ROBBING THE MAILS

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 110, 3 February 1930, Page 10

ROBBING THE MAILS

SPECIALISTS AT WORK

Dominion Special Service. London, December 19. In consequence, of many mail-bag robberies this year, it has been arranged that banks who are sending notes to branches or from branches to London shall henceforth ' not send them as postal packets, but commit them direct to railway officials, and send their own staffs to collect them at the end of the journey. The Post Office will be relieved and pleased at the change, which it has urged on the banks for a long time. The thievps who specialise in mail-bag robberies will find that bundles of currency notes are less easy to secure. Whether there is one gang or several, the police do not seem to know. But undoubtedly they specialise in the work, and have done much too well out of it, so well that the Post Office and the banks "could not arrange terms of insurance against the risk of money being purloined from the post. The methods of the thieves are neat and mysterious. One big coup at least is believed to have been made by a man who was consigned in a dressbasket which travelled beside mailbags in the guard’s van of an express. Confederates held the guard in conversation for a few minutes while he was making his round of the train. The big, heavy basket was claimed at the next station, and not till it was off the train was it noticed that a mail-bag had disappeared. The practice of sending by post big parcels of bank notes has become a matter of routine since the war, but it seems too risky to continue. In any case, it is not a normal'' and customary use of the post. Until gold ceased to" be used for ordinary currency, the banks always conveyed it between the provinces and London by couriers, usually one or, two of the bank's own clerks' travelling in a reserved carriage of an express train. /