Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs 'left son nothing but dirty a surname and love'
Ronnie Biggs' son has told how his notorious Great Train Robber father left him nothing but a "dirty surname and a lot of love" when he died.
Michael Biggs, 48, said he "missed his dad everyday" nearly 10 years after frail Ronnie passed in 2013, aged 84. The infamous robber was released from Norwich Prison in 2009 on grounds of ill-health. A series of strokes, heart attacks and pneumonia left him in a wheelchair, unable to speak.
But he joyously declared that he wanted to enjoy the "last chapter" of his life after spending more than 30 years on the run for the August 8 1963 heist. Now, on the 60th anniversary of the robbery, Michael said: "When my father died I heard something I will never forget and it has helped me a lot. The pain never diminishes, you just get used to it.
"I still feel the same pain now that I did the day I lost him. It's the same for everyone who loses a loved one. There's not a day I don't miss him like mad. Memories are all I've got. My dad left me no money whatsoever, all I got was a dirty surname and a lot of love. That's what I carry with me now."
Ronnie was jailed for 30 years for the meticulously planned robbery but escaped over the wall of Wandsworth prison after just 15 months. He fled first to Belgium and then France, where he underwent plastic surgery and acquired a false passport.
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Ronnie Biggs July 1963 aged 35 years old (PA)
Ronnie and his son Michael in 1990 (DS)After a stint in Australia he flew to Panama and then Brazil, finally settling in Rio de Janeiro in 1970 to live the "high life". He was famously pictured drinking cocktails with bikini-clad Brazilian girls and forever boasting of his escape.
Ronnie spent 27 years in Brazil until he finally came back to the UK aged 71 in May 2001, and was immediately arrested and sent to Belmarsh Prison. He was released two days before his 80th birthday and died four years later.
Michael said: "Even though he was very ill when he was released, the mind was as sharp as ever. His body had been completely ravished by life but his mind was very sharp. He spent his days watching television so he was Mr Current Affairs.
"It was hard having to decipher everything on his spelling board, but we did have a lot of quality time. All in all it was great that he got to spend those last four years as a free man, which is what he wanted."
Biggs was one of the gang that had held up a Glasgow to London night mail train carrying used banknotes and got away with £2.6 million, believed to be around £50million in today's money. After successfully executing the theft, the robbers hid out in a farmhouse and used the acquired banknotes to play a game of Monopoly. But it proved to be the gang's downfall.
When the police discovered the hideout they found the game covered in fingerprints which eventually led to their arrest. Biggs, a one-time petty crook who spent just two years in the RAF before being thrown out, became an anti-hero who stuck two fingers up at British authorities unable to extradite him from South America.
But to many he was a member of a violent gang which coshed innocent train driver Jack Mills and left him for dead and then dined out on his notoriety. He sang with the Sex Pistols, was seen on the grid at a Grand Prix and seemingly taunted the British police from his beach-front flat.
Biggs divorced his first British wife Charmian Powell in 1974 after meeting stripper Raimunda de Castro, Michael's Brazilian mother, to avoid extradition. During his time on the run, Biggs was kidnapped by former SAS mercenaries from London.
He was snatched from a restaurant in Rio on March 16 1981 and smuggled into Barbados. Despite an effort to extradite him back to the UK, the authorities dismissed the case and he was sent back to Brazil.
Ronnie Biggs in 1998 (PA)
He fled the country after the crime (PA)Michael - then a baby-faced boy - made an emotional TV appeal for his safe return and it launched him into a career as a pop star. CBS Records in Brazil recruited him to join a boyband, called The Magic Balloon Gang, which flourished for six years from 1981. In total they sold 30million records. Michael, who now works in forestry and lives in north east Brazil, still enjoys celebrity status with a TV show dedicated to music.
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He said: "My life was thrust into the media from the day I was born. My dad was a train robber, my mum was a stripper, my godfather was a forger and my godmother was a porn actress. What a great start in life."
In 1964 seven of the robbers involved in the train heist just outside Leighton Buzzard, Bucks., were handed some of the longest sentences in modern British criminal history at the time. Mr Justice Edmund Davies said it would be positively evil if leniency were exercised.
When a great crime was committed, he said, it called for great punishment, "not for the purpose of mere retribution, but to show that others similarly tempted should be brought to a sharp realisation that crime does not pay."
Taken together with long sentences meted out to five other members of the gang, the total added up to 307 years. But Michael has now criticised the sentences, claiming they backfired on the Government who wanted to make an example of the robbers.
Michael said: "The Great Train Robbery will continue to be an incredible part of history. Even though it was a crime and it was wrong, it's part of British folklore. I just hope newer generations review how sentences were being handed out and the way the criminal system is screwed up. Society can benefit from looking at history."
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