John Maris did not need to think for long before he decided - some 56 years ago - to push through the hedge adjoining the pasture where his cows were grazing to inspect the abandoned farmhouse that had been occupying his thoughts. Four days earlier, the Great Train Robbery had taken place 25 miles from the herdsman’s Buckinghamshire home and he had noticed a number of odd comings and goings from the ugly collection of buildings up the hill from his own. As news spread of one of the most enduringly-captivating crimes of the post-war era, he joked to his wife that the men up the road must be the thugs responsible. In fact, he had indeed stumbled on the gang’s hideout and his decision to investigate further was to have heavy consequences - from death threats to having to carry a concealed truncheon for years afterwards - that haunt him to this day. Now aged 90, the then young father-of-two had noticed Land Rovers pulling in and out of Leatherslade Farm for several days in the aftermath of the raid in the early hours of 8 August 1963 on the Glasgow to London mail train. Joanna Espin, the curator of the exhibition, said the archives from the case raise uncomfortable questions about the place reserved in popular culture for the robbers, who had not been afraid to resort to extreme violence to subdue and intimidate those on board the train. “ Such was the chaos in the immediate aftermath of the robbery that it took two separate phone calls by Mr Maris to police before officers were dispatched and the farm - complete with a cellar full of the ripped bank note packages and the Monopoly board used by the robbers in a game played with their loot - was declared a crime scene. Herdsman John Maris was working in a field near the house at Leatherslade Farm, near Brill in Buckinghamshire, which the gang was using as a hideout. In return, he received a £19,000 reward (equivalent to £250,000) and an enduring period of anxiety and persecution as he and his family were targeted by a catalogue of threats for his public-spirited role in unravelling the so-called “Crime of the Century”. She didn’t tell me at the time.” Mr Maris, whose evidence was vital at the trial of key robbers such as Bruce Reynolds and Ronnie Biggs, eventually used the reward money to move himself and his family away from their home close to Leatherslade Farm. The exhibition will look at the work in the aftermath of the train robbery and other crimes of the Post Office Investigation Branch, the world’s oldest criminal investigation’s body. Among the documents gathered were the statements of witnesses to the 1963 heist such as postal worker Leslie Penn, who was beaten with an iron bar after he and a colleague piled mail bags against one of the windows in the HVP carriage in a vain attempt to stop one of the raiders gaining entry. With the aid of a glove and a torch, the robbers had rigged one of the signals toshow red at Ledburn in Buckinghamshire, causing the mail train to stop and allow the raiders to uncouple the HVP carriage before breaking in. Mr Mills, who was 57 at the time of the robbery, suffered extensive brain injuries but when he died seven years later a coroner ruled that there was no connection between his death and the trauma of that night, despite the driver’s protracted ill-health. For Mr Maris, his ordeal was not finished even once the robbers were behind bars. In an attempt to clear three of the gang members, a group of their friends came up with an alibi that depended on discrediting the farm worker’s testimony and a criminal complaint of perjury was laid against him. Tony Marsh, the Royal Mail’s present head of security, describes how he caught his first thief by planting cards with money inside the delivery bag of a suspected postman.
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