Scots get excited about ‘great grog robbery’

Press, 18 December 1985, Page 51

Scots get excited about ‘great grog robbery’

NZPA-AAP London The police are not saying much, but every now and then a train loaded with Scotch whisky and beer is stopped by a signal failure on the fringes of a Scottish city. Then, part of its liquid cargo disappears. The train coincidentally gets stuck on the fringes of a Glasgow suburb, and local legend has it that the residents are stopping the tartan special whenever they feel a thirst coming on. The now legendary first hijack of the booze train allegedly began quite by accident one night last year. British Rail’s Glasgow to London trains run past a Glasgow suburb, Cambuslang. Most of the residents of this depressed working class area are unemployed.lt is a tough and rugged place. According to the “Mail on Sunday” magazine, one of the freight trains, full to the rafters with Scotch whisky, beer and vodka, broke down and a local lad, curious as all lads are, climbed aboard.

The bush telegraph went into action and the locals came out in force.

They wheeled the stuff away in old prams, shopping trolleys and anything that had wheels. Others reportedly rolled kegs of beer down the slope from the railway line and carted it away in rubbish bags. Several were rounded up by police and charged with Cossession of stolen goods, ut the police themselves are trying to play it all down.

Asked whether it had really been the great grog robbery, one police spokesman said: “Absolutely not. These people exaggerate something terrible. It was barrels of beer they got, nae whisky.” Lawyers who represented the offenders tell a different story. . One said that the morning after the train raid, the potential clients almost forced him out of his office and he ended up talking to them in the toilet.

“It was the only place with open windows and the air was lethal. One match struck and we would have

gone up.” One client had sworn to his solicitor that he had had nothing to do with it at all, and then promptly passed out on the floor. When the solicitor’s clerk reached the man’s home, he counted about 6000 cans of beer.

The client pleaded not guilty. The police acknowledge that they did not recover most of the goods.“ln that place, things just disappear,” one said. The ensuing court case was the best entertainment Cambuslang has seen in years. One of the defence lawyers claimed his client had been performing a noble and patriotic act. The whisky, he said, would have spoiled if it had been allowed to lie in the immobile train.

It did not go down too well.

“What I hadn’t noticed was that the sheriff in court that day had a Highland name and he was not going to have his ancestors confused with some Glasgow neds,” the defence lawyer now chuckles.

The fines were doled out, and everybody hoped that was the end of it.

Legend has it, however, that the residents got together after the court case and decided it was an opportunity that should not be allowed to fade away. For several months, so the story goes, they logged all the trains rattling past their houses and worked out the timetables for the booze specials. Some technical type worked out the signalling apparatus and hey presto, trains were stopping. The police, who say to print anything about this story would be highly irresponsible and would add fuel to an already grossly overstated legend, claim the whole thing, apart from the initial court case, is a bit of a fairy story. "There may have been one or two incidents in the area, but there have been no thefts of whisky,” they say. “Possibly beer, but only the odd barrel,” a spokesman said.

He did admit, however, that inquiries were continuing.