SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: How The Great Train Robbery Worked

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Should Know

Episode: How The Great Train Robbery Worked

Podcast: Stuff You Should Know (iHeartPodcasts)
Date: September 26, 2025
Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant

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Overview

In this classic true crime edition, Josh and Chuck dive deep into the infamous 1963 Great Train Robbery in the UK. They trace the origins, mechanics, and aftermath of one of history’s most legendary heists—where a gang of British criminals relieved a Royal Mail train of a massive sum, largely without violence or guns, but with intricate planning. The episode also explores the cultural mythology around the robbers, the eventual investigation, various folk legends and enduring mysteries, and why the public often lionized the culprits.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Setting and Background

• The heist targeted the "Up Special" mail train running nightly from Glasgow to London.
  • “[The Up Special] had been running since the 1830s… almost 150 years without incident.” —Josh Clark [08:39]
• Banks relied on this train to move huge sums of money with little security:
  • “Here’s a bunch of huge sacks of money, we’re gonna put it on the train and you’re gonna sort it along the way.” —Chuck Bryant [09:40]

2. Formation of the Gangs and Planning

• The operation was a collaboration between two gangs: The Bowler Hat Gang (led by Bruce Reynolds) and the South Coast Raiders (led by Buster Edwards).
  • “Those are some great gang names, by the way.” —Josh Clark [07:52]
• The original idea came from a criminal named Fields, who was then joined by expert safecracker Gordon Goody.
• Unique British criminal slang learned during research—“bent” for crooked; “kosh” for bludgeon [04:11].

3. The Inside Man (Ulsterman) and the Best Night to Rob

• The gang had an inside contact—nicknamed “Ulsterman”—in the postal service, recently revealed as Patrick McKenna.
  • “The last great mystery of this thing from the 60s was just unraveled like two days ago.” —Josh Clark [10:06]
  • “He actually recommended they change the date to get a bigger take.” —Chuck Bryant [11:41]
• They timed the heist for the night after a bank holiday, when cash on the train peaked:
  • Usual haul: £300,000; Heist night: £2.6 million (~£69 million or $111 million today) [13:14-13:50].

4. The Execution: Stopping and Robbing the Train

• The gang manipulated railway signals—covering green lights, activating reds—to halt the train at a predetermined remote location (“Bridego Bridge”).
• An elderly train engineer, “Peter,” recruited by the gang, failed to drive the train post-robbery; the original conductor, Jack Mills, was forced to do it after being attacked (“koshed”).
  • “They hit the conductor over the head—a huge mistake.” —Josh Clark [21:30]
  • “The public perception … as working-class heroes doesn’t jibe with the violence.” —Chuck Bryant [16:34]
• The gang offloaded 120 of 128 money sacks (2+ tons) into a lorry and Land Rovers, then vanished to their safehouse, Leather Slade Farm.

5. Aftermath, Investigation, and Public Reaction

• The hideout plan: lay low at Leather Slade Farm, but locals grew suspicious; they left in a rush, failing to burn evidence.
  • They played Monopoly with real cash—later a key source of fingerprints.
  • “They left the Monopoly game and the ketchup bottle and a lot of other stuff that had prints on it.” —Josh Clark [24:34]
• A massive police manhunt (Scotland Yard’s “Flying Squad,” led by Tommy Butler) ensued; arrests began within 8 days.
• The robbers’ folk-hero status was cemented by public fascination with their daring, style, and ingenious (if ultimately flawed) plan.
  • “They had Land Rovers, getaway cars… It’s pretty cool. You see why people bought into all this stuff and thought it was cool? Because I think it’s cool right now.” —Chuck Bryant [22:22]

6. Trials, Sentencing, and Controversies

• Most participants were apprehended (12 of 15); some key associates escaped.
• Notably harsh sentences: 30 years in prison for many, far exceeding typical robbery penalties.
  • “Generally 30 [years], which was double the harshest penalties for robbery they’ve ever seen.” —Chuck Bryant [33:13]
• Some suspects claimed evidence was planted or confessions were coerced.
  • “False confessions were big at the time in England.” —Chuck Bryant [30:21]
• Innocent bystander William Bol got 14 years and died in prison; campaigns continue for posthumous pardon.

7. Escapes, Legends, and Lingering Mysteries

• Several gang members escaped prison in spectacular fashion.
  • “It was very cute how you could escape prison back then. Like, let’s put a ladder by the fence and climb up…” —Chuck Bryant [36:02]
• Ronnie Biggs, famously evading capture abroad for decades, became an anti-establishment icon.
  • Biggs’ dramatic life included plastic surgery and open residency in Brazil due to loopholes in extradition law [37:08–37:59].
  • He even survived a botched attempted kidnapping by British mercenaries [42:32].
  • “Biggs… was living openly as this felon escapee in Brazil. And there are things he couldn’t do in Brazil, apparently. He couldn’t go to bars, he couldn’t be out after 10 PM…” —Josh Clark [37:59]
• Less than £400,000 of the loot was ever recovered; the rest faded into criminal lore.
• Most gang members met tragic or unremarkable ends, not lives of glamour.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

1. On public sympathy and anti-establishment appeal:
   “He [Biggs] became like this folk hero of the anti-establishment. He sang vocals on lots of punk records.” —Josh Clark [05:41]
2. On British criminal slang:
   “Instead of crooked someone is ‘bent’… and a ‘kosh’ is like a, like a billy club and you can kosh somebody.” —Chuck Bryant [04:11]
3. On the engineering blunder:
   “Biggs… his only job was to find somebody who could drive the train, and he failed at that. And he screwed it up.” —Josh Clark [15:30]
4. On hiding out in rural England:
   “It was sort of a city boys move to think you can hide out in the country like that.” —Chuck Bryant [23:53]
5. On British law-enforcement’s pursuit:
   “Chief Superintendent Detective Tommy Butler was the head of the Flying Squad… It was sort of like the Elliot Ness of the day, going after Al Capone.” —Chuck Bryant [26:11]
6. On sentencing:
   “That same judge was handing out 30 year sentences to these guys where no one got killed.” —Josh Clark [33:42]
7. On the myth vs. reality of criminal life:
   “All of the robbers ended up saying… even if they got their cut… it was a curse.” —Chuck Bryant [41:09]

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Important Timestamps

• [03:00–09:10] — Setting up the crime, the train’s regular route, and lack of security
• [10:09–13:50] — Discovery and role of the inside man, impact of bank holidays, and the enormous sum at stake
• [15:28–17:17] — Execution details: the attempted train-drive, attack on conductor, and moral/press backlash
• [21:03–24:53] — The heist logistics: unloading money, hideout at Leather Slade Farm, and botched torching of evidence
• [25:44–29:48] — Scotland Yard investigation, public fascination, and mounting arrests
• [33:13–33:56] — Trial, surprisingly harsh justice, and comparison to more violent crimes
• [36:02–38:49] — Prison escapes, Biggs’ fugitive life and extradition saga
• [40:08–41:46] — What happened to the money, myth vs. real aftermath for the robbers
• [42:32–43:15] — The attempted kidnapping of Biggs & British government's frustration

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Final Notes

The Great Train Robbery remains an enduring symbol of criminal cunning—and public fascination with anti-establishment outlaws. Josh and Chuck deftly trace its complexity, from the humdrum logistics of British mail delivery to the implausible legends of the getaway, the pitfalls of rural hideouts, and how myth has long overshadowed reality. The episode is peppered with the hosts’ trademark banter, cultural observations, and a lighthearted but thorough forensic breakdown of one of the most famous crimes in British history.

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Transcript

[Podcast Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Josh Clark]

Hey everybody.

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[Podcast Announcer]

Welcome to Stuff you should know from howstuffworks.com.

[Josh Clark]

Choo Choo and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Took Bryant, there's Jerry. And you put all of us together with a couple of microphones, a crummy IKEA lamp and you. Well.

[Chuck Bryant]

And a head full of nose juice.

[Josh Clark]

You get stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. Stuff you should. Nose juice.

[Josh Clark]

Oh gross.

[Chuck Bryant]

How's it going buddy? Besides the obvious under the weather ness.

[Josh Clark]

Of you, I predict this is the last one.

[Chuck Bryant]

Great.

[Josh Clark]

I'm gonna be back to good as new by the next time we record.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, we're going to Vancouver and you'll get some of that good Canadian air air in your body and the pine air, it's healing properties.

[Josh Clark]

I'll get pine and flannel and ocean like in my. In my face.

[Chuck Bryant]

And moose. Yeah, moose hair.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's cool if you wad it all into a ball and sniff. Takes care of everything.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. What in the world are we talking about?

[Josh Clark]

I don't know. We're talking about trains.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

We're talking about a specific train, Chuck. We're talking about a specific train at a specific moment and place in time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes.

[Josh Clark]

That all came together to become known as the Great Train Robbery.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

Did you know, did you commission this article?

[Chuck Bryant]

I did not.

[Josh Clark]

Did you know about it already, Sam?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, a little bit, but not as like obviously as much. After I researched and I watched a couple of documentaries and was looking for a great awesome movie. But I don't think there really is a great awesome movie about this yet, which is surprising. I think they did like BBC did one and I think Sean Connery did one that was loosely. I think other things were loosely based.

[Josh Clark]

But like the taking of Pelham One Two Three.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yes, exactly. That's a good movie.

[Josh Clark]

Did you.

[Chuck Bryant]

The original? Of course, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Did you watch the Tale of Two Thieves? Is that one of the documentaries you watched?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I don't think that's out to the public yet. Unless I just haven't seen it.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think it's new this year.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, it seems like a 2014. Yeah, I want to see it.

[Chuck Bryant]

But there are no shortage of YouTube BBC docs because they love it. And I learned a lot of new words watching them.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, like what?

[Chuck Bryant]

Like instead of crooked someone is bent. Like a bent solicitor I figured out was a crooked solicitor. And a kosh is like a, like a billy club and you can kosh somebody.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like the train conductor was kashed.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

There were just a bunch of cool terms that I had to kind of figure out what they meant in American.

[Josh Clark]

Gotcha.

[Chuck Bryant]

In my English. Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So I had heard the words great train and robbery together, but I didn't know anything about it.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think there was another one, an older great train robbery from the 1800s.

[Josh Clark]

There's one in 1855 where a train traveling from London to Paris or vice versa had a bunch of gold bullion on it and it got hit that was legendary. But apparently this was the biggest train heist since then, more than a hundred years later. Yeah, it was a big deal and.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was sort of Jesse James style. That's why it became one of the crimes of the century in England for sure. I mean it was huge in the press and these guys that knocked off this train became these kind of weird working class heroes.

[Josh Clark]

Well, one of them became the symbol for the anti establishment.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which one?

[Josh Clark]

What was his name? The one who Made off for years and years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh yeah, yeah, Biggs, Yeah, he was on the lam for like 30 years. So he was super famous.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And they knew where he was and they couldn't get to him, which we'll talk about. But he became like this folk hero of the anti establishment. He sang vocals on lots of punk records.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really? Yeah, yeah. I saw in both documentaries they had a bunch of on the street interviews from the time with regular upstanding citizens like, whose side are you on? And a lot of them were like, well, I feel ashamed to admit this, but I kind of think these guys really took it to the cops on this one and they thought they were ingenious. And even though the plan, as we'll get to really was pretty uncomplicated, it wasn't nearly as clever as it was made out to be.

[Josh Clark]

Right, well, let's talk about the plan. So there was this idea who had.

[Chuck Bryant]

The original idea, I believe his last name was Fields. He was the guy who originally had the idea and approached several people, criminals for partnership and they all turned him down except for this ace safecracker by the name of Goody.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, so Goody had a friend who was. His name was Bruce Reynolds and I guess he. He originally funded the whole thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, well, they were in a gang called the Bowler Hat Gang in London. I know, right?

[Josh Clark]

I don't think we've said this. We've made reference to like the Wild west and train robbers and everything. This is the 1960s. Yeah, like the early 1960s that this is going on.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And the Bowler Hat Gang was. They dressed in bowler hats and suits and they had done some crimes and they were mainly career criminals and they actually even they had the press's attention and they actually tried to rob a train at first, but it didn't work so well and they got away. But they had sort of a. Not a trial run, but they legitimately tried to knock off another train.

[Josh Clark]

So is that when they realized that they needed to expand their rank and file?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they realize that we don't know trains and we don't know how to stop them. So we need to get some train guys.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So the Bowler Coast Gang who is, I guess, led by Bruce Reynolds. Right?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, Bowler Hat.

[Josh Clark]

The Bowler Hat.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Gang they got with the South Coast Gang, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, the South Coast Raiders.

[Josh Clark]

So they. And this is. I mean, those are some great gang names, by the way.

[Chuck Bryant]

Totally great.

[Josh Clark]

But the, the Bowler Hat Gang and the South Coast Raiders who were led by a dude named Buster Edwards. Right.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And Tom Wisby, he was one of the main guy, or Wisney. Sorry.

[Josh Clark]

So those guys all got together and they said, we've got this great idea. We need your people to come help us. We're gonna rob a train. And they're not just any train. There was one specific train that this gang targeted and for good reason. It was called the up special. And the up special had been running since the 1830s between Glasgow, Scotland and in London. Right.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And it'd run every night and it was basically like a mail sorting facility on wheels.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Like, it was pretty clever. They thought, well, we'll take all the mail from Glasgow that's going to London and we'll sort it along the way. So there was 12 cars in the Glasgow Special or the Up Special, and a diesel engine. So it was a pretty simple train.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it had run for years and years without incident for like 150.

[Josh Clark]

Almost 150 years.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it wasn't loaded with guards and cops. I mean, it was a bunch of postmen, basically.

[Josh Clark]

Which is a really. It's really weird then, that the banks would trust their money that were moving from Glasgow to London to this postal train.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That had like, no security, no armed guards, no. No alarms until the early 60s on the train cars themselves. But yet every night the banks would empty their. Their accounts into this train and say, good luck getting to London.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, here's a bunch of huge sacks of money, we're gonna put it on the train and you're gonna sort it along the way.

[Josh Clark]

Exactly.

[Chuck Bryant]

They had an inside man who. And this is one of those weird stuff, you should know things. You know how there's all these weird correlations in the news.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

I picked out this article two days ago, and two days ago it was announced who the identity of the inside man was.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. The last great mystery of this thing from the 60s.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Was just unraveled like two days ago.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I didn't even know it at the time, I found out afterward, but the. The code name was Ulsterman and it was always believed to be someone on the inside of the train and post industry to give him information. Like, the train is super loaded on this particular night because of a bank holiday. And he was named by Gordon goody as Patrick McKenna.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. In that documentary, A Tale of Two Thieves, they hand a picture of Patrick McKenna to Goody and say, is that Ulsterman? And apparently he kind of like gets visibly uncomfortable because he's kept this guy's identity secret. He was the last person alive for 50 years to know who this person was. There were two other people who knew. They both died before Goody Patrick McKenna died years back. And there was just this one man who swore he would take the secret to his grave. And he named them. He fingered him.

[Chuck Bryant]

These guys were really good at keeping secrets.

[Josh Clark]

Over the years, they wore bowler hats for goodness sake.

[Chuck Bryant]

So McKenna's family was super surprised to hear all this. Police never suspected him and they basically think that this guy felt bad afterward and never even spent the money and gave it to the Catholic Church, like slowly over the years. Oh, yeah, his cut is what the family is saying.

[Josh Clark]

That sounds like an Ulsterman kind of thing to do.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, Olstee, he's a good guy.

[Josh Clark]

Well, before he had his change of heart, he was the inside man that helped the gang figure this out.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

He actually recommended they change the date to get a bigger take.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it was. And it worked.

[Josh Clark]

Can you, can you explain this to me? So a bank holiday and it's the same thing here in the us it's like. Like a day the banks are closed.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

They have official bank holidays. There is a banking act in the UK from the 19th century that designated certain days as bank holidays.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

What I don't understand is why is there so much more money the day after a bank holiday? It's like everybody waited to do their banking business that they would have done on Monday, on Tuesday, like there's so many more people or so many more transactions that didn't get to be done on that Monday that were carried out on the Tuesday that. That's why there's so much more money.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know. Maybe it's that the. Because of the holiday, they didn't do their deposits and make the money leave the bank like they normally would. So it was compounded, I guess. So there was like double the amount of money as usual because they didn't do their drop on the holiday or something.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But they didn't conduct any business on the holiday, so there wouldn't have been more money to accumulate than usual. You know what I'm saying?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, if it came after a weekend, though, maybe it was like all of that weekend's deposits had gathered up.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know. That's a good question.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. The point is that that's a lot.

[Chuck Bryant]

More money than usual.

[Josh Clark]

A lot more. Usually this train car, the Up Special, carried about £300,000 between Glasgow and London each night.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

On this particular night, the night of August 8, 1963, which was Thursday, early wee hours of a Thursday. It was carrying something like £2.6 million, which today, in dollars, would be worth about 50 million.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think It's. I looked that up and it was like double that.

[Josh Clark]

100 million?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, yeah, because you're going from 1963 to 2013 and from pounds to dollars. Yeah, I might be off, but I got 69 million pounds today. Or $111 million US.

[Josh Clark]

Let's go with that. That's way better.

[Chuck Bryant]

Either way. 2.6 million pounds was a ton of money for a high spec then. Yeah, it was like really, really a lot of dough. Even splitting it among 15 guys.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And they didn't even necessarily split it evenly. There were the core gang who were carrying this thing out, and they all got even splits, but they're also accomplices. In addition to ulstermen, there was Mr. 1, Mr. 2, and Mr. 3.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And those are their names. So because they were never brought to justice, there were three that just got away with it. Even though they knew who they were, supposedly they didn't have evidence to go pick them up. So, like, the identities of the three guys that got away, they think they knew who they were the whole time, really.

[Josh Clark]

I mean, one of them's named John Weider. He got away.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm not sure. Was he one of the one, two or three?

[Josh Clark]

He was, yeah. He was the one who got the safe house for the gang.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, well, he worked with Fields to get the safe house. Well, let's back up here.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

We're so excited. We're getting ahead of ourselves. So he mentioned that they recruited another gang that knew how to work with trains, knew how to stop trains. And what they did was they brought this guy on board who had this elderly man who was a train driver. His name was Peter. And Peter's job, once they stopped the train, was to get it to where? The drop point, the exchange point was in case the train stops at the red light, which they very awkwardly wired the red light to turn on. And they just covered the green light with some gloves. But it worked. They stopped the train and still needed to get it down the track to the exchange point. And this old man gets on board and he's like, I don't know how to undo this new handbrake.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

So he was useless.

[Josh Clark]

And so the guy Biggs, who became this criminal legend for evading the law for so many years, apparently his only job was to find somebody who could drive the train, and he failed at that. And he screwed it up.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

So the guy who was supposed to drive the train got thrown off the train and they got the original train engineer, the one whose job it was to actually drive the train under normal circumstances, and made him drive another mile and a half to this bridge.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that was Jack Mills. And this is a very important detail. He was, like you said, the conductor and two guys jumped on the train at the very front there and koshed him, which is smacked him on the head a bunch with this billy club.

[Josh Clark]

I thought it was a crowbar.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, it was an iron Kosh, which is English for crowbar, I guess. And this was a big point because for a lot of reasons. One in that it was why the, the justice ended up coming down so harshly on them because they were apparently way more violent than they needed to be with this guy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And the public perception of these guys as working class heroes doesn't jibe with the violence because they weren't, you know, the English still aren't really into violence as a whole.

[Josh Clark]

No. Especially if you're the Bowler Hat Gang.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, you dressed nicely and you conducted your business, your criminal business, like gentlemen.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And you didn't need to beat this old guy up. He was elderly, nearing retirement, and his family says the robbers still say today that like, he wasn't beaten up nearly as bad as they say. And the family was like, no, he never fully recovered and died of cancer.

[Josh Clark]

But about seven years later, I think he died of leukemia.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they say he had headaches for the rest of his life and he was just not the same man.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, you can't do that to somebody.

[Chuck Bryant]

You can't do that to someone.

[Josh Clark]

And like you said, that changed absolutely everything. Goody, the guy who's really the brains behind this whole operation, he wrote a book a few years back before he died, and he named, he said it was either Buster Edwards or a guy named James Hussey, who was the one who coshed the poor conductor.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And supposedly Hussey, who was brought in as a heavy, is some muscle. Supposedly at his deathbed he said that it was him who kashed the guy. But there are other people that say, including Jack Mills son, who said no. My father told me who it was and it wasn't him. This guy is just doing that robber thing where you still cover for your people. So like on his deathbed, he was still trying to cover for the real guy. And I don't know if we'll ever know for real if it was him.

[Josh Clark]

Or the other dude while lying on your deathbed yeah. That's not okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, that never happens. Yeah, that's where you're supposed to be the most truthful.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. Like, Yeah, I mean, they take deathbed confessions, like, as, like, completely legitimate in court.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's where you're supposed to look at your wife and say, I never really loved you.

[Josh Clark]

Wow, that's terrible, Chuck.

[Chuck Bryant]

Could you imagine? I think that was in a movie once. You thought it was going to be some tender moment, and he was like, I never really loved you.

[Josh Clark]

I think I know what you're talking about. The War of the Roses, where they're both laying there dying and Michael Douglas goes to put his arm around Kathleen Turner.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's one of my favorite movies.

[Josh Clark]

It's a great movie. No, I don't think anybody's done that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay, so Roger Cordry is the guy's name who came up with the idea to fix these train signals. And he was an associate of Buster Edwards. And if you had ever seen the movie Buster with Phil Collins.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, is that who it's about?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's who it's about.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sort of like working class criminal. Like criminals back then were kind of revered in certain circles in England. It's weird.

[Josh Clark]

Two hearts beating in just one mind.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was that from that movie?

[Josh Clark]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

Okay.

[Josh Clark]

Great song.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so after this break, we are gonna talk a little bit more about how it went down and what happened right after.

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[Josh Clark]

So, Chuck. Yeah, we've got the Bowler Hat Gang and the South Coast Raiders coming together for one huge heist that's worth about $100 million in today's money.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, or half that.

[Josh Clark]

They're hitting the up special, just this crotchety old 12 car train moving along through the night from Scotland to London. Right?

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And so the gang messes with the lights.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

They put a glove around the green light and manage to turn on the red light. So the train comes to the stop, they all board the train, they hit the conductor over the head, huge mistake. They bring on the guy who's supposed to drive the train, find out he can't drive the train, throw him off, stand the conductor back up, probably give him a handkerchief for his head and say, we need you to drive this another mile and a half to the drop point which is called the Brittigo Bridge.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Was it like a bridge overpass?

[Josh Clark]

And the guy does that and they start offloading the loot.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they got 120 of the 128 sacks of cash money onto. They had this big lorry and a couple of Land Rovers.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Could this be any more stylish?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was pretty stylish.

[Josh Clark]

They had Land Rovers, getaway cars.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it's pretty cool. You see why people bought into all this stuff and thought it was cool? Because I think it's cool right now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And so what they did, they had prearranged a hideout and this was fields job as well was he bought this farm and farmhouse.

[Josh Clark]

Leather Slade Farm. Right.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it was sort of ingenious, but ended up screwing them in the end because the idea was within 30 minutes of this robbery, they have effectively disappeared off the face of the earth.

[Josh Clark]

Well, they stopped the train and got it to the bridge and offloaded more than a ton of money.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, two tons, I think.

[Josh Clark]

Two and a half tons of money in 15 minutes.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they were back in their hideout in another 15. So by the time this thing was reported, they were gone in this farmhouse like with the windows shut and the shades drawn.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

But that also kind of screwed them because before they left the train they said, all right, no one moves for 30 minutes. And so the cops hear this and they went, oh well, they're probably within a 30 mile radius then. And so they put this out on the news. We know that they're within a 30 mile radius and we're going to start canvassing the area. They get word of this, they're within 28 miles and they go, well crap, they're going to find us. And they also said it was sort of a city boys move to think you can hide out in the country like that. And this one guy in the documentary was like, nah, out in the country you get noticed if you're 15 guys in a farmhouse.

[Josh Clark]

That was their undoing. A neighbor said there's a lot more people at this old rambling old farm and they're all wearing bowler hats for some reason, or at least half of them are. There's something fishy going on. So when the word got out that this train had been hit, this guy came forward and said, you guys should go check this farm out.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah, well.

[Josh Clark]

Well, the guys weren't only at this farm for the half hour after the heist. They'd been there for like eight days, waiting for the day to come, getting ready, eating things that required catch up. Playing Monopoly.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, played a lot of monopoly with their real money. Yes, they did, because they thought that was just a fun thing to do.

[Josh Clark]

Hilarious. And they did go to the trouble of wiping down a lot of the stuff, but they left a lot of stuff behind. Including the Monopoly game. Including the ketchup bottle and a lot of other stuff that had prints on it.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, yes, because Fields was supposed to get a guy to go torch the place.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's what I thought. I was like, why wouldn't you just burn the place down?

[Chuck Bryant]

That was the plan. And apparently the guy never did it. And they ended up getting out of there a few days early. They left five days into it because they obviously heard the news that they were canvassing the area. So they left quicker than they wanted to. And like you said, left a lot of stuff behind because they thought it was going to be torched.

[Josh Clark]

Their plan was to lay low there for a few days.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, to keep laying low. But when they found out they were basically making their way to them little by little. They got the heck out of Dodge quicker.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that probably kept them from getting caught sooner.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But in. So the public is being treated to this incredibly daring train heist. These people got away without a trace for at least the first week. Finally, within a week, this Leather Slade Farms has been identified as the place where these guys were hiding out.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they found the trucks and they.

[Josh Clark]

Got at least one person within eight days of the. Of the heist.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And all of a sudden people start falling. There's 15 people and on the case is called the Flying Squad who are like the best of the best that Scotland Yard has to offer to combat these. Some of the best of the best criminals that Great Britain has had to offer at the time.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Chief Superintendent Detective Tommy Butler was the head of the Flying Squad. And like you said, this was so sensational because it was the top robbers and the top cop. It was, I guess it was sort of like the Elliot Ness of the day, going after Al Capone. It was just a huge story. And like you said, they started getting nicked one by one. And it came out later that there was an informant by the name of Mickey Kehoe. Supposedly, Scotland Yard said this guy Mickey Kehoe was telling us all about it because it was well known within the criminal underground, like what was going on, and started naming names. Although the robbers to this day still say, nah, it wasn't Mickey Kehoe. We know that guy. He didn't even know us that well. He wasn't giving up names. Yeah, but I don't know. Scotland Yard says he was, so I don't see why they'd make that up.

[Josh Clark]

I could see them making it up to protect somebody else. Especially if they didn't like Mickey Kehoe in the way he looked.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's true. But you're right, they started to go down one by one. There was a pretty short list of people who they thought it was. It wasn't like some great mystery.

[Josh Clark]

Plus, once they started peeling away one and catching one here or there, others started falling. Did anyone who was caught name names? Did you get that impression?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, they were. Most of them were pretty tight lipped. In fact, one guy, Charlie Wilson, he was the treasurer of the gang. They called him the Silent man because he literally said nothing. He didn't speak at all during the trial.

[Josh Clark]

Right. He went on to become a U.S. congressman who waged a proxy war against Russia and Afghanistan in the 70s.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't think so. I think that's a different Charlie.

[Josh Clark]

Wow. Different Charlie. Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Tom Hanks.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Right. So consider this from the public's point of view. There's this daring robbery, right? Word's getting out. Within a week you got your first guy caught. But there's still tons more people on Lamb, which gave the press tons of fodder. They had so much to write about. There was a capture of one of the guys that involved rooftops. Like the guy was running and jumping from roof to roof with the police in chase, you know. And finally, by August, all these guys are rounded up. Twelve of the 15, I think, were rounded up.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

And they Started to stand trial in January. They were caught. They're being quiet. The public is just totally in awe. And finally this trial starts. And right out of the gate, the judge found out that Biggs had a criminal past. So he shouldn't be tried with the rest of them because it could taint the jury against all these other guys unfairly. So Biggs got spun off to his own trial, and these guys stood trial. The other four or the other 11. No, 10 of them stood trial. One of them managed to have a lawyer. He was there because his prints were on the. No, the Monopoly game.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

There were prints on ketchup and Monopoly and pots and pans. And some of the guys wore gloves the entire time. And they were smart ones.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, but Biggs was the one. Remember Biggs one job was to bring the train engineer, and he screwed that up.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

His prints were on the ketchup bottle, so he screwed that up, too. But there was another guy whose prints were on the Monopoly game. And his lawyers managed to show that those could have gotten there long before the crime and that it didn't necessarily mean he had anything to do with it. He got set. He was acquitted. During this trial, he was the only lucky one. Everybody else had the book thrown at them.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, there was a lot of them were saying that they cooked up a bunch of evidence because they knew it was them, but they just didn't have the evidence. So the big lorry truck they had painted hastily painted yellow. And the Goody, one of the main, you know, two guys, was supposedly. Some of his evidence was that they found yellow paint on a shoe. And he was like, I didn't paint in those shoes. And it was funny because years later, he's like, oh, I did it. And, yeah, I painted that truck yellow, but I wasn't wearing those shoes. They planted that evidence, is that right?

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And apparently there was false confessions. There was another great British word for that. I can't remember what they called. It's chaverdabba. Chaverdobing. False confessions were big at the time in England. And there was a lot of reports from these robbers that they were using false confessions and planning evidence. And again, even though they did it, they were like, yeah, but if you don't have evidence, you can't convict us.

[Josh Clark]

All right?

[Chuck Bryant]

So I don't think we'll ever know if they cooked up some of this evidence or not.

[Josh Clark]

Well, there was one guy named Bowl, William Bowl.

[Chuck Bryant]

Poor guy.

[Josh Clark]

He apparently had nothing to do with it. Well, he received money in payment From a debt from, I think that Goody owed him.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, it was Biggs.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, Biggs. Biggs again.

[Chuck Bryant]

He was a friend of Biggs, and when he got out, helped him kind of lay low, but he had nothing to do with the robbery.

[Josh Clark]

He got 14 years.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I'm sorry. It was Cordry. It wasn't Biggs.

[Josh Clark]

Okay, Cordry.

[Chuck Bryant]

I know. I feel bad for Biggs. We're just dragging his name through the mud. Yeah, but it was Rob Cordry. It wasn't Rob Cordry, but it was his dad. It was his great grandfather Cordry. And he was Bol's friend. He helped him lay low and he wanted. Cordry was actually the first one to get pinched because he and Bolt helped him rent a garage. And they paid in, like, the same banknote bills for like, three months in advance in cash. And the lady said, eh, this is a little suspicious. Turned him in. Bol got wrapped up. And because all these guys were saying, we're innocent, they couldn't come out and say, well, he really is innocent. So they kind of had to take this guilt with them to prison.

[Josh Clark]

So Bol got 14 years for doing nothing.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And for just basically knowing the wrong guys and hanging out with the wrong guys. He died in prison.

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I'm not laughing because it's just tragic.

[Josh Clark]

It is tragic. So his family's, like, trying to mount a campaign now to get a posthumous pardon at least.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But he. He and the guy who got hit over the head, the conductor, are really the two big victims in all of this.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And one of them, there was only one guy that turned in his cut of the money and actually pleaded guilty out of the rest.

[Josh Clark]

That was Cordray, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was Cordray.

[Josh Clark]

So even he says, yes, I did it. Here's my 80 grand. The guy who he associated with still got 14 years and died in jail. Yeah. That's so sad. So you'll notice that we're talking about 12 of the 15 Biggs, by the way, after he stood trial separately, was also found guilty. And got things like these guys were getting like 20 years, 30 year sentences, enormous sentences for this train robbery.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, generally 30, which was double the harshest penalties for robbery that they've ever seen.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Which is really strange because the judge in the case, he had actually reduced another robber in a completely separate robbery where a man had been shot and killed during the commission of the robbery.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, wow.

[Josh Clark]

Someone who was involved in that robbery had his sentence reduced from 15 years to 10 years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Crazy.

[Josh Clark]

Because that judge thought it was excessive. That same judge was handing out 30 year sentences to these guys where no one got killed.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, that was Justice Edmund Davies. I think because it was such a high profile case, he felt he could make his name, had to be, you.

[Josh Clark]

Know, so he was making his name though, against public sentiment because a lot of people were very much saw these guys as folk heroes. None more though than Biggs. And the reason why Biggs was a folk hero was because he evaded capture so long. And we'll talk about that right after this stuff you should know.

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[Podcast Announcer]

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[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Josh Clark]

Stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, so some really interesting things happen after they were sentenced. Charlie Wilson escaped prison.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Which was pretty cool. A couple of them escaped prison in the way that it was very cute how you could escape prison back then. Like let's put a ladder by the fence and climb up and jump over into a truck and speed away.

[Josh Clark]

It turns out that Benny Hill show was basically a docudrama at the time.

[Chuck Bryant]

Another one escaped when he. I think he had some guys infiltrate the prison and help him escape.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. In a furniture truck.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

That was Biggs, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. It was a lot easier to escape prison back then. And some of these were maximum security, for what it's worth, you know.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Well, yeah. One of them was Britain's version of Alcatraz. They say Wandsworth Prison and that Biggs escape from there. When he escaped and went on the lam, he went to Australia and then eventually moved on to Brazil. But first he stopped off at one of the worst human beings to ever walk the planet's office. This very same cosmetic surgeon who redid the faces of Nazis fleeing Europe at the end of World War II.

[Chuck Bryant]

Really? Yes, that's who his plastic surgeon was.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Interesting.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So Biggs got his face redone a little bit, went to Australia, made it to Brazil, and he had a family in Australia which he left behind there, and then went on to Brazil, got a girlfriend, and she was pregnant with their child. When the authorities, the British authorities found him in Brazil and he said, oh, turns out under Brazilian law, you can't extradite the parent of a Brazilian citizen.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, crazy.

[Josh Clark]

So for many, many years, Ronald Biggs lived openly as this felon escapee in Brazil. And there are things that he couldn't do in Brazil, apparently. He couldn't go to bars, he couldn't be out after 10pm he couldn't associate with, you know, anybody with a criminal record or anything like that.

[Chuck Bryant]

But.

[Josh Clark]

But he wasn't imprisoned by the Brazilian authorities and he couldn't be extradited to Great Britain, which drove Great Britain crazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I'm sure.

[Josh Clark]

And there was this one very famous detective who was on this case who made his own name. His name was Jack Slipper.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I get the feeling that he and Biggs, it was sort of like the Les Miserables, like Jean Valjean, you know, they had this lifelong pursuit.

[Josh Clark]

Smokey and the Bandit.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. It's a very old story.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it is.

[Josh Clark]

And Biggs and Jack Slipper were playing it out in real life. So much so that Jack Slipper in 1974 showed up on Biggs doorstep, I guess just to rattle him, just to say, I know where you are and I can get to you. And Biggs said, yeah, but you really can't do anything to me.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

And some of the other guys evaded police for a little while, for a number of years. But I think by 1969 they were all caught except for the three that they couldn't finger with good evidence. Yeah, but even the. The main mastermind was able to evade the police for four or five years. I think he went down to Mexico, Buster.

[Josh Clark]

He turned himself in after living on the lam for three years.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, And Bruce Reynolds, I think he was on the lam for a while too.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he got caught in Canada. I think one of the guys. Well, I guess it was Bruce Reynolds. When he changed his name, when he went on the lam, he changed his family's last name to Firth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, really?

[Josh Clark]

And he had a wife and son, Colin. He changed his son Nick's name to Colin Firth.

[Chuck Bryant]

Shut up. Is that the guy?

[Josh Clark]

No, no. Oh, totally coincidental.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

I thought you were gonna say, wouldn't.

[Josh Clark]

That be amazing if Colin Firth was the son of Bruce Reynolds and it was all an alias that he turned into a stage name.

[Chuck Bryant]

That would be awesome, actually. So one of the fun things that the Prime Minister tried to do because he was so upset about this was he tried to at one point or he didn't try to, he had the idea to reissue every banknote in England so their money would no longer be good.

[Josh Clark]

So from what I understand.

[Chuck Bryant]

And they were like, yeah, you can't do that.

[Josh Clark]

From what I understand, most of the money was never recovered.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, 400 grand out of the 2.6 million was recovered.

[Josh Clark]

Right. So there was a lot of that out there still.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, yeah.

[Josh Clark]

But apparently England went to a different type of decimal currency by, like, 1970, I think. And that means that that money that was out there automatically became worthless.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, apparently they laundered it pretty quickly afterward, so I don't know how much that affected them.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like, through bookies and stuff like that, they made it new money. However, all of the robbers ended up saying, like, even if they got their cut, like, it was a curse. And they didn't live this rich lifestyle in Mexico and Spain. Like, a bunch of them moved to these places and served shorter sentences because I think parole was brought in after they were sentenced. It wasn't even, like, a thing in England until then.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

But retroactively, they were able to get out in, like, you know, 10 or 14 years. And then, you know, supposedly he had some of this money still hidden away, but most of them ended up, like, one guy committed suicide. One guy died in a medical trial that he signed up for. One guy was murdered.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. By a hitman on a bike in Spain.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

So, like, most of them have these awful sort of ending stories, and they didn't live out, like, sexy beasts like Ray Winstone on the Spanish Riviera. I think some of that might have been influenced by some of that movie.

[Josh Clark]

Might be influenced by it. I think a lot of Great Britain's love of gangsters was influenced by these guys.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, they were definitely looked up to. And it's pretty interesting.

[Josh Clark]

I've got a little more on Biggs, The Ballad of Biggs of Biggsy. So he. I mean, he really is like a folk hero against with anti establishment types in the uk in part because he was living openly in the face of British authority. And it irked the British enough that a group of ex British military in 1981 kidnapped him from Brazil and put him on a boat and got as far as Barbados, where they had boat trouble.

[Chuck Bryant]

Wow.

[Josh Clark]

And they were picked up by the Barbadan authorities. And it turns out Barbados doesn't have an extradition treaty with the UK either. So he got sent back to Brazil. And supposedly these ex military were saying that they planned on, I guess, getting some sort of reward from the British Crown for bringing this guy back.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

But it's also been supposed that that was actually a plausible deniability cover, that it was actually like, the British really tried to have this guy.

[Chuck Bryant]

That wouldn't surprise me.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, he finally turned himself in and died in 2009, but he turned himself in in, like 2000. He started having, like, failing health. So he's like, I guess I'll go live out my life in jail. Yeah, some reason.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I think he went to, like, an old man's hospital jail back in the uk and not all of them met, you know, gross, untimely demises. You know, several of them just kind of retired or went back to their work as florists and. Yeah, Cordry sort of retired with her family in Sussex or London or sort of around England. But apparently none of them, like, got rich off this or they're not talking if they did. Yeah, still.

[Josh Clark]

Well, good, good. Yeah. Goods wrote a book, so there you go.

[Chuck Bryant]

There you have it.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to know more about the Great Train Robbery, a great place to start is the search [e-mail] and since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm gonna call this horse milk. In our animal domestication podcast, we talked about horse milk, and I can't remember what I said. I probably said it was gross or something.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, I think we said, like, we want to hear from people who've had it. And I figured we'd hear from a couple people, but I'm blown away by how many people have had a brush with horse milk.

[Chuck Bryant]

A lot of people liked it, too. This is not one of them. Hey, guys, just listen to the podcast on animal domestication. Wanted to tell you about the revolting drink called Kumas from Kazakhstan. That's K U M I S Mila Kumas. Mila Kumas. It is similar to the more familiar product kefir, which we Talked about that in something else, right?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, that's like. It's like Balki's version of sour milk. Bulgarian, I think.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

He said it's made from horse milk because horse milk has more natural sugars than cow, sheep or goat milk. Kumas ends up being mildly alcoholic after fermentation.

[Josh Clark]

Crazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Imagine the sourness of raw yogurt mixed with the bite of a shot of vodka.

[Josh Clark]

Whoa.

[Chuck Bryant]

And round it all out with the disgusting tang of horse milk. And you've got kumis.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I don't understand that last part. Like, I don't have anything to equate that with horse milk. Vodka. Check. Sour, like fermented yogurt.

[Chuck Bryant]

But you don't know that disgusting tang.

[Josh Clark]

No. And I want to know now.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, in Toronto, when I was there, my friend Chris from Let's Drink about it ate horse meat.

[Josh Clark]

Like, in front of you?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, I was supposed to go out to dinner with him, but I was sick. And after we recorded, they went out and the next day he was like, dude, I ate horse meat yesterday. I went.

[Josh Clark]

They go to Ikea?

[Chuck Bryant]

Nah, they went to some. One of those adventurous restaurants. And I was like, josh would have been all over that, but not me. No, thank you. Yeah, you'd eat horse meat, right? You'd try it out, probably. But not horse milk.

[Josh Clark]

Only if the horse died of old age.

[Chuck Bryant]

So Greg says, I drank it. Sleep well, that's what they said. They supposedly. All of them, they're called. What do you call them? Barbarians, something horses.

[Josh Clark]

Like old, dead horses?

[Chuck Bryant]

No, basically they were horses that died of natural causes.

[Josh Clark]

They called them like senior horses? No, like golden age horses.

[Chuck Bryant]

There's a word.

[Josh Clark]

There's a lot of words. I can say them all.

[Chuck Bryant]

So Greg drank it in Kazakhstan and he said it was served in a bowl. What he would describe as a bowl. You get cocktail peanuts. Like, you would get cocktail peanuts in, like, instead of a bowl of peanuts, it's a bowl of this disgusting drink.

[Josh Clark]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

I've lived in the Caucasus for four years now. I've had my share of questionable foods. The only thing I found more disagreeable than a saucer of kumas was a pickled rooster comb.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, my gosh.

[Chuck Bryant]

He said it was all skin and cartilage. It felt like I was eating an egg ear.

[Josh Clark]

Wow, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

That is from Greg.

[Josh Clark]

That's called using every part of the animal.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Greg, you just blew my mind.

[Josh Clark]

Same here, man.

[Chuck Bryant]

I wish I could think of the horses. Not like freedom horses, but it was.

[Josh Clark]

Something like freedom horses word. The horses that want you to eat them.

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

Donor horses? No. Well, we'll find out and tell everybody next time. Okay?

[Guest or Additional Host]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Essential is their horses that died of natural causes. They weren't killed for their meat.

[Josh Clark]

They got you.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to let us know about an experience you had that is fascinating or amazing, you can tweet it to us@syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com stuffyou should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastowstuffworks.com and you can hang out with us at our home on the web, the Internet clubhouse known as stuffyou should know.com.

[Podcast Announcer]

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com hey guys, it's Cheekies from Cheekies and Chill Cleaning Today. Well, not exactly my idea.

[Josh Clark]

Fun.

[Podcast Announcer]

But wait a second. Is Fabuloso involved? Because that's different. Cleaning with Fabuloso 2 times concentrated cleaner turns chores into fiestas Fabuloso pairs twice the concentrated cleaning power with long lasting lavender freshness. From showers to countertops, floors to doorknobs, it leaves your whole home smelling and feeling like a fresh oasis. You may never love cleaning, but you will love a home cleaned with Fabuloso. So make your home dramatically clean with Fabuloso. Pick some up today at your favorite store. Fabuloso 2 times concentrated formula provides 2 times more active ingredients vs non concentrated Fabuloso original use as directed.

[Ryan Seacrest]

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[Podcast Announcer]

This is an iHeart podcast.