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