Rich pickings on the Brighton railway line

Yet there were local precedents: A number of raids had been made on the Brighton line in the previous three years.

On August 18, 1960, railway guard Reginald Scammel was overpowered on an afternoon express between Brighton and London by four men with flour bags over their heads.

They escaped with £8,000 worth of registered packages, ripped out of a dozen mailbags, by walking away at Victoria with the loot in suitcases.

Just over a month later, there was another even more daring robbery.

Using a false key, three masked men in plastic raincoats entered the guard's van of the semifast 9.28 pm Victoria-Brighton train.

As it approached Patcham, they overpowered the guard, Mr Leonard Hooper, trussed him up and sorted through the mailbags.

Hooper remembered the leader was brandishing a cosh and wore a red mask.

The other two wore black masks.

The men clearly knew exactly what they were looking for, because they quickly selected six mailbags containing registered packages.

As the train approached Patcham tunnel, an accomplice on the line switched a signal from green to red.

As soon as the train stopped, the three robbers threw the bags onto the track, jumped down and scrambled unseen over the embankment to a waiting car.

The stolen mailbags, filled with unopened letters and soaked by rain, were found by a postman in a ditch near Lewes.

All the registered packets including £9,000 worth of new pound notes expected by Brighton banks had been removed.

Tampering with signals would, of course, also be a feature of the Great Train Robbery.

Following nationwide police investigations, in January 1961 three men and a girl were charged with receiving stolen property found in a Chingford house.

The prosecution claimed that 176 travellers' cheques found there were part of the proceeds of the September robbery.

Another guard was attacked and tied up, this time on the Hastingsroute.

Sixty-one-year-old Alfred Reynolds fell victim to a gang just north of Haywards Heath in November 1960 on the 7pm train to Victoria.

Enough was enough.

The following month, railway guards refused to work on the Brighton line without adequate protection, so British Rail agreed to fit bolts and chains to the mail vans. For well over a year, there were no more incidents.

But on April 11, 1962, five men posing as railwaymen made a daring midnight mail snatch at Brighton Station.

At 11.40 pm they casually picked out a buff-labelled white bag containing registered mail from a stack of postbags lying on the platform. The bags had been unloaded from the 10.28 train from Victoria.

Although the thieves, wearing peaked caps and dark uniforms, were challenged by a postman, one of them said: "It's all right, mate. We will look after this one. It's ours". It certainly was.

In the bag there were 222 registered items, mostly banknotes, worth about £15,000.

Picking it up, they strolled to theend of platform five, dropped down onto the lines and disappeared into the mist towards New England Road. The operation took seven minutes from start to finish.

Only four months later, in August, bandits struck again. This time a new method was used fire.

The men set light to an empty compartment of the 10.28 Wednesday night train from Victoria to Brighton. The blaze was seen when the train pulled into Preston Park.

Passengers were ordered out and the electric current was switched off.

Directly the guard left the van to help extinguish the flames, the rest of the gang stole two mailbags and walked unchallenged to a getaway car.

When police reconstructed the crime, it became clear one of the men had left a delayed-action firebomb in the train when he got out at Haywards Heath.

The following April the mailbags were recovered from bushes near Devil's Dyke.

There was then a considerable lull, loudly punctuated by the mother of all train robberies in August that year.

But on the night of November 23, 1967, three bogus postmen bluffed railway staff at Hassocks station into handing over 13 mailbags.

They strolled onto the platform as the London-Brighton train drew in and their leader calmly told the guard, "We have come for the mail. There's a bit of congestion at Brighton tonight".

The loot was bundled into a red van but, despite the alarm being raised by a porter-signalman who realised it was the wrong time for collecting mail, the police road blocks failed to prevent the van's escape.

Home-made postmen's uniforms were found the next day near Albourne and Balcombe.

In April 1970, two raiders halted a train outside Brighton's London Road station by pulling the communication cord.

As soon as the guard had gone to investigate, a man ran into the van, grabbed a mailbag containing 30 registered packets valued at about £3,000 threw it over a fence to a waiting green van, and was driven away.

This time, finally, a culprit was caught.

James Harris, 46, of East Dulwich, was charged and sent to prison for 18 months a light sentence, to my mind, for someone with ten previous convictions.