum of Egyptian Civilisation.  She also approved of the respect and solemnity with which Ramses II was received in France when he was sent to the Musée de l'Homme in Paris to be treated for a dangerous outbreak of parasites, brought by military plane and received by the Republican guard and senior officials and then driven to the Place de la Concorde to see the obelisk that was raised in Luxor during his own reign but has stood in Paris since 1836.  

Luckily as well as being a polemicist Dr Stienne is a story teller, and not only that, a story teller that is in love with her subject to boot. She mixes her own personal experience in with her narratives of mummies and whether you agree or not with her arguments her book is always interesting and informative. Personally, I think there are limits to the respect that we owe the dead. I don’t think anyone has the right to demand that future generations treat their mortal remains as though they are sacred. Anyone who hasn’t fully decomposed after a couple of hundred years is fair game for archaeologists as far as I am concerned. This a very good book which has received shockingly few reviews. Highly recommended.