How a Great Train Robber spent decades outrunning his thirty-year prison sentence

History · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Ronnie Biggs was a central figure in the 1963 Great Train Robbery, a heist that netted £2.6 million. After escaping prison in 1965, he embarked on a 36-year flight from justice, spanning continents and involving plastic surgery, punk rock collaborations, and a bizarre kidnapping attempt before his eventual 2001 return.

Born in 1929, Ronnie Biggs was a career criminal who participated in the infamous 1963 Glasgow–London Royal Mail train robbery. Alongside 14 others, he helped stop the train near Bridego Bridge. While the heist was dubbed the 'heist of the century,' Biggs's role was largely logistical; he was tasked with securing a driver to move the train, a plan that failed when the recruited driver proved unable to operate the locomotive. The gang successfully stole £2.6 million, but Biggs was soon identified after police found his fingerprints on a tomato sauce bottle at their hideout.

Convicted in 1964 and sentenced to 30 years, Biggs spent only 15 months behind bars before orchestrating a daring escape in 1965 using a homemade rope ladder. He fled to Paris for plastic surgery before eventually settling in Australia. By 1969, as authorities closed in, he moved to Brazil. His life in exile became a spectacle; he famously recorded a track with the Sex Pistols in 1978 and survived a 1981 kidnapping attempt by former British soldiers who hoped to return him to the UK. Because Barbados, where he was taken, lacked an extradition treaty with Britain, he was eventually returned to Brazil.

Biggs's long run ended in May 2001, when, suffering from declining health, he voluntarily flew back to London. He was immediately arrested and returned to prison to serve the remainder of his sentence. However, his deteriorating condition led officials to release him on compassionate grounds in August 2009. He died in a London nursing home in December 2013 at the age of 84, marking the end of a life defined by one of Britain's most notorious criminal acts and a decades-long game of cat and mouse with the law.

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