Episode 1. The Baker Street Bank Robbery

The Effect

It is 11pm on Saturday 11th September, 1971, and in Marylebone, London, Robert Rowlands, an amateur radio enthusiast, is getting ready for bed, plumping up his pillows and switching on his radio. It’s on the Citizen’s Band or ‘CB’ frequency which, in the early ‘70s, the government had declared illegal, but Robert waits for the radio to warm up before he switches to another channel. Suddenly, it sputters into life. Two voices. Urgent, agitated. ‘We’ve got about four hundred thousand. Let you know when we’re coming out.’ At first, Rowlands presumes he’s listening to an audio drama, but the more he hears, the more certain he becomes that this isn’t a fiction at all. It is a real-life robbery in action - and the two voices crackling through his radio’s speakers must be the gang responsible: a man communicating with his lookout, the latter coming through on a much clearer signal. And what’s more: Rowlands knows by the strength of that signal that the crime cannot be taking place more than two to three miles from his flat.

Rowlands becomes convinced that the thieves he’s overhearing are targeting his neighbourhood tobacconist’s shop, and immediately telephones his local police station. But he doesn’t get the reaction he expects ‘Oh, that’s very good, Sir,’ the duty officer answers. ‘If you hear any more Friday broadcasts, why don’t you record them?’ The local force presume Rowlands is a hoaxer, just the first of many embarrassing blunders the police make on this long and twisty case. Nevertheless, Rowlands does as the duty officer suggests and prepares his cassette, recording the conversations between the two men on the radio for the next two hours. As the minutes pass, the men’s interactions become more and more heated. Keep watch for the next hour, the lookout is told, then get some sleep and be back at your post at 8am. ‘No that’s a bit ridiculous, mate I’ll never wake up like that, over’ ‘Well what time do you think you’ll wake up? Over ’ ‘I’m suggesting we keep working tonight and get it done with.’ ‘Look, the place is filled with fumes… if the security come in and smell them fumes… none of us have got nothing, whereas this way we’ve all got three hundred grand to cut up.’ ‘My eyes are like organ stops, mate… I’m not going to be any good in the morning.’ ‘You can go to sleep tonight.’ ‘I will stay here. I will stay awake. Will you try and get in a bit earlier?’ While the two men engage in their argument, what they don’t realise is that they are not only revealing their names, but vital clues to their crime. And Rowlands is recording everything. As soon as he hears them mention both the fumes and the quantities of loot involved, he knows what he is listening to is a major bank robbery in action and that he is now in a race against time to convince the police that he is not a hoaxer, and that they only have a few short hours in which to act. At 1am he calls the authorities again, but this time he goes straight to Scotland Yard, telling them he has evidence. Officers arrive at Rowlands’ flat, listen to his recordings and sit with their ears pressed to his radio from 2am to 8am, hoping to overhear more. But there is nothing. Then, at 8.30am, approximately nine hours after Rowlands first picked up the suspicious conversation, his radio crackles awake. He hears the lookout again, who has been in position all night and is pleased that his co-conspirators are back and that the robbery can continue. The police are amazed by what they hear and Rowlands is finally vindicated. Or is he?

As Scotland Yard scrambles into action to locate the bank the thieves are targeting, Rowlands insists it is close, no more than a couple of miles from his home. But the police don’t listen, and insist on carrying out a sweep within an eight mile radius of central London. A radio detector van, the best technology available, is dispatched, to drive around the streets of London and pinpoint the source of transmissions. Known as ‘fox hunting’, it is a notoriously tricky process in an urban setting, where densely-packed buildings absorb radio signals - a difficult task at the best of times, but then the radio falls silent once more. The thieves have decided to switch their broadcast to another channel. And not only that, but the driver of the radio detector van has gone AWOL and, like the signal itself, cannot be located. Rather than being on duty, he has taken the van on a covert mission of his own: to visit his mistress. Almost an entire day after the initial conversation was detected by Rowlands, the police are none the wiser as to where the robbery is happening and their time is running out.

More officers are drafted in, and begin visiting one bank after another, insisting that the bank managers allow them to carry out a check of their vaults. One of these banks is the Baker Street branch of Lloyds. Located in the affluent area of Marylebone - the same area, in fact, as Robert Rowlands’ flat - this branch houses a top security vault used by some of London’s most high-profile clients, and containing immeasurable wealth. The branch manager shows police officers all the way to the door of this vault, which is on a timed locking system that cannot be overridden, and so cannot be opened until 10am the following morning, when the timer releases the lock. Police and the bank manager listen at the vault’s door. They hear nothing. The robbery must be taking place at a different bank. By the time Monday morning dawns, Robert Rowlands is waiting with baited breath to see what will happen next. Was he right about what he heard on his radio? Did he really record a bank robbery, or was it merely a prank… or something else? Then the news finally breaks and Scotland Yard’s worst fears are confirmed. They have failed to foil one of the largest robberies ever undertaken on British soil as, on a famous street in central London, a bank vault lies ransacked: the contents of 260 safety deposit boxes strewn across its floor. And the vault in question on that famous street? It is none other than the Baker Street branch of Lloyds, the very same branch that the police had checked less than twenty-four hours before. The loot is gone, the perpetrators nowhere to be seen. But they have left something behind. A bizarre and unexpected message, scrawled on the vault’s walls: ‘Let’s see how Sherlock Holmes solves this one.’

The Method Part I

Not that the police knew it at the time, but the message scrawled on the wall of the vault at Baker Street was a reference to The Red-Headed League, one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories featuring his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes. In this story, Holmes is visited by the pawnbroker Jabez Wilson, who has recently been accepted to join the ranks of the mysterious ‘Red-Headed League’, and employed to copy out the Encyclopaedia Britannica for hours each day. This he does until, one day, he is notified that the league has been summarily dissolved. Holmes investigates, deducing that the Red-Headed League was a ruse to get Wilson out of his shop, allowing a gang of criminals to dig a tunnel from his basement all the way into the vault of a nearby bank. And how does Holmes work this out and subsequently manage to foil the robbery? By carefully pacing the street between the pawnbroker and the bank, tapping the pavement with his stick and observing the hollow sound produced, indicative of a secret tunnel. Remember these methods, they’ll be significant to our story again very soon.

The Baker Street branch of Lloyds, ransacked by robbers in 1971, allegedly housed one of the securest vaults in England, let alone London, a vault that was designed to be completely impregnable. It had a bomb proof door weighing five tonnes. Steel reinforced concrete walls three feet thick. Trembler alarms fitted all the way around. And one thousand safety deposit boxes requiring not one but two keys to open. It was a bank that was said to be impossible to break into. But Anthony Gavin had other ideas. Born in a North London suburb in the early 1930s, Gavin had been trained in the Royal Fusiliers. He was looking for a big hit, and so the vault at Baker Street, and the untold riches stowed there, had caught his attention. But he knew that such a hit would be far from easy, and that the only viable way into the vault would be through a tunnel, a tunnel he had to dig.

So to give such an audacious scheme the best chance of succeeding, Gavin had to assemble an expert team. Alarm specialists, surveillance people, skilled diggers and engineers. And someone on the inside, someone capable of collecting vital measurements and information on the vault itself. Gavin recruits Reginald Tucker, who dresses himself like a respectable member of high society and pays the Baker Street branch of Lloyds a visit, opening an account under an assumed name, and depositing £500 in one of its safety deposit boxes. Once Tucker has done this, he is able to legitimately visit the bank vault on a regular basis without raising suspicion. Taking an umbrella with him, he uses it as a measuring stick, working out the dimensions of the vault and the point inside it at which the tunnel needs to come out. Using the same method as the legendary Sherlock Holmes in The Red-Headed League, he also paces the pavement, devising the exact distance between the bank and the shop two doors away that Gavin has just had a silent partner lease on his behalf. During these reconnaissance missions, Tucker learns a key piece of information from the bank manager. The door to the vault is on a timer. It goes on every Friday evening and switches off every Monday morning. This means that the vault is completely sealed off to bank staff every weekend, so that anyone breaking into it is guaranteed not to be disturbed once they are inside.

The next man Gavin recruits is Mickey Gervaise, a former associate previously employed by ADT Security. Gervaise’s role in the operation is no mean feat: figuring out how to get past those trembler alarms, each one made up of a small piece of metal inside a spring. If the device is shaken, the metal touches the spring and completes the circuit, causing the alarm to sound. But perhaps Gervaise’s job will actually be easier than expected. Directly in front of the bank, a water main is being replaced, and workmen are digging up the road with pneumatic drills. These same drills activate the vault’s trembler alarms and the police rush to Baker Street, their sirens blaring. Over the days that follow, this happens time and time again and, eventually, both the police and the bank staff have had enough, and the trembler alarms are turned off. After recruiting two more men with mining and engineering backgrounds to carry out the complex work of digging the tunnel, Gavin has one more person to enlist: the lookout Bobby Mills, the man who during the operation will be positioned on a roof opposite the bank, armed with a walkie talkie. And so the gang take up residence inside Le Sac - the newly-leased bag shop two doors down from the bank - disguised as contractors tasked with preparing the shop for reopening.

Week after week, Gavin’s team dig their tunnel, from Le Sac’s basement to the bank vault, all the way under the Chicken Inn, the fried chicken shop in between, working largely at weekends, when there are fewer people around to notice. But on 15th August, one month before the actual robbery, Gavin’s plan almost falls entirely apart. A member of staff at the Chicken Inn notices the suspicious noises emanating from the basement, noises far too loud to be regular refurbishment. He peers in through the window of Le Sac, determined to work out what is going on.

The Method Part II

A member of staff from the Chicken Inn, the shop right next door to Lloyds Bank on Baker Street, is becoming increasingly suspicious about the loud and unexplained noises he’s heard coming from below the building. Having determined it must be the contractors working on Le Sac, the shop undergoing refurbishment next door, he hammers on the window, demanding to know what is going on and threatening to call the police. Bobby Mills, the gang’s lookout, warns Anthony Gavin - the mastermind of the robbery - and the man from the Chicken Inn is eventually placated and goes back to work. It’s a close call though, and Gavin and his team return to their tunnel, but digging is becoming increasingly dangerous and now they have to try even harder to keep the noise down as they go, inching their way through the crumbling foundations of Victorian London. It takes a total of nine weeks of death-defying work before they find themselves below the vault and, with the trembler alarms still deactivated, they know that the only thing now standing in their way of cash and jewellery amounting to millions of pounds is the vault’s floor: made up of two feet of reinforced concrete. The men first begin to try and force their way up through the concrete using a hydraulic jack. It’s heavy work and the jack is simply not strong enough, and the ground beneath the men is too soft. It gives way under their feet and they have to resort to a Plan B. Next, they use a thermal lance, an extremely specialist, high-end piece of equipment that is essentially a hot glue gun, which pours out a stream of molten steel and aluminium at a temperature of up to 8000 degrees fahrenheit. It’s toxic work even in a well-ventilated space, but in a cramped, hand-dug tunnel with no ventilation, the fumes are thicker and more lethal, the liquid metal gushing from the lance causing hot rocks and debris to rain down on the men, who begin to choke. And the task is not even proving to be worth the risk, as the lance makes no progress in cutting through the vault’s concrete floor. Gavin calls a temporary halt. He is desperate now, having come so far, having worked for weeks in potentially deadly conditions only to fall at one of the final hurdles. After some consideration, he decides the only thing left to try is explosives. Sticks of gelignite, to be exact, more malleable than dynamite and even more powerful. However, the margins for error involved in setting off explosives in a confined space are tiny, and the heist has turned into a suicide mission. Nevertheless, holes are drilled into the underside of the vault’s floor and the gelignite inserted. Pulses racing, the men retreat down the tunnel and light the fuse. Will they be blown to smithereens or buried alive? The fuse fizzes and there is an almighty explosion.

As the smoke clears, Gavin and his cohorts get their first glimpse of the promised land: the Lloyds bank vault, with its shining walls of safety deposit boxes, inside which lie the spoils of a lifetime. They crawl up into the room, but the gelignite fumes, like the smoke from the thermal lance, begin to choke them, and they have to make the decision to grab a fraction of what they can through the toxic clouds and flee once and for all, or rest and return in the morning to do a more thorough job. Gavin and the men inside the bank are desperate to get out of the fumes. Mills, the lookout, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to be a fan of early mornings. But after some back-and-forth, the men decide to call it a night and get back to work on emptying the vault the next day. But the following morning they are right inside, filling their sacks with wads of money and precious gems, when they overhear the voices of two men, coming from just outside the vault’s door. A bank manager and a policeman, having a conversation about whether there might be somebody inside. Despite the vault door being locked, the robbers freeze. The police cannot get in, but they could still hear the robbery in action, and from there deduce the men have tunnelled inside. Gavin and his men do not even dare to breathe.

The Aftermath

The criminal Anthony Gavin and his team of thieves are clearing out the high-security vault at Lloyds Bank in Baker Street when they hear police on the other side of the door, trying to determine whether there is a robbery in progress. The criminals freeze, for what seems like hours, their walkie talkie eventually rasping into life. It is Bobby Mills, the lookout, giving them the all-clear. The police, unable to check inside the vault due to the timed lock, he says, have left. Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the men force their way into as many of the safety deposit boxes as they can before fleeing, a triumphant Gavin - who has seemingly managed to complete an impossible crime - writing his message for the police on the wall of the vault on the way out.

And clearly, as we saw in The Red-Headed League, Sherlock Holmes would have done a far more effective job of preventing the thieves from getting away. As it was, almost immediately after the scale of the Baker Street bank robbery was discovered, the police began to come under fire. Why hadn’t the largest force in the country managed to stop the heist, many asked, when they had actually listened to the whole thing unfold? It didn’t help that Scotland Yard had not paid any heed to Robert Rowlands that first night, when he overheard the robbers in action on his CB radio. Despite Rowlands’ insistence that the crime was being carried out close to his home, the police had wasted valuable time searching 750 banks in Greater London, instead of focusing their search on the two to three mile radius Rowlands suggested. When Scotland Yard actually attend the scene of the crime, they are astounded by what they find. A high security vault, tunnelled into by hand, over a distance of forty feet, through a space roughly no more than ten by fourteen inches cut through concrete multiple feet thick with a total of eight tonnes of spoil material shifted. And that’s not all that astounds them. One of the first things that catches the police’s attention amongst the disarray of the looted vault, is a set of photographs of a famous politician in a series of compromising positions, which appear to have been deliberately left. The safety deposit boxes at Lloyds not only held money and jewels, but secrets. Secrets comprising stashes of drugs, incriminating documentation, and scandalous photographs of members of the highest echelons of society, even members of the royal family. Allegations immediately begin to circulate that the thieves were, in fact, not targeting money or jewels at all, but evidence of nefarious activity by people in power.

The police are quick to quash these rumours, only for more lurid ones to germinate, and a ‘D’ notice is slapped on the whole affair - a directive to the British press that they shouldn’t publish a story due to the potential threats its publication opens up to national security. Unsurprisingly, this only sends the conspiracy theories into overdrive. Are the police attempting to strangle the story of what happened in Baker Street because they don’t want to alert the robbers to the nature of their investigation… or are they protecting the high-ranking members of society incriminated by what has been discovered in the vault?

Once Scotland Yard follow the tunnel back to Le Sac, the nucleus of the whole operation, it doesn’t take long for them to uncover Gavin’s ‘silent partner’ - the man who took out the lease on the shop on his behalf. He is identified as 64 year-old Benjamin Wolf, and when police put him under surveillance, they are led straight to the main suspects of the robbery. But the way Scotland Yard handles the investigation raises suspicions once again, and while some accuse the police of incompetence, others claim corruption. Detective Inspector Alec Eist, the officer in charge of the investigation, was known to protect some of the UK’s most notorious criminals for his own gain. His delay in taking action against the crime’s key perpetrators, many believe, is the result of him taking his own cut of the Baker Street loot. A full two years after the robbery, a number of its key suspects plead guilty, but it seems the charges against them have been somewhat watered down. Anthony Gavin and Reginald Tucker are sentenced to only twelve years each. Benjamin Wolf, the lessor of Le Sac, is sentenced to eight. Mickey Gervaise, known to be one of the most prolific robbers of his time, isn’t arrested at all, however. And ten years after the robbery, he disappears altogether and is never seen again. And as for the goods, only a fraction of what was stolen that weekend in September 1971 was ever recovered. It is estimated that Gavin and his gang got away with a booty worth a total of over £70 million.

And in a final twist to the tale, in the weeks after the robbery, rather than arresting those responsible, police considered prosecuting Robert Rowlands for listening to unlicensed ‘CB’ radio transmissions. They only decided against it when they realised that, considering Rowlands was trying to help them foil a massive robbery, such a prosecution probably wouldn’t bring them very good publicity.

So what was at the heart of the Baker Street bank robbery? A criminal gang wanting to land the jackpot? Endemic police corruption? A shocking establishment scandal, or something else? We won’t know the truth for some time, as all documentation relating to the case is held in the National Archives, heavily redacted and under embargo until at least 2071. Indeed, the only way to get hold of such highly-classified information, would be to tunnel into the National Archive vaults and steal it. But that’s another story…

© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.