Have you seen that brill film The Bank Job featuring Jason Statham
leading a gang underground to access countless safe deposit boxes? They story’s
loosely hung on a robbery that happened on Saturday 11th September
1971 and here I am where it happened on Baker Street in London. I was staying
in a hotel in Hampstead and there was a guided tour of the city one day. It was
for uninitiated who were down in The Smoke for their first time so I asked to
be dropped off “anywhere in central London” and I’d make my own way back to the
hotel. The driver dropped me at Baker Street - perfect.
The corner where the bank’s main door sits was so
busy I was forced to take lots of photographs in the hope some were usable. The
robbers had rented a leather-goods shop called Le Sac two doorways from the
bank and dug the entrance to the tunnel in there. I took some photos of this
though it’s now called Fraser & Co. They dug approximately 15m sideways so
they passed underneath the Chicken Inn restaurant (now Pizza Hut.) They only
worked through the weekends when they were less likely to be heard. A thermal
lance failed and the breached the bank using explosives.
Often crimes are uncovered by the banal and the
robbery is no exception: an amateur radio buff called Robert Rowlands who lived nearby in Wimpole Street overhead
conversations between the robbers and their lockout who was watching the bank
from a roof across the road. He told the police who considered it a joke and
suggested he record the conversations. After midnight he contacted Scotland
Yard Police Station and officers visited him immediately. They checked 750
banks within 10 miles of the receiver. They visited Baker Street’s Lloyd branch
oblivious to the robbers who were smashing open safety deposit doors only
metres away. Everything looked fine, the mammoth
security door was locked so they left.
The gang stole valuables and cash thought to be
worth about £35 million with inflation. But why is little known about this
robbery? Normally such robberies are an illuminate to the media and their
floodlights light up every corner of the story but not this one. There weren’t
any explosive front covers on the newspapers, no top story on News At Ten.
Why did the press let this robbery pass under their hands quietly? A sub-plot
of the film hangs on the reason for robbery was not cash but dynamite sexually-explicit
photographs of Princess Margaret lying in one of the safety deposit boxes. The
film suggests that on a stay at her luxurious getaway in Mustique
Princess Margaret was logged by criminal/actor John Bindon
(who was on the run at the time - there’s been a documentary made of their
meeting called The Princess and The Gangster (available on youtube.))
The security services have wrapped up this case effectively as we still don’t
know why the robbery didn’t receive much publicity. Some newspapers later named
the robbers who’d been caught and received twelve-year prison sentences but
little is known about them, the haul they got away with, if the photos did
exist. The press said the Mr Big who masterminded the crime was never caught. I’m
a Radio 4 geek and one week the robbery was the subject “Punt PI” which looks
into strange cases. It suggests the robbery was kept low-key due to a corrupt Detective Inspector taking bribes. Will we ever
know the truth?
They went in through the SAC…
It’s now Fraser & Co…
Robert Rowlands
picked up the radio messages from the lockout on the roof who was watching the
bank…
Walking away from a historic
robbery…