page_title: Great Gold Robbery
section_title: Later
hierarchical_section_title: Great Gold Robbery / Later
caption_attribution_description: English: Bullion box from the 1855 Great Gold Robbery
context_page_description: The Great Gold Robbery took place on the night of 15 May 1855, when a routine shipment of three boxes of gold bullion and coins was stolen from the guard's van of the service between London Bridge station and Folkestone while it was being shipped to Paris. The robbers comprised four men, two of whom—William Tester and James Burgess—were employees of South Eastern Railway, the company that ran the rail service. They were joined by the two planners of the crime, Edward Agar, a professional career criminal, and William Pierce, a former employee of SER who had been dismissed for being a gambler.
  During transit, the gold was held in "railway safes", which needed two keys to open. The men took wax impressions of the keys and made their own copies. When they knew a shipment was taking place, Tester ensured Burgess was on guard duty, and Agar hid in the guard's van. They emptied the safes of 224 pounds of gold, valued at the time at £12,000, then left the train at Dover.
context_section_description: Tester and Pierce were transported on board the Edwin Fox convict ship on 26 August 1858; the destination was the Swan River Colony in Western Australia. Burgess was given a ticket of leave in December 1859 and a conditional pardon in March 1862. Tester received his ticket of leave in July 1859 and a conditional pardon in October 1861. He left Australia in 1863. Agar remained in England for a little longer; he is known to have been held in Portland Prison in February 1857, before being transported to Australia on 23 September 1857. He was given his ticket of leave in September 1860, and a conditional pardon in September 1867. He left Australia to travel to Colombo, in modern-day Sri Lanka in 1869.
  One of the strongboxes and a sack of the lead shot can be seen on display at the National Railway Museum.
  An account of the trial was published in 1857, with illustrations by Percy Cruikshank, the eldest son of Isaac Robert Cruikshank. The history of the robbery can be found in The First Great Train Robbery, written by David C. Hanrahan in 2011. In the May 1955 issue of The Railway Magazine the railway historian Michael Robbins wrote an article on the robbery; in November 1980 the Journal of the Railway and Canal Historical Society carried an account written by the historian John Fletcher.
  The writer and director Michael Crichton produced his novel The Great Train Robbery in 1975; his introduction reads "The Great Train Robbery was not only shocking and appalling, but also 'daring', 'audacious' and 'masterful'." A subsequent feature film based on the novel, The First Great Train Robbery, presents a highly fictionalised version of the event, portraying Pierce (played by Sean Connery), as a gentleman master criminal who eventually escapes. The robbery also featured as one of the themes in the mystery novel Kept by D. J. Taylor.
caption: Bullion box and bag of lead shot from the robbery[78]
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