The Great Train Robbery (35 page)

Neddy Singleton was hopelessly outclassed by Smashing Tim from the start. Early in the fight, Neddy adopted the ruse of dropping to one knee whenever he was struck, in order to halt the fight and allow him to catch his breath. The spectators hissed and booed this ungentlemanly trick, but nothing could be done to prevent it, especially as the referee—charged with giving the count of ten—called out the numbers with a slowness that demonstrated he’d been paid off smartly by Neddy’s backers. The indignation of the fans was tempered, at least, by the recognition that this chicanery had the side effect of prolonging the bloody spectacle they had all come to witness.

With thousands of spectators standing about, including every manner of coarse and brutal ruffian, the men of the Yard were at some pains to operate unobtrusively. Agar, with a revolver at his spine, pointed out Pierce and the guard Burgess from a distance. The two men were then apprehended with great adroitness: a barker was pressed to each man’s side, with a whispered suggestion that they come along quietly or take a bit of lead for their trouble.

Pierce greeted Agar amiably. “Turned nose, did you?” he asked with a smile.

Agar could not meet his eyes.

“Doesn’t matter,” Pierce said. “I’ve thought of this as well, you know.”

“I had no choice,” Agar blurted out.

“You’ll lose your share,” Pierce said calmly.

At the periphery of the P. R. crowd, Pierce was brought before Mr. Harranby of the Yard.

“Are you Edward Pierce, also known as John Simms?”

“I am,” the man replied.

“You are under arrest on a charge of robbery,” Mr. Harranby said.

To this Pierce replied, “You’ll never hold me.”

“I fancy that I will, sir,” Mr. Harranby said.

By nightfall on November 19th, both Pierce and Burgess were, along with Agar, in Newgate Prison. Harranby quietly informed government officials of his success, but there was no announcement to the press, for Harranby wanted to apprehend the woman known as Miriam, and the cabby Barlow, both still at large. He also wanted to recover the money.

On November 22nd, Mr. Harranby interrogated Pierce for the first time. The diary of his assistant, Jonathan Sharp, records that “H. arrived in office early, most carefully attired and looking his best. Had cup of coffee instead of usual tea. Comments on how best to deal with Pierce, etc., etc. Said that he suspected nothing could be got from Pierce without softening up.”

In fact, the interview was remarkably brief. At nine o’clock in the morning, Pierce was ushered into the office and asked to sit in a chair, isolated in the middle of the room. Harranby, from behind his desk, directed his first question with customary abruptness.

“Do you know the man called Barlow?”

“Yes,” Pierce said.

“Where is he now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is the woman called Miriam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where,” said Mr. Harranby, “is the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“It seems that there is a good deal you don’t know.”

“Yes,” Pierce said.

Harranby appraised him for a moment. There was a short silence. “Perhaps,” Harranby said, “a time in the Steel will strengthen your powers of memory.”

“I doubt it,” Pierce said, with no sign of anxiety. Soon after, he was taken from the room.

Alone with Sharp, Harranby said, “I shall break him, you may be sure of that.” The same day, Harranby arranged for Pierce to be transferred from Newgate Prison to the House of Correction at Coldbath Fields, also called the Bastille. “The Steel” was not ordinarily a holding place for accused criminals awaiting trial. But it was a frequent ruse for police to send a man there if some information had to be “winkled out” of him before the trial.

The Steel was the most dreaded of all English prisons. In a visit in 1853, Henry Mayhew described its features. Chief among them, of course, were the cockchafers, narrow boxes in a row with “the appearance of the stalls in a public urinal,” where prisoners remained for fifteen-minute intervals, treading down a wheel of twenty-four steps. A warder explained the virtues of the cockchafer in this way: “You see the men can get no firm tread like, from the steps always sinking away from under their feet and
that
makes it very tiring. Again the compartments are small, and the air becomes very hot, so that the heat at the end of a quarter of an hour renders it difficult to breathe.”

Even less pleasant was shot-drill, an exercise so rigorous that men over forty-five were usually exempted. In this, the prisoners formed a circle with three paces separating each. At a signal, each man picked up a
twenty-four-pound cannonball, carried it to his neighbor’s place, dropped it, and returned to his original position where another shot awaited him. The drill went on for an hour at a time.

Most feared of all was “the crank,” a drum filled with sand and turned with a crank handle. It was usually reserved as a special punishment for unruly prisoners.

The daily regimen of Coldbath Fields was so debilitating that even after a short sentence of six months, many a man emerged “with the steel gone out of him”—his body damaged, nerves shot, and resolution so enfeebled that his ability to commit further crimes was severely impaired.

As a prisoner awaiting trial, Pierce could not be made to undergo the stepper, the shot-drill, or the crank; but he was obliged to follow the rules of prison conduct, and if he broke the rule of silence, for example, he might be punished by a time at the crank. Thus one may presume that the guards frequently accused him of speaking, and he was treated to “softening up.”

On December 19th, after four weeks in the Steel, Pierce was again brought to Harranby’s office. Harranby had told Sharp that “now we shall see a thing or two,” but the second interrogation turned out to be as brief as the first:

“Where is the man Barlow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is the woman Miriam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is the money?”

“I don’t know.”

Mr. Harranby, coloring deeply, the veins standing out on his forehead, dismissed Pierce with a voice filled with rage. As Pierce was taken away, he calmly wished Mr. Harranby a pleasant Christmas.

“The cheek of the man,” Harranby later recorded, “was beyond all imagining.”

Mr. Harranby during this period was under considerable pressure from several fronts. The bank of Huddleston & Bradford wanted its money back, and made its feelings known to Harranby through the offices of none other than the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston himself. The inquiry from “Old Pam” was in itself embarrassing, for Harranby had to admit that he had put Pierce in Coldbath Fields, and the implications of that were none too gentlemanly.

Palmerston expressed the opinion that it was “a bit irregular,” but Harranby consoled himself with the thought that any Prime Minister who dyed his whiskers was hardly in a position to berate others for dissembling.

Pierce remained in Coldbath until February 6th, when he was again brought before Harranby.

“Where is the man Barlow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is the woman Miriam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is the money?”

“In a crypt, in St. John’s Wood,” Pierce said.

Harranby sat forward. “What was that?”

“It is stored,” Pierce said blandly, “in a crypt in the name of John Simms, in the cemetery of Martin Lane, St. John’s Wood.”

Harranby drummed his fingers on the desk. “Why have you not come forth with this information earlier?”

“I did not want to,” Pierce said.

Harranby ordered Pierce taken away to Coldbath Fields once more.

On February 7th, the crypt was located, and the appropriate dispensations obtained to open it. Mr. Harranby,
accompanied by a representative of the bank, Mr. Henry Fowler, opened the vault at noon that day. There was no coffin in the crypt—and neither was there any gold. Upon reexamination of the crypt door, it appeared that the lock had been recently forced.

Mr. Fowler was extremely angry at the discovery, and Mr. Harranby was extremely embarrassed. On February 8th, the following day, Pierce was returned to Harranby’s office and told the news.

“Why,” Pierce said, “the villains must have robbed me.”

His voice and manner did not suggest any great distress, and Harranby said so.

“Barlow,” Pierce said. “I always knew he was not to be trusted.”

“So you believe it was Barlow who took the money?”

“Who else could it be?”

There was a short silence. Harranby listened to the ticking of his clock; for once, it irritated him more than his subject. Indeed, his subject appeared remarkably at ease.

“Do you not care,” Harranby said, “that your confederates have turned on you in this fashion?”

“It’s just my ill luck,” Pierce said calmly. “And yours,” he added, with a slight smile.

“By his collected manner and polished demeanour,” Harranby wrote, “I presumed that he had fabricated still another tale to put us off the mark. But in further attempts to learn the truth I was frustrated, for on the first of March, 1857, the
Times
reporter learned of Pierce’s capture, and he could no longer conveniently be held in custody.”

According to Mr. Sharp, his chief received the newspaper story of Pierce’s capture “with heated imprecations and ejaculations.” Harranby demanded to know
how the papers had been put on to the story. The
Times
refused to divulge its source. A guard at Coldbath who was thought to have given out the information was discharged, but nobody was ever certain one way or the other. Indeed, it was even rumored that the lead had come from Palmerston’s office.

In any case, the trial of Burgess, Agar, and Pierce was set to begin on July 12, 1857.

The trial of the three train robbers was greeted by the public with the same sensational interest it had earlier shown in the crime itself. The prosecuting officials, mindful of the attention focused upon the event, took care to heighten the drama inherent in the proceedings. Burgess, the most minor of the players, was brought to the dock of the Old Bailey first. The fact that this man knew only parts of the whole story only whetted the public appetite for further details.

Agar was interrogated next, providing still more information. But Agar, like Burgess, was a distinctly limited man, and his testimony served only to focus attention on the personality of Pierce himself, whom the press referred to as “the master criminal” and “the brilliant malignant force behind the deed.”

Pierce was still incarcerated in Coldbath Fields, and neither the public nor the press had seen him. There was plenty of freedom for eager reporters to conjure up wild and fanciful accounts of the man’s appearance,
manner, and style of living. Much of what was written during the first two weeks of July, 1857, was obviously untrue: that Pierce lived with three mistresses in the same house, and was “a human dynamo”; that he had been behind the great check swindle of 1852; that he was the illegitimate son of Napoleon I; that Pierce took cocaine and laudanum; that he had previously been married to a German countess and had murdered her in 1848, in Hamburg. There is not the least evidence that any of these stories is correct, but it is certainly true that the press whipped public interest to the point of frenzy.

Even Victoria herself was not immune to the fascination with “this
most bold
and
dastardly
rogue, whom we
should like
to perceive at first hand.” She also expressed a desire to see his hanging; she was apparently not aware that in 1857 grand theft was no longer a capital offense in England.

For weeks, crowds had been gathering around Coldbath Fields, on the unlikely chance of getting a look at the master thief. And Pierce’s house in Mayfair was broken into on three occasions by avid souvenir hunters. One “wellborn woman”—there is no further description—was apprehended while leaving the house with a man’s handkerchief. Showing not the slightest embarrassment, she said that she merely wished to have a token of the man.