And all we had guarding this lot was a 14-year-old boy (me), two coppers and a government official next to Alfie, the driver, who was one of a family of well-known greengrocers in those parts. We would drive from King’s Cross to the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street or, if we had coins, we took them to the Royal Mint on the north side of Tower Bridge. Snatching the gold would have been the easiest bit of work ever for anyone with a little bit of enterprise. I fantasised even then about nicking it: at today’s prices, each bar would have fetched £100,000, and I lovingly cradled those bars like I would a child. The deliveries were made on a fairly regular basis and because of the heavy work were unpopular, and word quickly got around because everyone was asked to volunteer. It would have been easy for us to tell someone where it was coming from, but, those days, people weren’t that way inclined. They didn’t think of thieving big lumps of money. For me, though, a seed was sown.
My next job was at Pannet and Eden, as a warehouseman. They were based in Wandsworth and did herbs and stuffing as well as hair cream and associated products. One job involved carrying hundredweight sacks full of breadcrumbs up ladders and stairs, which built up my strength. Another part of the job was handling 56lb boxes of lard or fat intended for the stuffing – so, needless to say, my mother’s family and friends were never short of hair oil, mint sauce, stuffing or lard. Nor were many of the women working in Pannet and Eden. I would wrap chunks of lard in greaseproof paper and slip it into their open handbags. I never charged them a penny for this, although a number showed their appreciation in different ways – usually among the empty sacks in the loft above the storage rooms. We were still on ration books shortly after the war and limited to only about an ounce of lard per person, per week, so I became the most popular young male among 45 women workers.
People always go on about men on building sites, but you have to see it to believe what women get up to in factories. The old ones were the worst. They’d grab your dick and get a little too excited. If you gave them a playful kiss, you’d get a tongue down your throat.
With a wage of £4.50 a week, I’d nick anything to make up for the hard work I had to do. A good line was women’s make-up, which would get you a few quid on top of your wages. I stayed at Pannet’s for about a year, the longest I’ve had in any job, and eventually got sacked when someone grassed me up for giving cooking lard to one of the women. The sack came out of the blue, but it didn’t worry me very much and I went to work for Stevens and Carter, a scaffolding firm. Onwards and upwards!
The only person to be really upset at my abrupt departure from Pannet’s was a lovely spinster of about 40 called Gladys. She cried when she heard I’d been dismissed. Gladys lived with another, more elderly woman. She was tall and thin with dark hair swept back and wore glasses. While she was no beauty, her nature made her a lovely person. She didn’t have a bad word for anyone and was always kind and laughing. Gladys had a lovely little twinkle in her eye and I think she got quite attached to me – not sexually, you understand, but in a maternal way, like an affectionate aunt. I used to chat to her quite a lot, and we got on well together. I would help her tie parcels and lift them off the bench after she’d packed them up. She talked to me about life in general and liked to see me enjoying myself.
Gladys was well aware of what I was up to with some of the young girls working on the factory floor. In fact, she became my accomplice and would leave me in the warehouse with the girls, shut the door, and say, ‘You two stay there…’
I last saw Gladys when I was 15 and was very upset some years later to learn that she had committed suicide. I was too sad to ask the details, but she must have been a troubled soul, or very ill, to do that.
Years later, a very strange set of events involving her took place. Gladys made what I can only describe as psychic contact with me during moments of great stress. I was 37 years old and in the depths of despair after being charged with the murder of Frank Mitchell – of which more later – when Gladys ‘spoke’ to me. I swear I could hear her voice saying, ‘It’s all right, Fred. Calm down. Take it easy. It’s going to be all right.’
Gladys came to me again when I was kidnapped and brought back to England from Spain and I know she is always there to help me in times of crisis. She’s lovely, my Gladys. A guardian angel sent to comfort me in times of need. I hope and pray she is now at peace and that I won’t need her services any more.
Her death, like the death of my parents, possibly affected me more than it might otherwise have done, because I was never able to mourn for them. I was unable to attend the funerals of my father, mother and sister-in-law Nellie because harsh prison rules would not allow me out. The same thing happened to Tommy Wisbey after he was jailed for the Great Train Robbery. While he was doing his 30 years he lost his teenage daughter, Lorraine, in a car accident, but was not allowed out to attend her funeral. I was godfather to his other daughter, Marilyn, and he was godfather to my son Gregory. At that time I was unable to grieve their loss with the rest of the family and, somehow, your mind doesn’t accept they are dead if you don’t go through the ritual of a funeral service. I still wake up at times and, just for a moment, think I must go round and see if the old man and Mum are all right. And then it slowly dawns on me that they are no longer here…
But back to my youth.
Scaffolding was considered a macho job and attracted strong young men, including ex-soldiers. We were all south-London men working on a site at Hatfield College, near the Armstrong Siddeley aircraft factory in Hertfordshire. The college had received deliveries of a large amount of sheet copper in packs of one-hundredweight rolls. These were stored under lock and key in a large metal bunker at the back of the site next to some woods accessible only by a dirt road, and I immediately saw the potential of nicking them.
To help me with this enterprise, I engaged the services of an elderly man called Fat Joe and his partner Claude, an evil-looking bastard with dark, slitty eyes. Fat Joe weighed about 20 stone and he and his partner owned the right vehicles to get the load away. They told me they would be able to sell the metal in Croydon.
The ex-guardsman who was supposed to be minding the site was more often than not in the village pub with his big bastard of an Alsatian dog. The man was a bully and very unpopular with the locals and some of our lads who had already had punch-ups with him. Naturally, I timed the robbery for when he was at the pub. We drove up the dirt road and knocked off the paddy (padlock) to the steel shed; then, we loaded up two big old cars, a Ford V8 shooting brake and a Chrysler. It was all dense weight, but we cleaned most of it out. The operation was a success and proved to be a nice little earner.
Next day, when I returned to work, enquiries about the theft were already up and running. Stevens and Carter scaffolders didn’t suspect me but, as I was sitting eating in the canteen, the guard’s Alsatian walked up to me and started sniffing me out. As if that was not enough, he then plonked himself down in front of me and sat staring at me. Never suspecting anything, my workmates made a joke of it: ‘Are you sure you never nicked it, Fred?’ they asked and then jokingly added, ‘Look at the dog watching you!’
The bloody animal looked as if he was about to spring on me! This went on for a few days but, thank God, only the dog sussed me out.
While working as a scaffolder, I had a relationship with a little firecracker called Joyce who was separated from her husband. There were other girls too who were quite saucy, nearly one in every block on my estate, and I used to cop for quite a few of them. But Joyce was a bit special. I’d met her at a party and took her outside for a drink on the balcony: She was more forward than I expected. She took off her knickers, put them in her handbag and, without waiting, undid my trousers and jumped on me, wrapping her legs around my waist and clinging to my neck. Then she started bouncing up and down like a bloody rabbit. It had