Identity of ‘The Ulsterman’ suspected of tipping off Great Train Robbers revealed for first time in Sun investigation
FOR 60 years the identity of the Great Train Robbery gang’s Royal Mail mole, known as “The Ulsterman”, has remained an elusive mystery.
But a Sun investigation today reveals the name of the man who Scotland Yard believed may have provided the crucial information for the crime of the last century.
He is Gerald McMorran, a Belfast-born former high-ranking Post Office official who held a senior position on the GPO’s security team at the time of the robbery.
The daring £2.6million heist — worth around £60million today — still remains the world’s highest-value train robbery, allowing for inflation.
A team of 15 robbers held up the Glasgow to Euston express in the early hours of August 8, 1963, at Sears Crossing, near Cheddington, Bucks, coshed the driver Jack Mills and made off with the cash.
Eight bags containing just over £130,000 were left behind on the orders of ringleader Bruce Reynolds, who ensured the gang stuck to a strict time schedule.
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They then fled to their farmhouse hideout, but disastrously, a trusted associate failed to burn it down, and it yielded a treasury of clues when police discovered it five days later.
Eleven of the robbers were identified by their fingerprints and mostly given jail terms of 30 years.
Three, Harry Smith, Danny Pembroke and, almost certainly, Billy Ambrose, got away with it and another, John Daly was acquitted.
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Today only one of the gang survives— 94-year-old Bob Welch.
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As the 60th anniversary of the robbery approaches on Tuesday, two questions remain: Who coshed Jack Mills and who was the gang’s inside mole known as The Ulsterman?
Several well-informed sources think the prime suspect for bludgeoning Mills was the third robber to escape justice, former boxer Ambrose.
A postman, Patrick McKenna, was identified by ringleader Gordon Goody in 2014 as the Royal Mail mole.
But the Manchester postie’s family and close associates of the gang say McKenna was a patsy made up by Goody for a book.
McKenna would certainly never have had access to the inside information that the gang seemingly used.
In contrast McMorran, who died in 1999, would know the exact timings of the train and crucially, how much money was on board.
According to Yard intelligence, the mole dubbed The Ulsterman was introduced to Goody and fellow robber Buster Edwards by bent solicitor’s clerk Brian Field.
He worked for solicitors who had represented Goody and Edwards in the past, and they told author Piers Paul Read how he introduced them to a well-spoken, middle-man of around 50 named Mark, who drove the two robbers to meet the mole, who they said was middle-aged, slightly balding, with a Northern Irish lilt.
Arrangements were made to deposit the mole’s share of the robbery with Brian Field.
But Field lost more than £100,000 when it was found by a couple buried in a Surrey wood a few days after the robbery.
There was never enough evidence for police to question McMorran or arrest him, and there is nothing in his background to suggest any criminality.
Yet tantalising clues reveal how he was in the frame.
At the time of the robbery he worked in the security unit, dealing with protecting trains and vans from robbery.
His job gave him access to movements of large sums of cash by rail and road.
Perhaps significantly, gang leader Bruce Reynolds wrote in his autobiography how the insider told Goody and Edwards before the robbery: “When you’ve done this there is another one you can do in Leeds.
“It involves a van with a driver, his mate and a security guy. You’re looking at three million.”
It suggests that as well as trains, the mole had high-level information on movements of cash in Post Office vans, which only a few staff would have done.
One of them would have been McMorran, the only man from Northern Ireland who worked in the GPO security section.
He lived in quiet obscurity in Beckenham, on the borders of South East London and Kent.
A Freemason, he showed no signs of obvious wealth but moved back to Northern Ireland after retiring in 1979 and lived in a large lakeside home.
There was nothing in his background to suggest any link with any kind of criminality.
His daughter Valerie Hoy, 78, last night insisted to The Sun: “My dad was very moral, very honest and he was kind of religious. I never remember him being dishonest in anything.”
The seniority of the suspected mole within the Post Office was referred to in a recorded interview between robber Roger Cordrey and Piers Paul Read which came to light in 2019.
Cordrey said: “They told me their information was from a very good source.
"They showed me a list of the HVP (High Value Packages) movements and the number of bags.
“The official bit of paper I got with it was pretty good proof that they were in contact with someone that knew what they were doing.”
Cordrey was also given a Travelling Post Office Schedule, which was not widely available to staff.
In a confidential report on the train robbery by Richard Yates, deputy head of the Post Office Investigation Branch, he wrote: “I hold the view that meticulous planning would be undertaken by criminals of this calibre, that the arrangements would be precise and that consequently, detailed information would be essential before embark- ing on such a venture.
“Furthermore, I think that provision would be made for any changes in procedure to be notified to the gang.
"Post Office employees in general would not . . . be in a position to keep abreast of daily changes in TPO (Travelling Post Office, a reference to the mail train) working.”
Three of the postal workers on the train had criminal records, but checks showed none had any links to the gang.
A trawl of phone calls was made by Post Office investigators.
In that era it was possible to see from which line a call had been made, but not where it was received.
An informant said Goody had arrived at the hideout, Leatherslade Farm, at 11.30pm on August 7, half an hour after the rest of the gang, explaining he had to deal with a call to the insider.
Police suspected Goody had called Brian Field at his home in Pangbourne, Berks, for an update from the mole.
Every phone call made within a 30-mile radius of the gang’s hideout was checked, as were calls made on the train’s route from Glasgow to Rugby, the last stop before it was robbed, but without success.
But there were no searches made for calls from London to Pangbourne or the area around the farm, adding to the theory that the insider was in London.
By early 1964 the inquiry was focusing on the theory that a senior, well-placed mole in the Post Office had tipped off the gang.
This was fuelled by credible intelligence that remnants of the gang planned to rob a TPO in the South West carrying £6million in cash.
In addition, the gang were said to be planning to rob a Post Office van carrying diamonds in London.
Files show that McMorran sat on a joint police and Post Office committee set up to deal with the threat.
A series of security recommendations were made and neither of the planned robberies ever materialised.
Field was deemed to be a weak link after being jailed for 20 years for conspiracy to rob and five years for obstruction of justice.
But his sentence for the robbery was quashed over a technicality as the jury had acquitted him of receiving stolen money, despite the cash bags having his prints on.
John Wheater, senior partner at the firm where Field worked, was jailed for three years for concealing the name of the person who bought Leatherslade Farm for the gang.
After his release from jail, he said: “I did get the impression that there were some other people involved who were not brought to trial and have not been named by the police.
“One thing I learned pointed . . . to a link between the gang and somebody in Post Office security. This somebody made contact . . . with one of the men who stood trial, and it was this man, one of my fellows in the dock, who gave me the information when I was discussing with him how he became involved.”
Wheater said the intermediary “put up the proposition that large sums of money were being moved by train at various times and that it was there for the taking, so to speak.
“This made my fellow prisoner a linchpin in the whole thing. I was never able to discover who the intermediary was. I was told that after the robbery money was passed to the intermediary for himself and for the Post Office man.”
Former Daily Express chief crime correspondent Percy Hoskins was given the Post Office mole’s name by a senior Scotland Yard officer.
In an off-the-record conversation the officer told him the insider under suspicion had joined the Royal Mail in Belfast more than 20 year earlier.
He worked his way up and later moved to England, settling with his family in a quiet, middle-class South London suburb.
Hoskins did not have enough proof to name him but told how he visited the suburb and spoke to the suspect’s wife then, on April 20, 1964, wrote a story about the second planned train robbery.
He wrote: “Now the big question disturbing the authorities is: Who is the tip-off man in the Post Office? The information shows he is not a low-ranking official.”
A historian was given access to the late Hoskins’s files by his daughter and found a card with a typed address: Kelsey Lane, Beckenham.
The Sun has established McMorran lived there at the time of the robbery.
Coincidentally or not, Gordon Goody’s 2014 book How To Rob A Train referred to his nominated insider, McKenna, once having “lived at Southall Road, Beckenham”.
No such road has ever existed and McKenna had no link with Beckenham. Was it Goody’s Freudian slip?
Mr McMorran’s daughter Valerie is adamant her father would not have been involved in the train robbery.
“It wasn’t him. It must have been another Ulsterman,” the mother-of-four told The Sun this week.
She said it was widely known among staff that sacks on the T.P.O contained money and added: “I asked my father once why did they send so much money on a train from Glasgow to London?
“He had just taken the security job and he told me they had been doing that for year upon year and there had never been any bother and they never had any security.”
She said her father did not have any criminal associates and said he believed the robbery had been “planned even before he got the job.”
In fact, files seen by The Sun show McMorran had worked in the Royal Mail security section from as early as 1960.
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Valerie added: “My father talked about it (the robbery) to me only within the realms of what he was allowed to mention.
“I know he had to deal with it all afterwards, but he was a very capable man."
