The Baker Street Robbery, Marylebone, London

 

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…

 

 

 

 

 

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Robert Rowlands picked up the radio messages from the lockout on the roof who was watching the bank…

 

 

Walking away from a historic robbery…