Once again, I am thinking about the eight billion people in the world and how we have no idea about the lives of the most of those people, save for the handful of individuals that surround our own circle of existence.
Then, I think of this every day, backward, throughout all of time. And hopefully, again, forward, moving endlessly. Life after life, being measured out, one step at a time, one event after another. And we, for the most part, live completely unaware of the billions of stories that follow.
I noticed that today was the birthday of Ronald Christopher Edwards. Everyone called him Buster Edwards, and so will I. He was born January 27, 1931, in London, England. His early life is vague. His dad ran a bar. When he was old enough, Buster went to work in a sausage factory, and that is where his life of crime began.
Yes, he was a crook, I’ll tell you. When you have a name like Buster, one of two things has happened. You are either some kind of sports jock, or you’ve turned to the life of crime. The latter was the case for this Buster.
Oh, it started out harmlessly enough. He stole sausages from his employer and sold the meat on the post-war black market. Then, during his national service with the Royal Air Force, he was caught stealing cigarettes. From there, he went back to South London, opened a bar of his own, and became a professional criminal.
He was involved in two notable crimes. The first was a robbery from the Comet House in 1962. That was the headquarters of British Overseas Airways Corporation at Heathrow Airport. A gang of them planned and carried out the robbery, taking £62,000 (£1.33 million today). That equals 1.8 million U.S. dollars. Many of the gang were captured, but somehow, just somehow, old Buster escaped arrest.
Then, there was “The Great Train Robbery.” Yes, the famous train robbery there in England. Buster and a gang of crooks intercepted the Glasgow–London mail train. This happened in the early hours of August 8, 1963.
They tampered with the track-side signal lights, which allowed them to stop the train. They moved the engine and car with all the money to a spot where they could rob the train. They filled their little crook bags and they escaped with £2,600,000 of used banknotes (£54.8 million today). That turns out to be 75 million dollars in the U.S.
The gang went to their temporary hideout at Leatherslade Farm, but it didn’t take police long to find them. And once again, most of the gang were captured, tried, and imprisoned. But again, old sneaky Buster Edwards evaded arrest with about £150,000 of the stolen money. He took the money and his family down to Mexico, and soon, that money ran out. The family was homesick, so they moved back to England in 1966. It didn’t take long for him to be arrested, convicted, and jailed for 15 years.
I know it is quite a story, but it doesn’t end there. After 15 years in jail, he opened a flower stand on some corner in Waterloo Station in London. Just selling flowers, it seemed. But in 1994, Edwards died in Lambeth, London. His brother found him hanging from a steel girder inside a garage. It seems, at the time of his death, he was being investigated by the police. They suspected him of being involved in a large-scale fraud scheme. They speculated he feared being re-imprisoned.
He was 63. Edwards was survived by his wife and daughter.
That’s one story.
On a lighter note, it is also the birthday of Samuel Gompers, born in 1850. He was an American Labor Union leader. I won’t go into the details of his life.
But his last name Gompers reminded me of my Grandpa Edward, who had false teeth. He’d put them in a glass on the kitchen counter and I called his teeth “Gompers.” I’d forgotten about this until I saw Samuel Gomper’s name.
Then Grandpa and I would take folding chairs out to the backyard with his cap gun and shoot little snappy bangs when birds would land in his cherry tree. I loved the way the caps smelled after being fired.
And that’s another story.
The world is full of them, it seems.
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“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”
— Sue Monk Kidd, author
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“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”
― Graham Greene, novelist
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You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.”
— Margaret Atwood, poet, novelist, literary critic
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The Great Train Robbery and teeth on the kitchen counter.
