As ITV dramatises the life of the Great Train Robber, the wife he left behind breaks her silence

As ITV dramatises the life of the Great Train Robber, the wife he left behind breaks her silence Charmian Biggs is adamant. ‘I didn’t want to be known as someone else’s wife. I’m somebody in my own right. I am more than just a wife. I’m not a shadow in the background. I have a mind of my own.’ And yet it is as the ex-wife of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs that she will forever be defined in the public consciousness. To that end, ITV1’s new five-part drama, unambiguously titled Mrs Biggs, will both reinforce this image and help to add a third dimension to a woman often presumed to have been little more than a gangster’s moll. Biggs was sentenced to 30 years for his part in the robbery, in which £2.6 million ( the equivalent of £40 million today) was stolen from the hijacked Glasgow-to-London mail train during the early hours of August 8, 1963. His share of the loot was £140,000 (£2.5 million today). He escaped from Wandsworth prison in 1965 and went on the run, finally surfacing in Brazil before giving himself up and returning to jail 36 years later. In London from her Melbourne home for the launch of the TV series, Charmian, now 74, is clearly not a woman to be messed with. Intelligent, articulate and, despite it all, with a twinkle in those watchful eyes, she is at pains to explain why she cooperated over the dramatisation of a much-told story. ‘I did an interview with Australian TV in 2001,’ she says, ‘and I made it quite clear that was to be my last word on the subject.’ So what changed her mind? ‘I was approached by ITV and became increasingly impressed by the homework they’d done. They’d read all the books, watched all the documentaries. And they convinced me that it would make an interesting story if it were told from my point of view.’ Writer and executive producer Jeff Pope, the man responsible for Appropriate Adult (the story of Fred West), The Moors Murders and The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence, then sat down with Charmian and a tape recorder. ‘I was effectively Michael Parkinson for a month,’ he says. Happier times: The Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs with his wife Charmian in 1974 ‘And I told him much more than I’d ever intended,’ adds Charmian, with a wry smile. There has already been criticism that a drama about Biggs is even being made, in particular from the family of Jack Mills, the train driver who was badly beaten with an iron bar during the robbery and was unable to return to work. He died seven years later of leukaemia. But Daniel Mays, who plays Biggs, insists the drama isn’t making light of what happened. ‘If there was ever a story that shows crime doesn’t pay, this is it,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t glamorise what happened. It shows that, quite rightly, the gang didn’t get away with anything — the money was almost like a curse and brought them nothing but trouble. ‘I know a lot of people were disgusted when Biggs was released on health grounds three years ago because they feel he should have been locked up for the rest of his life. As it is, his relationship with his sons from Charmian is fractured; they have totally disowned him. But no one should feel sorry for him because he has no one to blame but himself.’ Charmian, who is portrayed by Sheridan Smith, was the eldest of five children of an unbending headmaster and his browbeaten wife (played by Adrian Scarborough and Caroline Goodall). As an 18-year-old bank clerk, she met the roguish Biggs on a train. Legend: Ronnie Biggs at the London launch of his Autobiography Odd Man Out: The Last Straw in 2011 ‘He was extremely good company,’ she says, ‘self-educated, with a great sense of humour, an intelligent man — and he was exciting. I realise now that I was looking for love. ‘I certainly didn’t feel very loved at home. My nose had been put out of joint when my younger brothers and sisters appeared in rapid succession. But, suddenly, Ronnie put me on cloud nine, floating on air.’ But, as he quickly confessed to her, Ron had form. His mother died when he was 12, he didn’t get on with his stepmother or her 12-year-old son and so he began living rough, eventually winding up in borstal. ‘I thought he needed a family,’ says Charmian, ‘people who cared about him.’ When they married — against the wishes of her father — they set up a building and decorating business. ‘He promised me faithfully he wouldn’t go back to crime. He’d been fairly unsuccessful as a criminal and he was a very good tradesman.’ That might have been that had it not been for the owners of their rented house telling them they’d have to move unless they wanted to buy the property. And that would require a £400 deposit — money they simply didn’t have. Ron approached career criminal Bruce Reynolds, a man with whom he’d served time in Lewes Prison. Reynolds didn’t have the money, either, but he was prepared to cut Ron in on the mother and father of all heists — something that would set him up for the rest of his days, said Bruce. Ron battled with his conscience and his conscience lost. ‘He told me he was going to Wiltshire to earn money felling trees,’ says Charmian now. ‘When I heard about the Great Train Robbery the day after it happened, I suspected Bruce Reynolds might be involved, but not Ron because I didn’t think he’d betray me.’ She was stunned when Ron arrived home with his share of the stolen money. ‘I felt as if I were glued to the wall up near the ceiling somewhere, watching it all happen. My immediate thought was that we should get it out of the house.’ Biggs’s role in the robbery was to recruit a replacement driver to move the mail train from the point where it was hijacked, on the Bedfordshire-Buckinghamshire border, to an unloading point half a mile away. ‘It was naive of the gang to think they could get away with so much money,’ says Daniel Mays. ‘We show how — deservedly — their life changed because they were constantly worried about a knock on the door, about their faces being in the paper.’ Biggs was quickly caught, along with most of the rest of the gang. Charmian was shocked by the severity of the 30-year sentence at a time when parole wasn’t an option. Unsuccessful criminal: Ronnie Biggs, one of the masterminds of Britain's 1963 Great Train Robbery, holding up a poster of himself during promotions for his book Odd Man Out She’d visit him in prison, unbuttoning her coat to allow him a glimpse of her naked breasts. ‘That was the only quibble Ron had when he was shown the TV series in advance,’ she says. ‘Sheridan is seen wearing a black bra when, as he pointed out, I didn’t wear a bra at all.’ After his escape, Biggs and Charmian were reunited in Paris before he was smuggled to Australia under a new identity. Six months later, she joined him with their two sons. ‘I had brought the remains of the money — about £9,000 — with me and we bought a station wagon and took three weeks to drive to Adelaide. It was like another planet, just beautiful. We felt pretty safe.’ When rumours of their true identity eventually began to gather force, they relocated to Melbourne. But there, too, the law was closing in, with Ron making his escape just hours before the police swooped. Charmian was left to bring up their three sons — the third had been born in Adelaide — by herself, but not before being arrested. ‘I told the police nothing. But they took the children away and placed them in care for a weekend while I was being questioned. I was hysterical.’ Worse, much worse, was to follow. Crossing an intersection in the family car, she was hit broadside by another vehicle, her eldest son, Nicky, taking the full force of the impact. The ambulance took half an hour to arrive — it was too late. Nicky was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. Ask Charmian now if she regrets her helter-skelter life and she pauses. ‘The only thing I regret,’ she says, ‘is something I could do nothing about and that’s losing my son.’ She also had to break the news to Ron, now holed up in Rio de Janeiro because there was no automatic extradition treaty between Brazil and the UK. In character: Sheridan Smith and Daniel Mays as Charmian and Ronnie Biggs in the new TV series Mrs Biggs Daniel Mays says the popular perception of Biggs’ time in Rio is that he led a carefree life on the beaches and in the bars, surrounded by gorgeous women. ‘Losing Nicky brought out the darkness in him. He was a flawed character anyway, so nobody should feel sympathy for him. The reality was it was quite a desperate existence. He didn’t have any money and he couldn’t even comfort his wife in their grief.’ In 1974, Charmian went to visit him — by this time he was in a Brazilian prison because he’d been tracked down and Scotland Yard was trying to extradite him — and was in for a further shock. He’d taken up with a young nightclub dancer, Raimunda, who was pregnant with his child. ‘I couldn’t see him the day after my arrival from Australia because Raimunda was visiting. When we did meet, he suddenly said: “I want you to divorce me, Charm.” ‘I was totally flabbergasted. But Brazil was a Catholic country. If he married Raimunda, he stood more chance of being allowed to stay there — and particularly if the baby was a boy. ‘I was in shock, in tears and then, all of a sudden, the doors to the room in which we were sitting were flung open and about 30 press photographers and reporters were ushered in. It must have been arranged with the authorities, but that didn’t stop it from being the most terrible invasion of my privacy at such a very difficult moment.’ Charmian felt utterly betrayed. ‘I’d been through a great deal for Ron. Was this how I was to be rewarded? And yet, the other half of me knew that my granting him a divorce would probably save him. He’d be able to stay in Brazil. So my emotions were very mixed. In the end, my decision was governed by my desire to put my children first. ‘Later on, Ron tried to persuade me to come and live with him and Raimunda and their son, Mike. To be blunt, I didn’t want to be Number One wife in a harem. ‘And I think it’s fair to say that my sons felt abandoned by their father in favour of this new boy. They used to say that Ron could reel me in, like a fish, and that’s partially true. But then he remains the father of my children, something that never goes away.’ She now lives alone in Melbourne, having built a new life for herself under another name. She studied for an honours degree in English and then worked, first as a journalist for the government, helping to promote Australia’s image overseas, then at Melbourne University Press as an editor and ultimately on the internal publications produced by the Australian Wheat Board. To this day, Charmian cannot damn Biggs out of hand. ‘I admit to still being concerned as to what happens to him, yes. He was the love of my life.’ But she’s learnt some harsh lessons along the way. ‘Crime doesn’t pay in any way, shape or form. But then I’m conceited enough to think that I have enough brains to get by without doing anything illegal.’