The Great Gold Robbery

The case

When three iron-bound boxes of gold reached Paris from London in May 1855, two of them were heavier than they should have been and one was lighter. Inside, under intact-looking seals, the bankers found lead shot. Somewhere between London Bridge and the Bank of France, about 224 pounds of bullion and coin, worth some £12,000, had been turned into birdshot, and every company along the route insisted it could not have happened on their stretch.

It had happened on the South Eastern Railway's 8.30 pm mail train to Folkestone, where gold for the Continent travelled in the guard's van inside Chubb safes. Each safe needed two keys, and the company kept them apart, one set at London Bridge and another at Folkestone, so that no single employee could open a safe. The scheme to defeat that rule came from William Pierce, a former railway clerk dismissed for gambling, who had spent his idle months drinking where railwaymen drank. He brought in Edward Agar, a professional thief of long experience and unusual patience, and two insiders: James Burgess, a guard who regularly worked the bullion trains, and William Tester, a clerk in the traffic superintendent's office who could see the guards' rota.

Getting the keys took most of a year. When one Folkestone key was lost in 1854 and the locks were sent back to Chubb, Tester briefly smuggled the new keys out of the office for Agar to press into wax, but in his nerves he brought two copies of the same key. The second impression was taken at Folkestone, where Pierce slipped into the harbour office while the staff went to meet the Boulogne steamer and Agar copied the key from its cupboard. Over the following months Agar rode the line on Burgess's shifts, filing his rough copies until they turned smoothly.

On 15 May 1855 Burgess stepped out of London Bridge station and wiped his face with a handkerchief, the signal that gold was aboard. Pierce and Agar bought first-class tickets and handed their heavy bags of lead shot to Burgess for the van, and Agar hid there as the train pulled out. He opened the safe, prised the bands off the first box, swapped gold bars for an equal weight of shot, and resealed it with a homemade die. At Redhill, Tester collected a bag of gold and went back to London to be seen at his desk. Pierce joined Agar in the van and they treated the other two boxes the same way. At Folkestone the safes were unloaded without question. The two men rode on to Dover, ate supper in a hotel, threw the tools in the sea and took the early train back to London.

The gold was melted down in Agar's house in Shepherd's Bush, with a cracked crucible scorching the floorboards, and part of it was sold through a fence. The four split the money. Burgess bought bonds; Pierce opened a betting office; Tester left for a post managing a Swedish railway. For more than a year no one was arrested.

What undid them was a separate offence and a broken promise. In 1855 Agar was arrested over a cheque fraud he said he knew nothing about, convicted at the Old Bailey, and sentenced to transportation for life. Before leaving he arranged for Pierce to receive £3,000 of his money to support Fanny Kay, the mother of his child. Pierce kept the money. Penniless, Kay went to the governor of Newgate in 1856 and told him what she knew. When the South Eastern Railway's solicitor visited Agar in Pentonville and Agar learned of the betrayal, he gave a full confession and agreed to testify.

Pierce and Burgess were arrested in November 1856, and Tester came back from Sweden to surrender. At the Old Bailey in January 1857 Agar was the Crown's chief witness, and his calm account, corroborated by railway staff, innkeepers and the locksmith John Chubb, sank the defence. The jury took about ten minutes. Burgess and Tester, as railway servants, were sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. Pierce, convicted only of simple larceny because he was no longer an employee, got two years' hard labour.