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Baker Street robbery

1970s crimes in London1970s in the City of Westminster1971 crimes in the United Kingdom1971 in LondonBank robberies
Lloyds Banking GroupRobberies in EnglandSeptember 1971 events in the United KingdomUse British English from September 2019
Baker Street burglary tunnel
Baker Street burglary tunnel

The Baker Street robbery was the burglary of safety deposit boxes at the Baker Street branch of Lloyds Bank in London, on the night of 11 September 1971. A gang tunnelled 40 feet (12 m) from a rented shop two doors away to come up through the floor of the vault. The value of the property stolen is unknown, but is likely to have been between £1.25 and £3 million; only £231,000 was recovered by the police.The burglary was planned by Anthony Gavin, a career criminal, who was inspired by "The Red-Headed League", a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle in which Sherlock Holmes waits in a bank vault to arrest a gang who have tunnelled in through the floor. Gavin and his colleagues rented Le Sac, a leather goods shop two doors from the bank, and tunnelled during weekends. The interior of the vault was mapped out by one gang member using an umbrella and the span of his arms to measure the dimensions and location of the furniture. The gang initially tried to use a jack to force a hole in the vault floor and when this failed they used a thermal lance. When this also failed to work, they used gelignite to blast a way through. Once inside, they emptied 268 safety deposit boxes. The gang had posted a lookout on a nearby roof, who was in contact via walkie-talkie, and their broadcasts were accidentally overheard by Robert Rowlands, an amateur radio enthusiast. He called the police, who initially did not take him seriously, so he used a small cassette recorder to make a recording of the burglars' conversations. The second time he contacted the police they accepted what he was saying, and began hunting for the burglars while the break-in was in progress. They searched 750 banks in an 8-mile (13 km) radius, but failed to locate the gang. Police found the members of the gang soon after the break-in; one of the burglars, Benjamin Wolfe, had signed the lease for Le Sac in his own name and informers provided information that led to Gavin. At the end of October 1971 police arrested Wolfe, Gavin, Reg Tucker and Thomas Stephens. They continued to search for other members of the gang, including one woman, for five years, but no further arrests were made. Gavin, Tucker and Stephens were sentenced to twelve years in prison; Wolfe received a sentence of eight years, less than the others as he was in his 60s. There have been several rumours connected with the burglary, including one that the government issued a D-Notice to censor the press; that one of the safety deposit boxes contained compromising photographs of Princess Margaret and the actor and criminal John Bindon; and that photographs of a Conservative cabinet minister abusing children were found. There is no evidence to support these claims and they have been widely dismissed. Some of the rumours inspired the story for the 2008 film The Bank Job. Many of the papers relating to the burglary remain under embargo at The National Archives until January 2071.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Baker Street robbery (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Baker Street robbery
Glentworth Street, London Marylebone

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Latitude Longitude
N 51.522311111111 ° E -0.1578 °
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Berkeley Court

Glentworth Street
NW1 5PG London, Marylebone
England, United Kingdom
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Baker Street burglary tunnel
Baker Street burglary tunnel
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Chiltern Court
Chiltern Court

Chiltern Court, Baker Street, London, is a large block of flats at the street's northern end, facing Regent's Park and Marylebone Road. It was built between 1927 and 1929 above the Baker Street tube station by the Metropolitan Railway. Originally intended as a hotel and as its company headquarters, and begun in 1912, the Metropolitan's plans were interrupted by the First World War. When construction recommenced in the late 1920s, the building was redesigned as a block of flats and the Chiltern Court Restaurant. The architect was Charles Walter Clark. During the 1930s the block was home to a number of notable figures, including the writers H. G. Wells, who held a weekly literary salon at his apartment, and Arnold Bennett, who died at the court in 1931. The composer Eric Coates lived in the block between 1930-36, and the cartoonist David Low was also a resident. During World War II, the Special Operations Executive was based at 64 Baker Street, and its Norwegian Section was located in three flats at Chiltern Court, from where it directed the operations against the heavy water plant at Telemark. Chiltern Court is not listed, being specifically excluded from the listing designation for Baker Street tube station. It is recorded in Pevsner, where it is described as "a stately classical pile, the grandest [of the] mansion flats" in the vicinity. The Chiltern Court Restaurant, now a bar, was referenced by John Betjeman in his television programme from 1973, Metro-land.