Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/30/in-1855-a-band-of-london-thie.html
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NB that is a very American looking train to illustrate a story about a British train robbery.
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They last tried that 56 years ago
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A band of London thieves
I’ve never heard them, are they any good?
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Meh.
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They made a film of it (loosely).
The film’s plot is loosely based on the Great Gold Robbery of 1855, in which a cracksman named William Pierce engineered the theft of a trainload of gold being shipped to the British Army during the Crimean War.[1] The gold shipment of £12,000 (equal to £1,101,507 today) in gold coin and ingots from the London-to-Folkestone passenger train was stolen by Pierce and his accomplices, a clerk in the railway offices named Tester, and a skilled screwsman named Agar.
Crichton’s movie was based upon his book, which is excellent, albeit more fictional than historical, as to the specifics of the case.
The movie relegates to a few seconds of film interesting stories that Crichton dug up about the period:
The cheapest sleep in London were “penny hangs” where men would sleep more-or-less standing up, their upper-body weight hanging on ropes stretched across the room like clotheslines. It required the “guest” to be dead drunk to sleep, of course, which they all were. You could spend your last pennies on a few more beers rather than a real room that way.
It went on at greater length about the same topic Neal Stephenson spent pages on in his Baroque Cycle books: that there was no greater public entertainment in London than a hanging, and people would walk hours in from the countryside to see one, after some time spent mocking and jeering at the person about to die.
And Sean Connery is shown taking tea with a bank officer’s family in their yard, enjoying their “ruin”. At the time, fashionable Londoners would have a ruined bridge or building painstakingly constructed in their back yard, as a conversation piece.
Anyway, loved the book, much enhances the movie, do dig up both.
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That would have been The Sultans of Sting.
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