Armed and Dangerous--This is the True Story of How I Carried Out Scotland's Biggest Bank Robbery

by James Crosbie

  Once loaded with kit, my arms feeling as if they were being drawn out of their sockets, I was doubled out of the room and up an almost impossible steel spiral staircase to end up out on the prison centre.

  ‘Double!’ The first word I heard again as the screw behind the desk yelled when I threatened to come to a faltering halt. ‘Double while you answer my questions.’

  I gave him my name, puffing and panting as if I’d just run a marathon and answered his questions about medical treatment, religion and diet between wild gasps of breath. Eventually he slapped a door card on top of my kit. ‘Now double!’

  Jesus! What did he think I’d been doing for the last half-hour? I was beginning to think it was the only word they knew.

  ‘One-twenty-two!’ He shouted my cell location and pointed to his right. ‘Now double away and bang your door. And double!’

  I turned into 122 at the trot and fell to the floor across my blankets. ‘Bang that fucking door!’ the voice screamed from the desk. I shoved the door with my foot and collapsed across my kit again, almost sobbing with relief. What had I let myself in for? This was Reading Borstal.

  On my very first morning I made the mistake of trying to make two trips to the toilet recess. An Arran-sweatered screw was on to me in a flash. ‘What do you think you’re doing? One slop-out, that’s all.’

  I put on my ‘reasonable’ voice. ‘Sir,’ I began. ‘It’s imposs …’

  That was as far as I got. Whack! A full open-handed slap across the side of my head. ‘Don’t talk back to me!’ he raged. ‘One slop-out, that’s all!’

  In those days there were no such thing as watches or radios in prison, even for borstal boys, so we had no way of knowing the time. And the work was murder too… Sewing mailbags! A bundle of them were thrown into your cell, along with a huge needle and a hank of waxed thread. Instructions were screamed – ‘Get bloody sewing!’ You had to get bloody sewing just as hard as you could, hoping you were doing enough in the time. On my first day I could hear the opening and slamming of doors as the screw came round the landing checking our work. I was feeling quite pleased with myself as I had almost completed a whole bag. Gradually, the sound of doors opening and closing came nearer and I began to hear voices, but nothing clear as yet. Finally the cell next door to me opened and I could hear what the screw was saying.

  ‘How many?’ His voice was sharp, very businesslike.

  ‘Two, sir. I’ve done two.’ I could even hear the tremble in his voice.

  Two! My mind shrieked. Two! Oh my God! And I was happy with one. I bent over my bag in a futile attempt to produce a bit more work.

  ‘Two!’ The screw’s voice echoed my thoughts. ‘Two! You better get three done in future or you’ll find yourself in serious trouble, m’lad.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ I heard the submissive reply.

  I was shaking with nerves as I plunged my needle in and out of the heavy grey canvas. I should have put the bloody stitches further apart! Oh, Jesus, he was coming.

  My door burst open. ‘How many bags?’ I looked at him and held out my meagre offering.

  ‘What?’ He tore the bag out of my hands and threw it on the floor as if in a temper. ‘Three! It’s three bags I want, not half a bloody bag.’ He ranted and raved at me for several minutes, uttering dire threats if I failed to meet this target. Believe me, the sound of that 8.00 pm bell from the centre was the only welcome sound of the day in Reading Borstal.

  After the first month of this sort of torture we were upgraded from the basic grade and given a job in the wire shop, where they made diamond-mesh fencing wire and safety nets for the Prison Service. This was a vast improvement on the mailbag sewing and you were even allowed a few words with your work partner as long as they were about the job. It was a great relief to get away from that quick-change routine and settle down to a proper job.

  I made a blunder on my very first day in the wire shop. The works screw in charge of the shop came up to me with his location board. Anywhere else if a screw wanted to know your cell number he would ask, ‘What is your location?’ Obviously you would give the appropriate reply. However, this screw held the board in front of him and asked me, ‘Where do you live?’ Then he added, ‘And don’t say Glasgow.’

  I was happy to please him and said in all innocence, ‘Oh no. I live in London.’ Whack! The location board bounced off my head. ‘Don’t try and get funny with me, Crosbie.’ I was warned. ‘You’ll find yourself starting another month of basic if you’re not careful.’ It was only then I realised it was my cell location in the borstal he wanted to know, not my outside address.

  Normally a borstal boy under punishment at Reading served between three and four months before being returned to normal conditions. When you are serving time in Reading, three months seems very long indeed and all sorts of schemes and excuses are used to try and get this term shortened. I was no exception in trying to get away from there early, but I had a really good excuse to put forward. The charge of fraud – selling Mr Chinnery’s hired car – was still outstanding against me in Glasgow and this meant that when I completed my period of borstal training in England, I would have to appear in court in Glasgow to stand trial for that offence.

  I wrote a petition to the Secretary of State requesting that I be transferred to Scotland so that the outstanding charge could be dealt with and my sheet would be clean when I finished my borstal training. Nine out of ten petitions are dismissed with the phrase ‘No grounds for complaint’. However, I wasn’t complaining and my petition did make some sense: what was the point of me completing my borstal training and becoming a rehabilitated person, only to be arrested and taken to Scotland to answer to an old offence? If I was transferred to Scotland and had the case dealt with now, I would leave borstal with no outstanding charges.

  About four weeks after I had sent out the petition, I was marched into the governor’s office and told that my request had been granted and that I would be going back to Wormwood Scrubs to wait for transport to Glasgow. This decision cut about four weeks off my time in Reading and I was quite happy about the idea of being transferred to Scotland. Within a week I was heading back to the Scrubs and two weeks after that my journey to Scotland began. It was almost with relief that I got off the prison transport outside reception at Polmont Borstal, six weeks after my journey had begun.

  Because I had completed nearly six months of my sentence, I skipped quickly through the classification hall and was allocated to Wallace House which was the block where they kept the troublemakers and inmates they thought might give them problems. With my record it was the only house I was getting into.

  I had been at Polmont for about four weeks when I was escorted through to the Sheriff Court in Glasgow for my fraud charge. It was all an anti-climax. The sheriff noted that I was serving a sentence of borstal training and simply admonished me on the car charge, ordering that I be returned to carry on with my current sentence and that was that. If I hadn’t already been serving the borstal sentence, I would probably have been dealt with very differently.

  Wallace House was more or less a cell block. Everyone had a single cell and the routine was identical to that in an adult prison, slop-out and all. Whatever the ‘training’ was supposed to be, it escaped me completely. My time there passed pretty uneventfully, although I did get one surprise about a month before I was due to be released. The housemaster sent for me and informed me that I was to be taken to Edinburgh for a medical to see if I was fit for military service. ‘That can’t be right,’ I told him. ‘I was in the Royal Air Force and bought myself out in 1955.’

  ‘Yes, Crosbie. The military authorities are aware of that. But as you only served six months before leaving, you have to serve a further eighteen months in the army to complete the full two-year period of national service.’

  I had no answer to that and the following day I was taken, along with two or three other lads, to the medical centre in Edinburgh to be examined. I did my best to fail the medical, hoping for a grade-t
hree rating which would disqualify me from service. When I was doing the rising on the toes exercise I made out that it hurt my tendons and barely made it halfway up. Then I thought I would display colour-blindness by failing to pick out the numbers on the dotted colour charts they showed me. Needless to say, I messed that up. I actually felt quite self-conscious when I looked at the bright, colourful cards and saw the numbers leaping out at me clear as crystal. How could anyone not see them, I thought. But I persisted in my plan to prove my colour-blindness and denied being able to distinguish any numbers among the coloured clutter.

  I thought my act was going well but, when they showed me a grey dotted card with a bold red number sticking out like a sore thumb, I really felt that it was so obvious I would have to admit to being able to see it. What I didn’t know was that the red against the grey of this card was the least visible to a colour-blind person. The tester gave me a resigned look and marked me with a pass. In the end, I passed the whole medical and was really fed up about it.

  Around October 1957, I finished my borstal training and went home to my parents in Palermo Street. They had been visiting me during my time in Polmont and were happy to have me at home again. I suppose knowing that I would soon be getting called up made them worry less about me. I had been at home for just over a week when the brown envelope dropped through the letterbox with my call-up papers and a travel warrant to Aldershot, Hampshire. I had been selected for service in the Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) and was to report to Blenheim Barracks, Farnborough. At least my ‘bad tendons’ had kept me out of the HLI.

  Less than a week later I was on my way to serve Her Majesty again.

  Chapter Eight

  Sharpshooter Crosbie

  I was prejudiced against the army even before I arrived at Farnborough. I knew it would be all the same mad shouting again, just like the RAF. Still, after nearly two years of borstal, I wasn’t very concerned about that and at least I wouldn’t be getting locked up at night. It turned out that Blenheim Barracks was basically a kitting-out camp, but they also spent some time there doing the usual aptitude and IQ tests and I found myself filling in the same forms yet again. They did make us do a little bit of square bashing there as well, probably because we were national-service conscripts and they didn’t want to let us think it was too easy.

  I shot off to London at the first opportunity and called on Ted. Don had left the flat by this time, but was still around and Jack Witney was living nearby in Kensal Rise. Shilton had got himself married and was the manager of a fruit shop in Queensway. Ted made me welcome and told me that I was free to use his home for my 48-hour leaves whenever I got any. He had also kept all of my clothes and, a pleasant surprise, my bike.

  Naturally I wanted to know what had happened during my two-year absence and it was Jack who told me all about the trials and tribulations they had gone through during my incarceration. As I had never contacted anyone at Bravington Road, I had no idea that the car ring had been, in modern terms, ‘bust’ and that Jack had served an 18-month sentence for car theft. Jack told me how it happened.

  After I had been captured at Victoria and disappeared into the prison system, Jack and Don had resumed business with the stolen cars. Jack had found a customer who required mainly engines and other mechanical parts like the clutch and exhaust systems. This meant that the stolen cars, or shells by now, had to be towed away from Ted’s garage to be dumped and this was the most dangerous part of the operation. Jack and Don always dumped them as quickly as they could. This meant that all the stolen cars were being abandoned fairly close to the garage.

  The police soon realised that cars stolen from places as far away as Neasden, Wembley, Acton and more or less any outlying district to the north-west were all being found in the Paddington and Kilburn areas. As every abandoned car had obviously been towed to its dumping spot, they reasoned that the crook’s garage couldn’t be far away.

  Police surveillance in the area was intensified and early one morning the crew of a police patrol car spotted Jack unhitching a car in Sutherland Avenue. The police pulled up, checked the towed car and discovered that it had no engine. Jack and Don immediately came under suspicion and were taken into Harrow Road police station.

  Knowing the dangers of this happening, Jack and Don had a prearranged story. They had always taken turns when they had a car to tow away for dumping and it was Jack’s bad luck to be the ‘driver’ that night. Don’s story was simple, as all the best stories are. He had received a phone call from Jack asking him if he could come along to Saltram Crescent and give him a tow in a car he had just bought. Don had obliged and towed Jack to Sutherland Avenue and had just untied the tow rope in preparation to return home when the police arrived. It was as simple as that. He knew absolutely nothing about a stolen car or missing engine.

  Don gave his home address and as his driving licence and other odds and ends bore his name and Chippenham Road home address, it all checked out. The police didn’t connect him to Bravington Road or Ted and therefore missed the connection to the garage, which would have been fatal for everyone, Ted included. Jack’s story was that he had bought the car very cheaply from a guy he had met in a pub – the usual tale. With no engine? The police knew full well he was lying. That was the reason it was so cheap, Jack boldly told them. Logbook? Oh, that was to be handed over the following evening in the same pub.

  The police knew that they had undoubtedly caught the car thieves who had been plaguing them, but they couldn’t break Jack down. He stuck to his improbable tale and confirmed that he had phoned the unsuspecting Don for a tow. There was no evidence to charge Don, so he walked; but Jack was charged.

  The jury, like the police, didn’t believe his tale either and Jack got a guilty verdict at the same court as me – the County of London Sessions. As he was only done for the one car he was sentenced to 18 months – a heavy sentence under the circumstances, but still lucky for Jack. If the police had managed to trace Ted’s garage they would have found evidence of over 20 car thefts there, because magpie Ted had taken and kept the tool kit and spare wheel from every car that had passed through his premises.

  Jack had served a year in prison, but with his three-month remand he had actually been away just over 15 months. Time spent on remand was not counted as serving your sentence then, as it is today. He had only been out about six months and was fiddling about here and there trying to scratch a living. Whatever had happened, I was glad to see him and it felt good to be around my old haunts again. But I had the army to contend with, as well as the fact that I was on borstal licence for the next year as well.

  My company had a second lieutenant who didn’t like me. A friend of mine called Robert Loughry and I were out one evening and we spotted this officer driving into the car park of a pub in Farnborough. When he went into the pub we wandered over and looked inside his car. There was a large trunk in the back seat and he had left the keys in the car’s ignition. I looked at Robert and we grinned at one another. A minute or two later we were driving along the road towards Guildford. We just drove around in it for a while then headed back to our barracks. There was a parking area under the buildings that held the classrooms and I decided to leave it there. Just as we were leaving the car, I looked at the trunk in the rear seat and became curious.

  I really think if I hadn’t developed a dislike for the pompous pig I would have walked away, but that dislike, caused by his attitude to me, just tipped the scales. I opened the trunk to find that it was full of uniforms and other clothes. On a sudden impulse we got back into the car and drove it round to the incinerator, stuffed all his gear into the still glowing interior and gleefully watched it burst into flames. I realise that it was all very juvenile, but it seemed hilarious at the time.

  The following weekend, I went off to London on an official 48-hour-pass and, as usual, I spent it at Ted’s house. I had such a good weekend going round my old haunts with Jack that I decided to stay longer than my pass permitted. I went to Ted’s doctor and
he gave me an ‘unfit to travel’ certificate for three days. Everything was fine and I was sitting in the living room of Ted’s house when there was a knock at the front door. When I opened the door, two CID men from Harrow Road were standing there.

  ‘Are you James Crosbie?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, a little bit wary but not feeling I had anything to worry about. The upshot of it all was that Robert Loughry, my so-called pal, had become torn with remorse, or something and had gone and told the duty officer about stealing the car and burning the clothes.

  As stealing the car was a civilian matter, the officer had informed the police and they had got a warrant for my arrest. I was taken to Harrow Road nick and held there until police arrived from Farnborough to take me back.

  Both Robert and I were charged with stealing the car and its contents. We were taken up before the magistrate’s court; Robert got three months and I got nine. As I had just turned twenty-one, I was taken to Wandsworth Prison in London to serve my sentence. Robert went to some young offenders’ institution. I never saw him again after that.

  Wandsworth was a frightening place for me. First of all they weren’t going to accept me as a prisoner because they thought I was too young. Of course, when they inspected my committal papers and found out that I really was over twenty-one, I started to get a lot of stick from the reception officers who were, to a man, all ex-military with their campaign ribbons plastered all over their chests. I was in uniform and they made a right monkey out of me, making me stand to attention and calling me a disgrace to the armed forces.

  Nothing untoward happened during my sentence and my date of release gradually came round. I was released on a Good Friday morning and was given an envelope with a travel warrant and instructions to report at 6.00 am on Saturday to 10 Company, RASC Bulford Barracks, Salisbury Plain District.