From the South China Morning Post this week in: 1968
London, February 25
A gang of seven highly skilled crooks trained for weeks in a derelict Northern France monastery before they spirited the 'Great Train Robber', Charles Wilson, out of a heavily-guarded British jail. Master-minded by a former French Resistance fighter known as 'Frenchy', they engineered the breakout from Winson Green Prison near Birmingham for GBP50,000 in hard cash. Details of this fantastic plot to free Wilson, recaptured last month, are told by his wife Pat in an interview in The News of The World.
For days the men practised scaling the monastery walls. Among the seven were a pilot, a radio operator and a locksmith. On August 12, 1964, Frenchy and his gang were ready outside the 15-foot-high prison walls. They wore dark clothing, making themselves almost invisible at night. Three scaled the prison walls with grappling hooks and a collapsible ladder. Outside, the radio operator listened for police broadcasts before joining the climbers. The locksmith raced to Wilson's cell and spent eight agonising minutes picking the lock. Wilson donned dark clothes and quickly followed the group over the walls.
Wilson and two gang members hid in a special compartment in a petrol tanker. Within minutes it trundled off for a deserted landing strip and a waiting plane piloted by a Belgian member of the group.
Wilson, a 37-year-old bookmaker, was jailed for his part in what was known as the crime of the century - the GBP2,500,000 hijacking of the Glasgow-London mail train in 1963.
Hongkong, February 26