Inside wild life of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs - from lover's sudden death to chilling meeting

Publish date: 2024-04-28

TWO years before the Great Train Robbery, Ronnie Biggs sat opposite a Hastings fortune teller who told him he would travel the world and have a child with a woman with long black hair.

Happily married to the “love of his life” Charmian, with a baby son, he was making an honest living as a carpenter and dismissed the prediction as “gypsy flim-flam”.

But his part in the most notorious heist of the 20th century, on August 8, 1963, was set to change the course of his life, rip his family apart and eventually lead to romance with a string of lovers which seemed to fulfil the spooky prediction.

In the new autobiography The Great Train Robber, published nearly a decade after his death via his ghostwriter and close pal Chris Pickard, Ronnie reveals extraordinary new details of his life on the run.

He opens up about the affair that spelled the end of his marriage to mum-of-three Charmian, the son who saved him from being extradited from Brazil and the sudden death of an on-off lover which left him “broken”.

Ronnie was 28 and working as a builder when he met Charmian Powell, then 17, on a train in 1957.

He writes: “We were mutually attracted and in no time we were making mad and passionate love in hotels, empty train carriages and on the classroom floors of the school where Charmian’s father was headmaster.”

‘I wanted the buzz’

Charmian’s parents were not impressed — especially as Ronnie was in and out of prison from the age of 19.

But after he wed Charmian in 1960 and had baby Christopher in March 1963, Ronnie was trying to go straight.

Finding himself short of the £500 (about £10,000 today) he needed for a deposit on a house, he made a fateful call to train robbery mastermind Bruce Reynolds, asking for a loan.

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Knowing that Ronnie was working on the house of a retired train driver, still identified only as Peter, Reynolds asked him to join the gang planning the robbery and to get his client involved — with a promised payday of £40,000 each (£800,000 today).

Despite winning £500 at the bookies a day before the heist, Ronnie decided to go ahead, saying: “I wanted the buzz and excitement of being involved, and that was something I was not getting from building work.”

In the early hours of August 8 — Ronnie’s 34th birthday — the 16-strong gang tampered with a signal to stop an overnight train carrying mailbags full of cash from Glasgow to London, near a bridge in rural Bucks.

The audacious heist, which netted them £2,631,784 (£50million today), sparked a huge manhunt which led to the eventual arrest of 12 of the gang members, including Ronnie.

In court Charmian watched, “pale and shattered” as her “loving lord” was jailed for 30 years.

But in 1965, after just 15 months in Wandsworth Prison, he escaped.

Charmian joined him in Paris, where he had a facelift to disguise himself, then to Australia, where their third son Farley was born in April 1967.

But the net began to close on Ronnie and they were forced to flee from Adelaide to Melbourne, then in 1970 he decided to move to Brazil.

He writes: “Charmian and I had no idea when we would meet again.

“We kissed and hugged each other.”

But incredibly, he reveals in the book that he cheated on her on the journey to South America, hooking up with a British woman called Molly Evans for the duration.

And it wasn’t the end of his philandering.

Soon after arriving in Rio de Janeiro, he took up with a 27-year-old Brazilian woman called Edith.

But then in early 1971 tragedy struck when Charmian was involved in a car crash which killed the couple’s ten-year-old son Nicky.

Ronnie only found out a month after the funeral, in a letter from Charmian.

He recalls: “Her opening line stopped me in my tracks: ‘Wherever you are and whatever you are doing, sit down... our darling son Nicky has been killed in a road accident’.

“I felt physically sick and faint, completely stunned by the terrible news.

“In a trance I got to a bar and sat down.

“I tried, but it was impossible to read any more of Charmian’s letter.

“I could only cry silently.”

In his grief, Ronnie considered giving himself up but decided neither Nicky nor Charmian would want that.

He says: “Life continued, but Nicky’s death at the age of ten had left me devastated.”

When his lover Edith went off for an extended break in the UK and the US, Ronnie wasted little time in “dallying” with another Brazilian beauty, Raimunda Nascimento de Castro.

He writes: “It was a fine romance until the day that Edith was due back from the US.

“Raimunda had left her baby-doll nightdress on the bed and I suggested she might take it with her in case Edith, who had a key to my apartment, turned up without warning.

“Raimunda exploded, giving me the ultimatum that I had to make a choice between her and Edith.

“I chose Edith, and the fiery Raimunda stormed out of my life in a huff.”

When Edith extended her travels, Ronnie met another girl in a local samba club — Ana Paula — and says: “We drank and we danced and eventually went back to my apartment to get to know each other better!”

But philanderer Ronnie got a taste of his own medicine when Edith’s sister gleefully broke the news, on his birthday, that she had married a hotel manager she had met in New York.

Without a pause, he took up with Ana Paula, but on the day he was due to take her out for dinner for her birthday, Raimunda paid him a visit.

He says: “In no time we were on the bed and talking about old times.

“I was really getting carried away when I remembered Ana Paula.

“Hastily I explained the situation to Raimunda and asked her to come back the next day.

“She called me a son of a bitch, but promised to return.

“When Ana Paula entered the apartment minutes later she was sniffing the air like a pointer. ‘I can smell a whore’, she said.”

He and Ana Paula split and two days later he moved Raimunda in.

On their first night together, he describes how she treated him to a “blue light cabaret”.

He says: “She invited me to sit down and switched on a table lamp.

‘Long-legged and sex-mad’

“I was surprised to see that the white bulb had been replaced by a blue one.

“Then she put on a lazy samba record and began to dance to the music, letting down her long black hair.

“Artistically, she stepped on to the marble coffee table and slowly started to strip off her clothes.

“We got on very well together and she was fun to be with.”

But the couple split after he refused to let Raimunda’s mum move in too, and he took up with 19-year-old bank clerk Lucia Pereira Gomes — “pretty, long-legged and sex-mad”.

Ronnie adds: “It was something of a whirlwind romance and we spent as much time as possible together, mostly in bed.”

A letter from Charmian begging him to come back to Australia made him contemplate giving himself up and going back to prison, but fate intervened once again when Raimunda revealed she was pregnant.

Initially, Ronnie urged her to have an abortion — but changed his mind when Scotland Yard detective Jack Slipper caught up with him in Brazil.

Slipper, who had been chasing him since his 1965 prison break, was preparing to extradite Ronnie to the UK when his cell mate told him how anyone who has a child with a Brazilian woman could not be extradited.

Ronnie was able to use the loophole to escape repatriation — and his fourth son Michael was born in 1974.

The baby proved the last straw for Charmian, who flew to Brazil to confront Ronnie, before reluctantly agreeing to a divorce, so he could marry Raimunda and stay a free man.

In fact the couple did not wed until 30 years later, after he returned to the UK and to prison, in 2001.

While he moved in with Raimunda, Ronnie was also enjoying an affair with divorced mother-of-three Ulla Sopher, who was to become his companion for more than 20 years.

He writes: “She was a very special lady who had helped keep me sane and on track on more than one occasion.

“She was my real best friend in Rio.”

On January 12, 1996 Ronnie let himself into her flat and found Ulla, who had been suffering stomach pains, lying on her bed in a T-shirt.

Assuming she was asleep, he left her alone for a few hours before taking her a cup of tea.

He says: “I touched her leg to wake her and as I did I knew something was wrong.

“I sensed she was dead.

“It was a terrible, terrible experience.”

Ronnie was 71 when he finally came back to the UK in May 2001, and was immediately arrested and sent to Belmarsh Prison in South East London.

He married Raimunda, behind bars, on July 10, 2002, and writes: “The nearest I got to consummating our marriage was a quick pinch of her bum as she stood next to me.

“Our courtship had lasted almost exactly 31 years from when we met in Rio to getting her to the altar.”

Released two days before his 80th birthday on the grounds of ill health, Ronnie died four years later.

He stayed close to son Mike until the end, although he says of his other surviving children, Chris and Farley: “They decided they wanted nothing more to do with me, to the extent they did not want their children to know who their grandfather was.”

Despite his many flings, Ronnie concludes: “After all I put her through, Charmian remained the love of my life.

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“I hope when I am gone, history will be kind to her and the boys (and that includes Mike), because they all deserve it for what I put them and their families through.”

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